(8) THE DYNAMO FROM DOWN UNDER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 12

(8) THE DYNAMO FROM DOWN UNDER

AN American newspaper, the New York Post, once labelled Aunt Daisy the Dynamo from Down Under. When she set to work on a project things usually happened. She had decided that Wellington should adopt "that fine American custom," the sunrise ser*vice at Easter. Nofone who knew her was surprised, therefore, when men were seen to be at work erecting a huge, white, floodlit cross on Mount Victoria. "It was a heavy timber cross," she says, "and had to be stuck in concrete because of our winds. But when the day came, the weather, in fact, was calm and perfect." Outlined in electric lamps as well as floodlit, the cross shone from the summit of Mount Victoria for a week before Easter, reminding citizens that it was Holy Week. The cross Aunt Daisy had seen at Honolulu’s Punchbowl was surrounded by a white-robed choir in cruciform formation, and a band playing Easter hymns. She set about providing Wellington with the same setting. Her school friend of New Plymouth days, the musician Harold Temple White, organised a choir which, though not white-robed, was able and big. The senior band of the Boys’ Institute provided the music. On Easter morning a few special buses ran, but most people attending the service simply trudged, sometimes long distances, starting out in the dark. The service began at 6.15, and by that time a large congregation crowded the western slopes of the hill. "It was just a short service, conducted by the Rev. Percy Paris," says Aunt Daisy. "And there was a wonderful coincidence. We had the hymn ‘Jesus Christ is Risen Today,’ and just as we reached the line, ‘Now above the sky He’s King,’ the sun came up over the horizon. It was a wonderful experience." : The following year a similar service was held. A Wellington paper reported the scene as one of peace and splendour. "Yet," it continued, "on a crag near ‘the great white cross, several khaki-clad figures, standing guard over a military reserve, provided a grim reminder of the less peaceful times upon which this Easter has dawned." The

sunrise service itself was to become a casuality of war. After 1940 it was discontinued for the duration. Revived again in 1945, it attracted some 5000 people to worship, but the -following year power cuts forbade the lighting of the cross and no service has been held since. W HILE her children joined the armed forces, Aunt Daisy fought World War II.on the home front. The country’s record apple crop of 1940 was threatened because ships were not available for its export. Commercial tadio was asked to sell the crop at home. "We organised a National Apple Pie competition, with a £4100 prize," says Aunt Daisy. "Literally hundreds of apple pies were sent in, and three

professional cooks were engaged by each ZB station for judging." The final of this contest took place at the Centennial Exhibition, amid blazing publicity and the roar of a fullthroated crowd. "My most thrilling moment was driving to the Exhibition," | says Aunt Daisy. "I rode in the leading car with ene of the candidates, There was a traffic cop in front with his siren going as we passed through the crowds lining the principal streets. "I think there was a little fuss afterwards about having the siren-but, oh, well-it was for the Exhibition, and a great ZB show, and nothing happened about it." The watching crowd was entertained by musical items while the baking took place. The Christchurch lady won, but all four finalists were presented with

the gas stove in which they had cooked their apple pies, and a wonderful time, says Aunt Daisy, was had by all. OON afterwards, the Government realised that the voice women listened to with such respect had a propaganda value. Aunt Daisy was asked to venture into what was traditionally a man’s world and see how suitable it was _ for women. "I was sent round all the Navy and Army and Air Force Stations," she says, "to see how the girls in the Services lived. They had a good training and it was hard work, but they were extremely happy.

Some of them had never attended a church service until they joined up. It was a wonderful: thing for all those girls, and after my visits I could come back and tell the mothers on the air how well their daughters were looked after." These tours were possible because throughout the war she had to prepare her Morning Sessions in advance, and sometimes had as much as three weeks in hand. In wartime, all broadcasts had to be cénsored in advance. "Of course, with my programme, it’s impossible to write it out,’ says Aunt Daisy, "and so I used to record it and the censors would run over the recordings," She is proud that no single item of the slightest possible use to the enemy was ever discovered in one of her programmes. Aunt Daisy’s personal war effort culminated in a_ semi-official goodwill mission to the United States. New Zealand was then the principal American base in the South Pacific, A tide of gum-chomping GIs, aréund three-quar-ters of a million of them, washed across the North Island, leaving in its wake a huge excess of florists’ shops, a tribe of newly-rich taxi drivers, and the un- mistakable accents of Iowa and Texas and Tennessee. The cry of the Kiwi abroad was said to be the age-old one of "Loot, Ioot!" At home it began to sound like "anygumchum?" In the South Island, which remained largely untouched, cynical remnants of the aboriginal culture took to calling the North Island the 49th State, or Little America. Certainly, New Zealand learned a good deal of the American Way of Life. The time had come for cultural interchange-Americans should learn something of their country’s South

