Posts by dyan campbell
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David Haywood wrote
Would it make it even weirder if I told you that this recollection comes from 1974? Back home my mother was tie-dying clothing, baking her own bread, and doing leatherwork. My dad spent his weekends making pottery.
Yipes, I am much older than you are... in 1974 I was 17 and all set to graduate high school. When I saw The Checks perform at one of Russell's Great Blends, I remarked to my husband that I had clothes older than that band... clothes that I still wear.But I don't know if you could really consider a suburb of Auckland (my husband's old stomping ground, Blockhouse Bay) any less urban than where I lived. As Douglas Coupland points out in one of his books, Vancouver's North Shore may be on the edge of a city, but it is still populated by deer, bear, ravens, eagles, racoons and the occasional cougar. You can walk straight out of the neighbourhoods and into the woods, even today.
And it's my husband Paul who insists the two countries existed in different centuries - at his high school in the 1970s boys were punished for having long hair, at my high school in the 1970s the teachers all had long hair, and most of the boys had moved on to Ziggy Stardust style mullets, or New York Dolls style bouffants - some complete with eyeliner, glitter and black nailpolish on the little fingers. No teacher ever minded, nor did they mind that we girls wore bare halter tops which were much more revealing than any bare midriff top popular today. No one minded, no one seemed to think there was anything sinister in it. No one in their right mind dressed like that in winter, mind you.
When we watch a movie that would like the skater-boy film Lords of Dogtown Paul is astonished at how different life in NZ was from life in North America. The cultures and attitudes may be very different between Canada and the USA - as evidenced in Michael Adams book of statistical comparisons Fire and Ice, but there was what Douglas Coupland describes as the "Pan North American Experience" of the same toys, slang, tv shows, cereals, clothes and pastimes. And these things either didn't come to NZ until half a generation later or were in some way banned by adults, according to Paul, who feels distinctly shortchanged.
I've never met anyone from Newfoundland, as it was thousands of kilometres from where I grew up on the West Coast, but I do know people who grew up in tiny towns like Nelson or Kimberly, Osoyoos -where there is little to do but ski, ride, fish, hunt or smoke pot. And their clothes looked pretty much like what we wore out on the coast, though their pastimes were less varied. Actually their ski clothes did look way less fashionable, but this is before their hills like Big White and Silver Star were discovered, and while Vancouver's Whistler may have been home to the Bognor or Fila suited Ski Bunnies, there were still plenty of kids in pom-pom hats and ordinary snowsuits up Grouse, Vancouver's after-school ski hill.
But you should really talk to my husband Paul about this. To hear him describe it, he was made to live in the distant past in NZ, and his photograhs do support his claim.
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The concept of The Murder House will horrify and alarm any Canadian... we had hygienists come to the schools and clean our teeth, give us toothbrushes, dental floss and those groovy little prizes - sodium bicarb powered submarines, water pistols and sparkly glass rings and necklaces... but the idea of anyone other than a dentist doing anything other than cleaning their kid's teeth will put a Canadian parent into a state of panic. Even the hygienists have something like 3 or 4 years training; dental health is taken pretty seriously in Canada, and as virtually everyone over the age of 15 has the beginnings of periodontal disease, it's standard for people to visit their hygienist much, much more than their dentist.
Canadians will spend a fortune on their kids' teeth - we were given endless flouride treatments (that horrible bubblegum flavoured stuff in those trays they leave on your teeth for 5 minutes) but fortunately for them none of us needed braces. But our Mum thought school appointed hygienists were not the real thing, and they only came once a year, so we were dragged in every 6 months to have our teeth scraped with those little metal hooks, which they still use. The process seems unchanged, except I don't have to have flouride treatments anymore, thank god. I've had people express alarm at all the flouride I must have swallowed, but what really alarms me is the endless x-rays they used to do of kids' teeth in those days.
Actually poor periodontal health has been conclusively linked to all sorts of diseases from cardiovascular disease to all kinds of arthritis, so it's much more crucial to health than most people realise. I wrote an article about this a few years back - poor periodontal health has been linked to an incredible number of disorders. It's not a good idea to piss off your immune system, which is what periodontal disease does, even in the early stages.
cheers
dyan
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That is a beautiful and evocative piece of writing David, thank you.
