Recollection of war through child’s eyes
"No chink of light was allowed to show through the curtains of any window at night, in case that might guide the Japanese bombers in their quest for the town of Hastings."
About two years after World War II had begun in 1939 – Governor-General Sir Cyril Newall came to Hastings, and as the usual custom, addressed multitudes of schoolchildren in a park. “All of you children appear to be well fed. You get plenty of butter, plenty of eggs, plenty of fruit. I want you to think of the children in England who get one egg a fortnight and butter about the size of a penny.”
While the governor-general was attempting to make the children have empathy with those in faraway England – what was it like to be schoolchild in Hastings during World War II?
Many will know Alan Berry through community organisations, or from his past accounting practice, Ingram, Thompson and Berry.
He is the son of Percy Berry, founder of Arataki Honey. Alan came to Hastings in 1941, with Percy shifting the family from Nireaha (near Eketāhuna).
The following is Alan’s reflection of that period.
“My earliest awareness of the war was that our father had dug an air raid shelter into the side of the hill below the macrocarpa shelter belt behind the house at Nireaha, in about 1940.
“Presumably the whole family was meant to race for the shelter whenever a Japanese warplane appeared on the horizon, although why invading Japanese forces would want to interest themselves in a solitary house near Nireaha, miles from nowhere out the back of Eketahuna, is hard to fathom.
“But I suppose that fathers felt an obligation to make that gesture, lest they be thought uncaring as to the welfare of the family.
“The background presence of the war was more apparent when we moved to Hastings in 1941, when I was 6. It was not something we kids dwelt upon or thought through at that age, but it was there and apparent to our consciousness in many ways.
“To replace the air raid shelter in the side of the hill at Nireaha, our father Percy dug a trench part way across the quarter acre section at 813 Fitzroy Ave, behind the hedge that separated the lawn from the vegetable garden.
“The trenches of the First World War were still to the forefront of people’s minds and that is what it was called – ‘the trench’.
“We were not told exactly what it was for, there were no air raid drills or anything like that but we seemed to be aware that we were supposed to jump into the trench if the Japanese started bombing Hastings.
“The Air Raid Wardens roamed the streets at night to check the security of the blackout [no light was allowed to show from dwellings] and a knock on the front door after dark would signal that a little more work needed to be done, a blind drawn lower or a curtain pulled further across the window, or even some black paper stuck across a skylight.
“No chink of light was allowed to show through the curtains of any window at night, in case that might guide the Japanese bombers in their quest for the town of Hastings.
“The street lights were changed from smooth shades, with an ordinary incandescent light bulb, to corrugated shades that were somehow meant to reduce the light reflection into the sky. And every block had an air raid siren mounted on a lamp post.
“These sirens were tested every Monday morning at noon, a practice that was to continue for many years after the war had ended, perhaps 20, providing the populace with an opportunity to synchronise their clocks and watches.
“Our father Percy would have been 31 when the war started in 1939 and would have been ‘called up’ for active service. Men, and probably only men, were called upon in a sort of pecking order – single younger men first, married men without children, single older, married with fewer children and so on.
“Percy Berry was working in the pay office of the Tomoana freezing works so that would have not been a high priority occupation, but he appealed on the grounds that he was also farming a hundred beehives, producing honey that could be sent to the forces overseas, or used to replace sugar that was in short supply.
“What is more he had five kids. I think it was the honey production story that carried the most weight and he was excused active service.
“But he did have to serve in the Home Guard. I do not remember hearing much about that episode in his life but he was of course an expert long distance rifleman, having been the New Zealand champion at age 21. Perhaps they made use of that talent, but I doubt they had enough rifles to go round.
“His view seemed to be that the Home Guard was an accurate representation of what we later knew as Dad’s Army, practising defence skills that would have been totally irrelevant should Hawke’s Bay have been invaded by the enemy.
“As kids, [brother] Ian and I did at least perform some slightly useful patriotic functions.
“In the latter years of the war Ian would have been 12 or 13 and he volunteered for the job of making camouflage nets, to be used to conceal vehicles and armaments in the Pacific.
“Mahora School supplied him with a wooden needle, a wooden sizing board to set the size of the mesh and a roll of baling twine. He thereupon set to and ‘wove’ the camouflage nets, lashed to the railing of the back porch, using the same technique no doubt as that of fishermen over the course of history.
“I was only 8 or 9 at that point but we did used to collect ‘ergot’ from the fescue grass that lined the roadsides.
“Ergot is a black growth like small grains of rice and grows in the seed-head of certain grasses.
“It was apparently used in medications for treating wounded service personnel.
“We used to scour the roadsides and pick these tiny black grains out of the grass and put them into a matchbox, for which we received three pence (two cents) when it was full.
“I have no recollection of any air raid drills at Mahora School but we did have a couple of ‘evacuations’ when we were sent home early, possibly so that the staff could attend to their defence procedures. And planes trundled over on several occasions to drop patriotic leaflets from the sky.
“Sweets were totally non-existent as sugar was needed for more important products. The only things I can remember having that might remotely be regarded as ‘sweets’ were Throaties, intended for sore throats but they served the purpose as a sweet when nothing else was available, and some flat brown tablets also intended as throat medication.
“It was years after the war before
Karl Pajo started up the Hawke’s Bay Confectionery Company, which made boiled lollies in a factory in Eastbourne St West, as I recall, with a small shop fronting on to Heretaunga St. They opened the shop one day a week for the sale of their confections.
“I remember the name Karl Pajo as I visited the factory a couple of times with my father, delivering honey for use in the confectionery.
“This was all in Hastings. We moved to Havelock North in May 1944 and by that time the tide of war had started to turn, although the battles in the Pacific still had another 15 months to run.
“The war had little presence in Havelock North by comparison with Hastings and my only recollection of anything related to the conflict was the celebration in the Village Hall when victory over Japan was finally proclaimed in August 1945.
“Mr JJ Nimon, the mayor, addressed the citizens of the borough, including our bunch of schoolkids and we all went home for the rest of the day after celebrating the occasion with an icecream.”
A new governor-general, Sir Bernard Freyberg, addressed schoolchildren in Cornwall Park, Hastings, on his inaugural New Zealand tour in October 1946.
Twelve months after the war had ended, the war’s impact was still fresh in communities.
After recounting the sacrifices made during the war by those serving, he ended his address by wishing the boys and girls “a very happy life”, and that “they were very fortunate to live in one of the best countries in the world”.