Pacific base. After much coming and going on Parliament Hill, it was. decided that Aunt Daisy was the one for the. job. \V ARTIME security shrouded Aunt Daisy’s third departure for the Americas. Finally, after waiting on tenterhooks at her hotel for what seemed endless hours, she was driven to the docks and taken aboard an American Liberty ship. The blackedout vessel quietly slipped its moorings and slid out through the anti-submarine defences into a grey and possibly dangerous Pacific. Aunt Daisy meanwhile plumbed the depths of the ship and of the American sense of humour. "The officer at the gangway read my papers," she says, "and said, ‘Oh, yes, Mrs Basham, Stateroom number one, please.’ I thought that sounded lovely. So I went down one flight of stairs, and then a steeper one, and finally an absolute ladder, I was in number one hold!" ; The "stateroom" consisted of a partitioned area containing 27 bunks and lockers, a maze of steam and air-con-ditioning pipes, 19 home-going American nurses, and three New Zealand girls going to the U.S. to be married. It was all very different from Daisy’s last stateroom in the luxurious Monterey, when she travelled to San Francisco only six years before. Austere though it was, Aunt Daisy preferred present small mercies to might-have-beens. The Americans, as always, were courteous hosts. Major Merrill Moore, a psychiatrist by calling, had personally lugged up the gangway a case of canned fruit juice and instructed one of the nurses to make sure that Aunt Daisy took some each day. The cook filled her thermos bottle with hot water for the early morning tea she would not be without. She drank it in the washroom, where there were a couple of stools-the only place to sit except on her own lifebelt. Deck chairs were extravagances of the prewar past. ; The ship was without benefit of a bugler, but the days began with a verbal substitute, the loudspeaker announcing: "This is Revelly-this is Revelly." Soon afterwards the men would begin to form the "chow line" which wound past the galley for most of the day. Enlisted men received two meals daily, with coffee and crackers in between. Officers and ladies did better. Their meals were served at tables in the cramped dining room, thrice daily. Among the stewards, Aunt Daisy’s favourite was a grizzled Negro named Terry. He was very thin and tall, she says, and during a severe storm his skin turned from black to a strange shade of yellow. Once, when the ship steadied for a minute or two, a relief from the continuous, sickening motion, she said, "Why Terry, it’s getting better, I think!" The steward turned up his eyes to heaven until only the whites seemed to show, and replied, "Miss Daisy, when our Lord was on this earth and there was a storm, He used to say, ‘Peace! Be still!’ An’, Miss Daisy, I guess maybe He’s saying it now." AUNT DAISY spent her days on deck, sitting on her lifebelt listening to the GIs harmonising hillbilly songs, handing out gingernuts to the hungry, two-meals-a-day men, and _ happily watching the wounded grow well again in the benign sunshine and sea air. At night she sometimes escaped from the heat and cigar-smoke of the packed dining-room on to the deck, but she ventured with caution, Echoing in her ears was the Chief Officer’s warning, issued on the first day out: "There's not going to be any larking on this boat.

If anybody falls overboard, this ship don’t stop to pick you up. That’s the end of it; we go right on. We don’t stop for anybody." No shipmaster, in fact, dared stop in’ mid-ocean in those days. His vessel would become a sitting target for the island-based submarines of Nippon. Daisy was careful not to venture far from the black-out screens by the dining room door. The voyage was a new experience, and exciting, therefore, but she was not altogether sorry when the ship moved, in a blazing sunset, through the Golden Gate into San Francisco. Next morning, before the vessel docked, Aunt Daisy was whisked ashore by an officer from the New Zealand Legation and met at the quay by another New Zealander, LieutenantColonel Halliwell, who escorted her to an hotel and informed her she had a press conference scheduled for eleven o'clock, Already it was a quarter to eleven, and she was horrified, "I couldn’t face a press conference," she protested, "without a cup of tea! And I’ve got a ladder in my stocking. I must change them." So the Colonel gallantly averted his eyes while Aunt Daisy changed hosiery, and gallantly joined her in a tooth-glass of luke-warm téa prepared from the, packet she carried in her baggage. The water came from the hot tap over the wash basin. San Francisco in wartime was no place to obtain such exotic drinks as tea, especially if one was in a hurry. Nevertheless, the brew, forbidding though it was, had the desired effect. The press conference was an undoubted success, Daisy holding the cynical pressmen of San _ Francisco spielbound, and discovering afterwards ‘that word of her coming had been flashed across the nation. URING this trip, Aunt Daisy recorded no fewer than 54 Morning Sessions, her programme going on the air in New Zealand each morning as if she had never left home. And she gave 26 broadcasts, one telecast, and numberless interviews directed at the Americans. "Someone from the New Zealand Legation went almost everywhere with me," she says. "I think they didn’t dare leave me alone in case I wrecked the Empire or something." She attended the launching of the 541st Victory ship from the Kaiser shipyards at Richmond, California, an unbelievably fast moving concern, which had been functioning for only three years. A ship was barely in the water before the keel was being laid for the next. Daisy was mightily impressed by the speed, but not so much as Kaiser’s workers were by the amount she packed into the lunch-time addresses she gave. For two of her listeners at Kaiser’s Aunt Daisy’s voice was a_ breath of home. They descended upon her quickly and introduced themselves — aed Hawke’s Bay girls marooned by the war while on holiday in California. After the launching-the ship was named Mello Franco, after a former Brazilian Foreign Minister — Aunt Daisy attended a celebration luncheon. "We had fruit cocktails and celery and stuffed olives," she says, "and hot creamed lobster in the half-shell, and potato straws and plates of salad and hot asparagus rolls and butter; and ice cream and macaroons and coffee." The guests were entertained by performers chosen from among the yard workers---mostly professionals who had iaken to industry for the duration. There was a song, "Smooth Sailing," for the benefit of the launching party and its ship, a Spanish love song for a handsome but embarrassed young lieutenant, and for Aunt Daisy a familiar air known as. "Daisy Bell." She was taken by sur- (continued on next page)

