THE MAN WHO DUG UP A DOOR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 295, 16 February 1945, Page 12

THE MAN WHO DUG UP A DOOR

| Written for "The Listener" by /

J.

HENDERSON

ICK came into Ward 11 with a small handbag in one hand. and a _ redchecked dressing gown tucked under his left armpit. The staff nurse Ied him to the bed next to mine. It had been white and empty: and lonely for a week. I’d been wondering who would be the next man to occupy it. The nurse hoped he’d be happy here, smiled, and went away. Nick undressed, put on his red-checked dressing gown, shoved the small handbag into his locker, and looked around, rather vaguely. "That’s a beaut dressing gown you’ve got,’ I said. "A real knockout. Where’d you get her?"

Nick grinned and said . oho, you couldn’t get a | dressing gown like that * now, no, not even for twice the price. He’d got = it just before he went into Trentham with the © First Ech., and while he was overseas he’d think, | now and then, of his redchecked dressing gown and wonder if his wife had put it away carefully and safely, as she had promised. And, when he got back, there it was, safe and sound, good as ever, and he’d been wearing it for a year now, and he was still very much attached to. his red checked dressing gown, "That’s fine," I said, "that’s fine." Nick sat down at the end of my bed and rolled a cigarette.

We yarned a bit, and then he began telling me all about Crete, in long, quick, nervous sentences. You could see he wanted to get it off his chest again. I guessed Nick hadn’t been talking to many soldiers for months, for he’d been discharged from the Army a year ago, and was a civvy once more in grey-checked sports coat, red tie and slacks. But his mind, of course, was still that of a soldier. And, even when you’re.out of the Army, with everything beliind you, all your old experiences and sufferings and agonies and joys boil up steadily within you, brew up like yeast, and every now and then you find you've got to get them off . your chest to someone who understands. It was like that with Nick. So I listened to all Nick had to say, and he went all over Greece and Crete, Mount Olympus, and Maleme, and the parachutists, and that long forced march over the mountains, and machine-gun-ning the Austrians from the top of that cliff. "They dived into a long ditch for cover, but we could still look down upon them from our positions on the cliff, though they didn’t know it, and they must have been very puzzled as they died there." .

Listening to Nick, I kept saying: "Sure, sure, yes," and "Gee, eh?" and "Go on?" and "Hell, yes, the same happened to us," until he’d got it all off his chest, in a matter of three days or so. Mind you, we wouldn’t talk of*war all the time, of course. And, when Nick got going, he’d deliver great chunks of wartalk. And so he got the war-poison out of his mind, for the time being. Fa * * FTER his operation, a very small one, Nick said: "It would be good to write a war book, and have it all finished and done with, for ever, wouldn’t it?"

"T reckon that would help a lot, if a bloke could do it," I said. His wife came and visited him, bringing shortbread. And one afternoon she brought their little son, Ralph. Ralph crawled all over the ward floor, and was very happy, and didn’t wet himself once, and Wwe old soldiers were all very proud of what Nick and his wife had done. When the operation scar healed up, Nick opened his locker, brought out his Handbag, packed his pyjamas, got into his grey slacks; grey sports coat, and red tie, tucked his. dressing gown under his left armpit, and said goodbye. But before he went he said to me: "Come round for a feed and a yarn and a beer or two on Saturday night. You know where we live." * * Ea ° O I went round to Nick’s Government house on Saturday afternoon. It was a nice little house, with a nice smell about it, and I was glad Nick and his wife-yes, and little Ralph-had a nice little house, now. And just before we had tea- ham, lettuce salad (radishes, spring onion, (continued on next page)

' (continued from previous page) slicéd carrots, and beetroot), and homemade cakes-Nick took me round the back of his house, and showed me where his vegetables grew. The garden was very neat and clean, and as Nick told me how the slugs had ravished his cabbage plants, the way you had to look out for bumble bees ruining the blossom on french beans, the proper way to earth-up potatoes, and what amazing luck he had had with his silver beet, his voice was smooth and easy. That tense anxiety had gone. He seemed quite a different person from the one who had told me of Greece and Crete, when he was beside me, in hospital. I was glad. 3 Nick said he’d had a lot of trouble digging this part of the section. Ruddy great stones all over the-place. And down there, by the little plum tree, he’d struck part of a bitumen road-bitumen road, mind you! "But I was digging away here," said Nick, grinning happily, "when the spade struck something solid, jarring my arms and shoulders pretty severely. What the heck is this, I thought to myself, trying to dig round it. But, try as I might, I couldn’t get to the end of the thing, so in the end I had to dig a flamin’ great ‘pit and muck round with a crowbar, and then I hauled out-you'll never guess." "What was it, Nick?" I asked. "A blasted great door, with bolts and hinges and knobs on it! A bloomin’ door! Wouldn’t it rock you?" "Tea’s ready, you two," called Nick’s wife, leaning out of a back window. And as Nick and I went in to tea, I felt a new fondness and sympathy and friendship for old Nick, the returned soldier, —

Not so much because of what he did in Greece and Crete. I’ve heard all that before. And, admittedly, he had some pretty good yarns to tell. No, not because of that. But because of the other thing. I feel proud that I know Nick now. For, wheh you come to think of it, there can’t be many people in New Zealand, you know, who have really dug up a door-with bolts and hinges and knobs on it.