One thing that has perplexes me though is that my contemporaries in NZ seem to have grown up in a different century than my contemporaries in Canada. I'm probably older than David, but I've compared memories and photographs with my NZ friends of the same vintage, and the only explanation is that we somehow inhabited different eras during the same time. How can this be?
My grandfather was born in 1878 and before the turn of the 19th century was surveying for the railroads down in South America, he went to WWI as a middle aged man... my father's childhood (the 1920s) shows him and my uncles decked out like Christopher Robin cute linen suits and adorable hairstyles long over the eyes in the front, short at the nape of the neck. He and his brothers went off to WWII having enjoyed what seemed to be a more modern era than my husband's 1960s recollections.
When I was a child in the 1960s my world was pretty close to (Gen X novelist's) Douglas Coupland's descriptions of modern suburbia, with Panther and Mustang (forerunners of the BMX) stunt blikes, skate boards, relentlessly electric toys (anyone here remember Creepy Crawlies, Ezy Bake Ovens, Incredible Edibles and road race sets?) There were Hi Fs, tape players and portable tvs in every kids' room and most of us seemed to have glamourous older siblings who wore amazing clothes and seemed to lead exciting, enviable lives.
Coupland is about the same age as I am, and grew up in the same neighbourhoods and he describes a childhood I instantly recognise - dated to modern readers, but weirdly space age to my NZ husband Paul.
Paul and our NZ friends describe a very different era in the 1960s with terrifying dentistry with foot powered treadle drills, woollen clothing and wooden toys. He says there was no such thing as colour tv until he was well into his teens and that no one would have a tv - colour or otherwise - in a kid's room He even claims they didn't have indoor toilets in the early 1960s in Blockhouse Bay. My grandfather had an indoor flush toilet in 1878. Even the good memories like David's above sound like they are from a previous century.
Any explanation out there?
And having said that, I just visited my hometown (Vancouver) and found myself unable to operate phones, stoves, plumbing and the sky train ticketing machines. I think I've been here too long to go back.
cheers
dyan
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John Ralston Saul's book Voltaire's Bastards devotes several chapters to the development of wars into their present form, including the point in history where those who gave the commands ceased to put themselves anywhere near any battleground.
He also pinpoints the time when the idea that a man could be a "hero" even if the battle in which he died was lost. Before that point, a soldier who died in a battle that lost would have had a pointless and ignoble death. It's an incredibly interesting book.But the point my Dad would make in all of this is that he did nothing remarkable and certainly not anything for which he should be honoured. In fact at the beginning of the recollections I asked him to write of his crash he is at pains to point out that he was "never taken prisoner, never decorated, was shot at but never shot, and at the time of his crash had only risen like a dying goldfish, to the humble rank of corporal".
He has also reminded us all that a WAAF had risked her life rushing towards a burning aircraft that was starting to explode to save the crew which is the remarkable thing, and that you might expect the men on the plane to run from it, nothing exceptional in that. Lucky perhaps. But that it took incredible courage to drive towards a burning plane loaded with bombs and fuel, jump out, run towards it and help everyone safely in before speeding away.
But he has said so many times - ever since I can remember - civillians suffered much more than anyone in uniform ever did. And talking to people - like our neighbour Dimitri Alpatoff, who'd been a kid in a ditch on the ground in Dresden - this does seem to be true.
Or my friend Dahlia, who'd been 10 or so, and fleeing Lithuania with her mother and 4 year old brother. Their father had been missing(later presumed dead), and the 3 of them were among millions of refugees on the move. During an air raid in I forget what city - the family who'd not slept in 48 hours, was in a train station when the sirens started. Dalhia's little brother was horribly train sick, and was bringing up the first meal he'd eaten in 2 days, and her Mum made the decision not to inflict that on those in the shelter and reasoned that the planes usually were miles away. Not so this time - the bombs fell directly on the station, and the 3 of them sheltered under the bench, watching bricks from the station fly around. Dalhia said the concussion made their eyes and sinuses hurt, and that they were concussed and horribly traumatised by it - especially her baby brother who even at 4 blamed himself for nearly getting them killed. Dalhia committed suicide only a few years ago, leaving an adored daughter and grandchild, and though it would be hard to really make any causal link to her early experiences, I can't help thinking it contributed. She always seemed so sad, in that elegant Lithuanian way that made Canadians and their relentless cheerfulness seem so bumptious and crass.