The Aunt Daisy Story (continued from previous page) prise. "I didn’t know they knew it in America," she says. The theme song, in fact, cropped up again and again, but it was not an American who. suggested that the third line should read, "It won't be a silent marriage." ‘\ HEREVER she travelled, Aunt Daisy concentrated on "selling" New Zealand. "I went,’ she says, "because I wanted to help Americans and New Zealanders to understand each other; to live as pleasant neighbours do, each gaining something from the other; and especially to be on watch against prejudice and sweeping generalisation." To this end, she broadcast whenever she could. She even took part in a programme with a "master mentalist" and successfully gave the show a New Zealand twist. Americans learned about hot springs and trout and Rata and Kiwis, animal and human. When Aunt Daisy appeared on U.S. television it was not the massive business that it was later to become. In the whole of New York there were only 5000 sets. American TV in 1944 was at a similar stage of development to British TV in 1938, when Aunt Daisy made her first acquaintance with the little screen at London’s Radio ‘Show. She remembers that the BBC were then screening such shows as Julius Caesar in modern, everyday clothes-"a terrible sight." Her own television interview had hardly been what the staid BBC bargained for. She tripped over the carpet on entering, and her vigorous, darting conversation thereafter created one of the liveliest programmes the corporation had telecast up to that date. By the time Aunt Daisy had crossed the continent to New York she confesses that her mind was "a confused jumble of memories of Beverly Hills, the Kaiser shipyards, broadcasting and its different personalities, Pasadena and its flowers, the Golden Gate Park, the Grace Cathedral, the Hollywood Bowl, luncheon at the Brown Derby, watching John Charles Thomas run his concert and Ronald Colman, Loretta Young and Edna Best do Bhithe Spirit, meeting Lionel Barrymore, and being photographed with Red Skelton and with Ginny Simms." UT the true high spot of the trip was still to come, at Washington, where New Zealand radio’s First Lady was invited to tea with the First Lady

of the entire United States. Eleancr Roosevelt had visited New Zealand not long before, and she kept Aunt Daisy beside her while they talked. "I was able to tell her," says Aunt Daisy, "that American nurses in New Zealand had told me her visit was the greatest uplift they had since they got there. She seemed most pleased to hear itbecause, I think, people in America jumped on her a good bit." Not always did Aunt Daisy encounter Americans as well informed as the President’s wife. On a radio programme from WNEW, New York, she spoke, in company with an Australian soldier, as an Anzac partner. "A girl at the Hammond organ played ‘Waltzing Matilda’ for Australia," she says, "and she actually thought that would do for New Zealand, too! But I managed to find ‘God Defend New Zealand’ in her book, so that was that!" If Aunt Daisy went to America to persuade its people to know and like New Zealand, the process had its obverse side. She ended her tour more than half in love with America, "We want all the Americans to come and settle in New Zealand," she assured a New York reporter. "We'd rather have Americans than anybody, because they’re more like us-full of energy and go." Boarding the ship in New York Harbour, however, almost consoled her for the pleasures ‘she left behind. As she came over the side she was greeted by the sight of a white-jacketed steward dispensing tea and thinly-sliced bread and butter. The ship was the Akaroa, a New Zealand vessel, which had not been refitted as a transport, and offered all the solid British comforts of the unrationed days before the war. After six months of coffee and doughnuts, Aunt Daisy was more than ready for tea. The ship crept in convoy down to Panama, and then, much faster, continued alone across the Pacific to Wellington. Daisy arrived just in time, The supply of Morning: Sessions she had sent back had nearly run out. On the day she stepped ashore only one was left. She rapidly picked up the threads again, telling her listeners about America on the air and in a series of articles for The Listener, later published as a book, Aunt Daisy and Uncle Sam. This book led to a question Aunt Daisy will never forget. On a later visit to America, in 1946, she showed it to a newswoman in Detroit. The American lady looked puzzled. "Who is this Uncle Sam?" she asked. "Is he your husband?" (79 be continued)