THE HOME THEY LEFT BEHIND THEM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 209, 25 June 1943, Page 4

THE HOME THEY LEFT BEHIND THEM

THOUSANDS of our fighting men have now returned to New Zealand invalided or on tours of duty. We see their badges in trams and trains, and on every street. In other respects, most of them are undistinguishable from men who have not been away, and from civilians who have never been in uniform. How do they themselves feel about us? To find out whether they feel New Zealand a strange place after their years abroad — dull after war's excitements, or changed from the familiar and generally contented and comfortable place it was when they went awaywe have interviewed some of them.

ee HANK God!" one man said, after we had been talking to him for a few minutes, "we | soon come to the end of the hero business. After the welcome-home speeches it is not long before we disappear into the background to make room for some one else, and that is what we want. We want fair treatment, of course, but those who spend their time complaining that they have been forgotten are only a small section. Naturally they get attention during an election year. "Except for the Americans, whose arrival we could not foresee when we went away, I don’t think many of us find the old home greatly changed. I certainly don’t. And it was a great relief to me when I was away to know that the Americans had arrived in time. No, don’t take too much notice of alleged rivalries and jealousies. Small groups on both sides account for those, too. The ‘Stars and Stripes’ don’t worry me. I ask myself how I would have liked to see the ‘Rising Sun.’" * * * "GREEN grass and abundance of everything" was the reply when we asked a soldier what was his first im- pression on returning here from the Middle East. "After the desert and the heat and the flies and camp. fare and then weeks of hospital ship, the. grass looked more like the Promised Land to me than anything that I had seen in the Middle East. Otherwise, things did not seem to have changed at all. After a few days at home, I felt I might be back in 1939. None of the changes that seem startling here-shelters, streets full of uniforms, really struck me much, We were used to all that." %* % a "T LEFT at the time of the Exhibition and came back a few weeks ago," said another soldier. "Some things struck me as changed-empty shops, postwomen, women in all sorts of jobs that

had been men’s jobs. But on the whole, we expected those things, and other things that we also expected were not there. The streets are still crowded, more so, perhaps, than even in Exhibition year, and though there are more uniforms and girls in uniforms, we were prepared for that. Perhaps we thought we would see a people more visibly worried by the war and by Japan’s inroads into the Pacific. The troops in the Middle East seemed to me to be more worried about New Zealand than you are here. The picture theatres seem more crowded than ever, and neither clothes nor food give much evidence of anyone feeling the pinch-as do, for instance, the people of Britain." % * % FTER the brilliance of colour in Egypt and Palestine I confess I found New Zealand very grey — and rather complacent," said another man we met. "Of course I was probably influenced by the fact that I did not want to come back at all, but was sent home on a special job. "What did I appreciate most? Well, I suppose those things that you don’t get in camp-evenings with a book by a fire, a good New Zealand dinner, and so on. The most startling change to me was seeing the streets full of Americans. It seemed to me that they looked to us much as we must look to the people in Cairo-and they seem to have the same sort of effect on things. You will know the kind of thing I mean-cafes crowded, complaints from civilians that they can’t get taxis, shops immediately full of souvenirs suitable to send to the folk at home, shops sold out of confectionery and other lines that soldiers like, even crowds of little urchins ready to black boots. In Cairo the New Zealand soldier appears as the fellow with plenty of money to spend," * * * IGH wages and plenty of money about the place were the first things that struck me, I suppose," said an elecoa

trician, who went away with the First Echelon, and is back in his civil occupation now. "When I started in the shop again, I found people were offering terrific prices for second-hand préwar stuff. Motors, for one thing-electric motors I mean-to power amateur workshops, to do wood-turning and so on; hobbies, in other words, that had been beyond their pockets before the war." "And how do you get along yourself? Is the world in general anything like what you expected it to be?" "Well, after the way we were talked to before we enlisted and the way people talked at us when we got back, we can't be blamed for having expected to be treated like heroes, But we. feel sometimes that we are political chopping~ blocks for all the parties, and we don’t like that kind of thing. If only they’d shut up and say ‘Well, you’ve done a fine job, and we'll do the best we can do for you,’ we wouldn’t mind." By Bg a THINK if you hear any grizzles and groans from this war’s returned men, it’s because they were promised so much when they went away. They were given a sort of open cheque, and when they came back to cash it, they found it was limited after all," said a member of the rehabilitation committee of a branch of the R.S.A. "That may be inevitable, but I still think that the consideration the returned man gets from the general public is not always what it ought to be. His first six months at home, after fighting overseas, are hard, and he is troubled in settling down, but he finds in his ordinary everyday transactions with the general public, over counters, in shops and so on, that he’s just one of the mob again, and there’s nothing of the hero about him in the eyes of the people. It was no doubt foolish to believe that there would be, but he is die poohine to find there isn’t."