And I remember my friend Aja's Mum, (who was Latvian but raised in Nazi Germany and saw Hitler speak once, on a school field trip) describing hearing her neighbours - including a little friend her own age - screaming as they were interrogated and murdered by the SS. She told us she'd seen the blood from the family oozing out from under the front door, pouring down the white steps but that hearing the screams had been so, so much worse and that she'd recognised each scream. I remember Aja and I were incredulous not so much about the blood, or the screams, but that the school-age kids were butchered as well, but of course they were.
And stop to consider the poor pregnant woman NZ born Nancy Wake (the most decorated woman in WWII) had seen disemboweled and left to die shackled in a town square in France - her husband had been someone important in the French Resistance. And spare a thought for the unfortunate woman's 2 year old daughter who sat crying quietly with her for the period of days it took her mother to die. The rest of the town was too terrified to defy the Germans and do a thing to help.
I have been fascinated about this subject since childhood, but the lesson my parents - who were both in the Air Force - really wished to drive home to me was that those in uniform have both fee will and responsibility - the real obscenity is when civillians become the target.
Here it is Anzac Day that everyone remembers - that's about soldiers. In Canada we commemorate November 11th - Remembrance Day, and it's supposed to be about all the fallen - not just those in uniform, but the civillians too, especially children who were caught up in it all.
You know, I meant to post about books way back - My Mum read to us all every night - she was one of those readers of books that could make everyone put down what they were doing to listen - she would read for hours and everyone would be spellbound. Our next door neighbour's son Grant, who was the same age as my brother (around 8 or 9 at the time I think) used to knock at the door at bedtime, dressed in pajamas, dressing gown and slippers - and ask "Can Richard come out to play?" to which my Mum would say "Well, no it's bedtime. But would you like to come in to hear a story?". I'm told this went on every night for years, and on colder nights Grant might also be wearing a sleeping bag over his shoulders, and snow boots instead of slippers. Sometimes his parents would turn up to take him home before my Mum finished, and they would stay and listen till she was done.
Anyhow my Mum read us all sorts of things. I can remember hearing Don Quixote (I would have been about 2) and wondering why that Donkey Hotey never seemed to be in it, and assuming he must be a friend of the horse, Rossinante. She read The Adventures of Hucklberry Finn, and the horribly sad dog story Beautiful Joe . Alice in Wonderland , The Secret Garden, A Christmas Carol, Victor Hugo's very sad Les Miserables and even sadder The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Tapestry Room__ , Pinocchio, Toby Tyler and Ten Weeks with the Circus.
Almost all of them dated back to her own childhood and before - the era when children in a story were grateful for food, shelter and adult care - and predated the later literary development where children are heroic and the adults are tedious at best and unable to recognise the child's greatness at worst. I am pretty sure
the odious Harry Potter would have been a little less scathing of the Aunt and Uncle who took him in, had his story been set in earlier times. Like Pinocchio, Harry Potter would have been portrayed as tiresome and selfish if he'd taken both food and shelter without some gratitude, and like Pinocchio he would have been punished by fate for his arrogance, and taught to appreciate the help and wisdom adults could offer. Ditto Captains Courageous - can you imagine such a story now? An arrogant, spoiled child is made to realise how much he has taken for granted, loses the most important adult in his life and in his unbearable grief he learns how much responsibility is his own if he is to grow up. If the story were written now, the Portugese fisherman would be an amiable bumbling fool who would not die at all, but be saved by the little clever and all-powerful boy.My Mum read us stories about being black - Julius Lester's To Be a Slave, __Booker T. Washington's __Up From Slavery and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
She could never quite come to terms with being half Indian (don't say "Indian" if you go to Canada - it's considered quite offensive - we say "First Nations" but that is considered too PC here so I find I have to watch myself depending where I am) - she was French Metis and sometimes denied it.
Part of the time I'd been led to believe there was no Cree blood in her family, she sometimes admitted her mother was half Cree. I found out in my 30s that while that was true, her Father was also half Cree, so I am twice as Cree as I'd been led to believe... which actually explained a lot.
