Poignant WWII letter awaits family
In 1941, somewhere in the Middle East, New Zealand soldier George Hood sat in a dugout, leaned on a kerosene tin and wrote a letter.
Hood addressed it to Len Green, the brewer at the Taranaki Brewery in New Plymouth where Hood worked before leaving to fight in World War II.
A few weeks later he would be dead.
More than 70 years later Green’s daughter Lynne Laurence wants to pass the letter on to Hood’s relations, if she can find them.
‘‘Mum had it in her treasures. I thought about giving it to the Waiouru military museum, but what would they do? Shove it in a drawer with hundreds of others? So I would like to find some family.’’
Hood worked with her father at the brewery, she says.
‘‘I don’t know what he did or what department or anything and he was called up to go to the war. Before he left, Dad put on a party for him. It (the letter) says the house warming, so it must have been Mum and Dad’s house they shifted into. A housewarming and a farewell party for him as well.’’
Hood writes fondly of the occasion in his letter.
‘‘It was a swell party. Remember me doing a trapeze act on the clothes line and racing around on a trike? I guess I must have had a drink too many ... lots of fun.’’
Laurence says the trike was probably hers.
‘‘There are several names there of people I’ve heard of, but I daresay they’re dead now.’’
Hood mentions Noel Autridge and Alan Nichol.
He couldn’t say where he was, he wrote, but it had been so hot ‘‘a bloke would get sun stroke from the moon if not careful’’.
‘‘We are well dug in and there is not much room, so we sometimes share... with some bugs.
‘‘We have to look carefully at our clothes in the morning to make sure there is a not a sucker animal in them.
‘‘One of the boys found a scorpion in his trousers the other morning, not the best of places, still we get used to these things and can’t be worried.’’
Hood wrote to Green that he’d like to stroll into the brewery and have a drink of Green Band, the Taranaki beer, with him.
‘‘As to myself I am fit and well and doing all right although of course a chap misses his old friends and places.’’
Anyone with information that could help find the Hood family can email helen.harvey@stuff.co.nz