The Good Life Greg Dixon
Hitting the road with your old man has much to recommend it.
War may be hell, but in Waiouru it’s a tourist attraction. And Dad and I were keener than hell to visit the National Army Museum one gloriously raw, blue-skied winter’s morning last week.
As we drove there from our digs at the Chateau Tongariro, the eternally handsome neo-Georgian hotel at the foot of Mt Ruapehu, past sheep grazing on frozen paddocks, we tried to remember when we’d last been to the museum, a set of three ugly concrete blockhouses that squat behind tussock grass and tanks at the side of State Highway 1.
This turned out to be impossible for the memories of a 52-year-old and an 81-year-old. Was it 20 years or
30? It was, we agreed finally, a bloody long time and probably closer to 40 years since we had last walked the museum’s galleries. Then, we were a father and son, both ever-soslightly preoccupied with “the war”, as we called it. Now, we are an ageing father and an equally ageing son both ever-so-slightly preoccupied with spending as much time together as we can. Neither of us is getting any younger, and we live 500km apart.
Leaving the city of the long, whining traffic jam for the good life in rural Wairarapa has been a journey paved with few regrets. One is that I am now very far indeed from the Bellringers best bitter at Galbraith’s Alehouse in Mt Eden. Another is that I am very far indeed from my mother, Marilen, also 81, in Auckland, and my father, Ron, who now lives in Tauranga.
We flew Mum to Wellington and collected her from the airport in December so that she might spend Christmas with us at our new home. For my birthday earlier this month, I thought a road trip to meet the old man at the Chateau – a destination lying roughly halfway between us – might give us some precious time to talk and to laugh and to remember, as we used to do over fish and chip suppers and Bellringers at Galbraith’s. W ar certainly is hell. Rifleman Ralph Joseph Dixon, dad’s uncle, my great-uncle, is, as far as we know, the only member of the family to die for his country. He lies, with nearly 900 others, a rose bush growing beside him, in a small Belgian cemetery by a country road leading to Ypres and Messines.
He died on another raw winter’s morning, February 23, 1917, a mere 16 days after arriving in France. His unit, the 4th Battalion of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade (NZRB), had moved up the line, to the freezing Ploegsteert sector on the border of France and Belgium, and had been intermittently shelled. Around 5.45am the next morning, they became the target of an intense artillery and trench-mortar bombardment, and then a German raid.
Though the barrage lasted just half an hour and the raid was parried in just minutes, the price was very high: three were missing, an officer and 20 men had been wounded and six, including Ralph, lay dead. He was just 23. His brother Vic, who happened to be in reserve behind the lines with the NZRB’s 1st Battalion, was given leave to go up to the front to recover Ralph’s body, which he did, and then buried him.
We didn’t expect to find a mention of Ralph, who died without having the chance to start his own family, among the excellent 100th anniversary World War I galleries, and of course there was none among the tales of death and the carefully curated detritus of war.
“If he was a general, you might find his name,” offered Ian, a chatty, fabulously knowledgeable, ex-RAF armourer, who now works as a museum guide.
He laughed, and so did we, a father and son lucky enough to have grown old together.
He died on a raw winter’s morning, February 23, 1917, 16 days after arriving in France.