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By Gaylene Preston
War Stories. I don’t know
how I started collecting them. I suppose I grew up in
the shadow of the war. During the peace. Back then, to
me as a small child, there were three times: “before-the-war”, ‘after-the-war’ and,
the most secret time of all, “during-the-war”.
I heard stories around my mother’s
skirts. Sitting under the kitchen table while the women
talked above
me. Never about the battles or the bombs. Always about
the relationships, dislocated and wrenched apart or,
sometimes worse, forced together again because of that
time called ‘during-the-war’.
The men’s
stories were very different. Not only in context, but
also in the telling. They were recounted
loudly with a beer in one hand, a rollie in the other
and eruptions of laughter. Army yarns for public consumption.
Sometimes the voices would become serious and a small
silence would fill the room, but not for long. The
show must go on Lest We Forget.
Everyone was trying
to, I realise now. Desperately seeking that amnesia
that blocks out thoughts of waste
and futility
and tunes them into mythology. Because we won, it
had to have been worth it. So my whole generation grew
up in the bright piercing light of the peacetime.
The
fifties.
Security. Conformity and everyone living the same
happily-ever-after, with the deep shadow of the war largely
unacknowledged.
I suppose it’s hard to own a
war as a first-hand event when it didn’t happen
here. When you live in a little piece of pink on the
edge of
the British
Empire in a place where hardly a shot was fired.
No apocalypse here. No blitz. No death and carnage.
Just romantic photos
on the mantelpiece of young soldiers who never
came back. Who never had funerals and who stayed forever
young
encased
in the black and white reality of an Egyptian photographer’s
studio portrait. And those who did come back, often
could only confront the terror in their worst nightmares.
Sissy
stuff. No demobbing. No therapy. No “let’s
talk it over”. Just roll your sleeves up
and work it off.
But down among the women the war
was a continuing
event. It was the reason why a neighbour never
married, or
couldn’t
have babies, or another’s husband drank.
Why a father rejected a son, why a husband couldn’t
be loving.
I used to think they were a timid
bunch, these women, with their naïve unworldly ways
and their insistence on conformity and security,
but
I now know how wrong
I was.
Reluctantly at first, because they
all felt their stories weren’t important, they have
with great candour and frankness, told us tales
that
vividly evoke their
lives and times. The nine stories in this book
haven’t
been found after years of careful searching. Carefully
selected they are, and it has taken a few years,
but 57 similar stories are now lodged on sound
tape in the
Alexander Turnbull Library, and there’s plenty
more where they came from. Ask your grandmothers.
I
have found the experience of knowing these women
and listening to their stories a very humbling
and inspiring
one. Humbling because I suppose in my supreme
confidence, I thought my generation invented everything;
and
inspiring because of who these women are. Their
humility and
deep understanding is a testament to the overwhelming
triumph
of the human spirit.
Unsurprisingly, I suppose,
one of them is my mother. I would like to thank her
and the other
women in
this book for coming clean and telling it like
it was.
You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.
Gaylene Preston
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