Home From The Islands

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 238, 14 January 1944, Page 5

Home From The Islands

FAIRLY big batch of men returned to New Zealand recently from the Islands, many of them destined for work in essential industries, since they are not Grade 1. The Listener saw these men filing off their ship the day they arrived and talked to one or two in the clearing station. Every man who struggled down the gangway with a huge heavy kit looked brown, but it didn’t mean necessarily that he had been fit as a fiddle all the time he was away. He might be carrying home woven grass mats, and baskets, carved coconuts and other souvenirs of the Islands, but he might also be bringing unpleasant recollections of bouts of dengue fever, crops of boils, or attacks of a form of malaria. "Our health was all. right on the whole-at any rate mine was," said one man we spoke to, "but there were very few of us who escaped altogether without some queer sort of illness that we'd never had before." : "Food all right?" "Oh yes. You’ve heard what it’s like up there-no fresh milk, difficulties with the butter in the heat, plenty of tinned cortied beef, and so on. .There’s plenty of local fruit, but the prices have gone skyrocketing. Pineapples, which grow in abundance where I was, were selling for 2s 6d each, and I expect you could get them here for not much more. Paw paws were a bit cheaper, and the coconuts you just pick off the trees as you want them." As men continued to file off the ship the pressure on the disembarkation arrangements began to pile up. Instructions were shouted to men waiting to receive their first pay in New Zealand currency after a long spell of the decimal system, and queues were moving forward. It was no time for standing around talking. We found another familiar face, a man who seemed to have a moment to spare. He had been in another part of the Pacific for nearly a year and confessed that he was "tired of sitting on his tail." He had specialist training, and hoped to get into the Air Force after his leave expired. Each man was handed an official circular explaining the arrangements that would be made for him in the near future-some would be re-mobilised at the end of their leave, being specialists, or men without children, others would ae called upon ‘to enter essential indusries :