My Mum may never recovered from or accepted being French Metis, or as they used to say in Canada in her day, being a "dirty Indian" but she did have a strong affinity with the Black Civil Rights movement in the USA. Very confusing for all of us, identity-wise.
She read us all sorts of unsuitable things for children - anything we requested. She read The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon the horrifying true account of Japanese fishermen who'd been unfortunate enough to die slowly from radioactive fallout from US tests in Japanese waters. She read Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and later, at 9, let me read Albert Camus The Plague and tried to explain that it was an allegory of the Nazi occupation of Algeria, but I was 9 and literal and insisted that if it were about Nazis, I'd notice. I could see it in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and in adulthood was surprised to find it was about Christianity, not Nazi occupation, but however impressed other adults seemed to be that I read Camus at 9, my Mother pointed out that I'd failed to understand it properly.
I'd said to my husband Paul that I suppose it's unusual to have had a Mum who let me read Camus so early, and he said it was unusual to have a Mum with Camus on the shelf.
But she was a strong literary influence - we grew up in a house with literally thousands of books - none off limits.
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Riddley Walker writes:
"my dad was in a german labour camp when the thousand bomber raids went over. he reckoned the buildings shook so much they were all afraid they'd collapse.
what happended in Dreseden was disgraceful. Curtis Lee May and Bomber Harris should have been tried as war criminals"The knowlege of the devastation caused by the massive bombing did weigh very heavily on my Dad, even at his navigator's table on a mission. As children my brothers and I used love to play war and to pester him with questions about his experiences, and he would tell us that war was not like a game, battles and soldiers are not wonderful things to be commemorated or honoured. He used to say the war was a horrible event and that civillians suffered much more than anyone in uniform and that human beings should learn from that horror.
He is appalled by the glorification of battles and soldiers. He's quite the pacifist, and was already by the end of the war. He agreed with the British government's decision not to award the Bomber Crews any kind of medal, he would have been sickened to have been decorated for what he did.
I agree with you, Riddley, that the thousand bomber raids were a terrible crime, that civillans should never be the main casualty in a war. My Dad has described how incredibly disturbing it was to know that the devastation he'd seen in London was exactly what he was causing from the air. And yes, Dresden struck the men on his plane as a very odd choice of target, though it is claimed now that it was a strategic target as some crucial material (I forget what) was made there. Which may have been true, but that would have been true of Detroit USA also, and they certainly wouldn't have bombed Detroit.
He spent a little time in London after an air raid, and had helped evacuate survivors. One elderly, dazed and thoroughly distraught woman had to be forced to leave, because she couldn't find her cat in what was left of her flat. My dad said the whole block was gone and you could see a severed hand here, a baby's crib there, somebody kids toy, disoriented people digging though rubble. He and the other men helping the survivors were pretty sure that her cat was history, and the old woman's distress was one of his most vivid memories. After that when he was on a mission he thought of all the old people, children and pets he was killing and was pretty distressed by it all.
Whether you could have tried Harris or others in Bomber Command without implicating Churchill and his cabinet, well, I don't think so. And it is easy to look in hindsight at the decisions they made with a sense of horror and outrage, but those of us who weren't alive during the time find it hard to grasp how desperate the Allies were, and how likely a German victory seemed, even late into the war.
But my Dad would probably be closer to your position on this subject than most people, I think... unlike Nancy Wake, who when given a medal recently for her work in the French Resistance made one of the shortest speeches of its kind "I killed a lot of Germans and my only regret is that I didn't kill more".
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Thank you Merc, Joe.
I liked the way Kurt Vonnegut made it clear how young most of the people involved in the war actually were - both my parents were only 17 when they joined the RCAF and were 21 and 20 when the war ended.
My husband's Father (who was in the NZ Navy) was even younger, enlisting at 15, seeing action by 16. My Dad, by contrast was 17 when he joined, but as the training was so long he was 19 before he flew missions. My Mum was stationed in Halifax, so of course never saw combat.
Vonnegut was one of the first authors who described how incredibly young these people were. I look at pictures of my parents - some taken more than a decade after the war - and they still looked like teenagers until the 1950s were nearly over.
But I don't think the rear gunners were necessarily small - though, you are right, their spot on board was extremely small. The rear gunner on my father's plane, "Boots" Engman was nicknamed so on account of his size 12 feet, was very tall.
