Fragility and vigour at dawn service
The corrosions of age and the vigour of youth stood shoulder to shoulder in Invercargill’s Anzac dawn service.
You could see it among the earliest arrivals. The elegant dignity of the elderly man having a quiet word to a uniformed teenager – ‘‘enjoy yourself, boy’’.
The varying degrees of hardiness were even embodied in a single figure.
A middle-aged man, perhaps straddling both worlds, wearing a warm jacket because it was cold enough and jandals because it was not too cold.
The Southland version of dressing sensibly.
As the crowd gathered, some discretely cradling cups of coffee from McDonald’s across the road, young and old stood close.
In fact the generations had come together so tightly it became tricky to move around the Cenotaph grounds.
Some held their programmes high, needing the illumination of spotlights to read them. The first announcement of the day alerted the assembly that an ambulance was at hand.
So was special seating reserved for anyone who was starting to find standing a problem. Before long, St John personnel had looked after three people who’d fainted. Two of them elderly, the other 12 years old. A balance, of sorts.
The Cenotaph guards who took their places at the corners of the monument were all young women. Army cadets Paige Gilbert and Annaliese Carlaw and Air Training Corps cadets Georgia Woolston and Hayley Anderson.
Yes, that would appear to be a first for Invercargill. But nobody should be surprised; young women feature so strongly now in cadet forces. And these four were chosen on merit – drill skills, not tokenism.
After a lengthy silence, boom. The very young buried their faces in parental puffer jackets and one adult could be heard quietly apologising for swearing.
Morning mist swirled over the band playing Abide With Me and the crowd’s murmured singing gradually grew louder.
Fr Vince Smith read the prayer. It was from Isaiah and it was perfect.
That passage about turning swords into plowshares, and the time approaching when national shall not take up arms against nation. A prophecy that’s been a while coming.
Where else but an Anzac service will you hear Kiwi crowds singing along, at least a little, to the Australian anthem?
Rather less hesitantly with the New Zealand anthem, though. As the laying of wreaths and poppies began, it became a case of overhead Air New Zealand flight vs piper.
The piper prevailed and not out of mere volume or stamina. His lament swirled around the stone cenotaph and restored attention to the names etched into it, while the aircraft completed its descent for yet another reliably safe landing in a still-pretty-safe country.
When came the public’s turn to lay poppies, Wynston Cooper was among them, holding the paper flower for his RNZAF uncle, Winston, killed in . . . well, Scotland actually. An accident. His pilot tried to turn too slowly.
‘‘I was born a year and a day later,’’ he said. ‘‘Hence the name.’’ And since we asked, here was another poppy for his great uncle.
He was in the Australian Army, World War 1. Killed on the first day of action, 1916. Around him hundreds, each with their own stories of family and friends lost, carried their own tokens to set down.
Ceremony over, the crowd departed to homes, clubs and breakfasts. Dawn had broken over a steely sky.
But moving among the thinning crowd was a conspicuous flash of colour from Diane and Sandra Brough, dressed as Red Cross nurses.
They made the uniforms for the 2014 commemorative Dawn to Dusk train journey from Invercargill to Dunedin.
In a square of sombre colours, they did make a cheering sight.