They're Learning To Be New Zealand Wives

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 266, 28 July 1944, Page 16

They're Learning To Be New Zealand Wives

HE first group of 19 Canadian wives and two fiancees of New Zealand airmen to leave Canada had just arrived when we went along to interview them, and as some of the airmen hadn’t seen their wives for three years, and the four who were fathers had never met Garry (two years five months), Shirley (15 months), Buddy, or more correctly, Andrew (seven or eight months), or little Garry (four months), their only coherent reaction for a time was how marvellous it was to be here at last. Well, it was nearly too marvellous for one of them. As we reached the side of the ship, a corporal was carrying a baby down the gangway followed by its mother. The cameraman was waiting, and snapped the trio as they stepped on to the wharf — but the baby didn’t belong to the corporal, and what’s more, the corporal was not married, simply one of the officials helping with the landing. "I’m not going to the movies for a month," was his comment. "Will it be on the screen?" asked the child’s mother. "We must watch for it."

"We don’t have pictures, we live right out in the backblocks," said her newlydiscovered sister-in-law. "Gee! I thought New Zealand was so tiny that you couldn’t get far away from anywhere." On the way to the reception remarks were passed about the seagulls perched along the wharf. "But don’t you have seagulls in Canada?" someone asked, "Oh, yes, but they look so intelligent here. They seem to know what’s going on." From Prairie to Hills Ten of the girls came from Winnipeg, where most of them had belonged to the Anzac Group, a club formed just over a year ago for the brides of Australian and New Zealand airmen. They were all well-dressed, and with one exception, all’ wore hats. "Normally, I don’t wear a hat,’ one commented. "But we were told it would be winter here, and at home we have to wear hats in winter for the cold." It was a warm, sunny day, and their impressions of our ' winter were definitely favourable.

"But you don’t have central heating in New Zealand, do you? I suppose you have to have a fireplace in every room. ... You don’t! Then how do you keep warm? We have fireplaces in Canada, but they are only for show. We just turn them on when we have visitors because they look so nice and cosy." "You know," one of them remarked, "we know so little about New Zealand. We’ve been pooling our knowledge on the boat so that we wouldn’t appear so ignorant when we arrived. "We’ve been practising eating with a knife and fork, too! But one thing that we’ll have to master soon is this Social Security system of yours. It seems so very complicated to us, because we haven’t anything like it at home. It’s all right for your people-you grow up with it and probably know it off backwards." They were also keen to know how we managed with rationing. Did we have enough coupons to buy all the clothes we needed? "We thought we were hard done by, but we had only tea, sugar, coffee, and butter rationed, and we each got one pound of butter a week," they said. "For a time meat was rationed, but that restriction has been lifted." They eagerly inspected a New Zealand coupon-book, and were surprised to find that our meat coupons (continued on next page)

were worth so much money and not so many. ounces of meat. In Canada, welloff people can buy better grade meat." What, No Eggs? "What's worrying me," confided one, "is that New Zealanders drink tea seven. times a day, and I’m not at all fond of it. As a matter of fact, I’ve brought a pound of coffee with me because I heard that New Zealand coffee had a lot of chicory with it. But I’m dying to try your milk. We’ve been told how wonderful it is. You don’t have it marginised, do you?" We said we were fairly certain we didn’t. What was it? "Oh, it has the cream all mixed up with the milk, so that when you leave it standing the cream doesn’t rise to the top." We have .noticed that sometimes very little cream rises to the top, but decided that the fact that some does proves that it can’t be marginised. "Do you get eggs in Canada these days?" we queried, cautiously. "Eggs! Yes, plenty of them. Why?" We broke the news gently. This is just one of the surprises in store for these young wives who have come to make their home in this country, and who are now scattered over the Dominion from North Auckland to South Otago.