My Dad's plane crashed on his 9th mission - they were headed to Duisberg (though on a Halifax, not a Lancaster that time) and during take-of, just as they cleared the trees my Dad - who had not yet plugged into the intercom - noticed the mid-upper gunner had an odd expression on his face. Moments later they veered sharply and smashed back down into the woods. Fire broke out before they stopped sliding, and everyone rushed to get out.
My Dad didn't think the undercarriage had been retracted but was wrong, so when he got the hatch open - not easy as it had been twisted on impact - he found it was only a few inches off the ground. He had to run through the fire to the escape hatch near the nose, getting burns to his lower face, neck and chest - and receiving the injury for which he still receives an Air Force Pension -
not for burns - he nearly dislocated his neck as he snagged his intercom wire on something.He crawled to the rear door just as the mid upper turret began to explode, and a WAAF lorry driver, whose courage in rescuing all of them earned her a mention in dispatches - helped him to her lorry, which she had left with the engine running. As they were driving away the bombs and fuel blew up, nearly knocking the truck over and leaving a huge crater in the ground. All of the men survived, though two were burned - one worse than my Dad.
My Dad's burns were not too severe - 1st and 2nd degree - and were not deemed serious enough for the actual hands of the great plastics genius and NZer, Sir Archie McIndoe. One of McIndoe's junior's did the grafts - which left nearly no scars, only a faint seam on his neck and chest, barely visible now and pretty faint when I was a child, though my Mum said they were quite a bright red for the first few years.
He was very lucky to have the McIndoe supervised regimen of saline baths, skin grafts, the incredibly beautiful nurses (a stroke of psychological genius for those men who were badly disfigured) and the then-experimental antibiotics, Sulfa drugs. He said McIndoe used to come around to see how his junior's work was progressing and would amuse the airmen by shouting at the junior doctor, then winking at the airman.
But it is a small world, it was a small war. Decades later - in the 60s or early 70s in Canada, my Dad worked with an English guy who was describing a photograph he took of the wreckage of a plane that went down in East Moor, where all the men had survived. As he went into detail, my Dad said "I think I was on that plane.
I'd post the picture, and my Dad's recollections (which I made him write down) but I don't have a scanner, plus they are way too long for this spot.
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I always enjoyed Kurt Vonnegut's writing -__Slaughter House Five__ was relevant to me as my Dad was a navigator on a Lancaster during the war, and had bombed Dresden.
It really is a small world - our next door neighbour - Mr Alpatoff - had been on the ground in the outskirts of Dresden - outside the range of the suffocating firestorms but close enough to have been rendered deaf by the bombing. He had been saved by lying in a ditch during the time the bombs fell (which was a period of several hours) and when he crawled out he was completely deaf and concussed. He said the bodies of those who'd not survived had no marks on them, except for some had a little blood around the nose or mouth, and many had been left naked by the blast.
I saw Kurt Vonnegut go into Munro's Bookstore, in Victoria when I was about 12 or 13. I coundn't believe it was really him, up there in Canada, but he looked exactly like he did in his photographs and was even wearing the same black raincoat he'd been wearing in some of the photos... I didn't say anything to him. As it turned out, he'd been in town on his way up the island to rescue his son Mark, who'd been diagnosed as schizophrenic and was in a very bad way. Mark Vonnegut - who recovered and later became a distinguished shrink - wrote a fascinating first hand account of his descent into madness, entitled Eden Express.
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the only modern novelists I ever read with much interest or pleasure - I know from his interviews he wasn't that keen on being alive anyway, but I'm sad to see him go just the same.
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Nobody Important wrote:
Unfortunately any plane that flies over US airspace is required to follow 'the law' as set by the US. This includes a plane that may later fly over US airspace ie if you fly NZ to Japan, and the plane later flies on to the US, the flight ex-NZ is subject to these regulations. The plane doesn't have to land in the US, just fly over its airpspace, in order to be subject to these regulations.
In short the US has dictated how the rest of the world must 'secure' its flights. It's one small step for them, one giant leap backwards for mankind. In Dubya We Trust
The US Customs checkpoint is set up to screen passengers entering Canada from the USA - we weren't flying anywhere from there.
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Stephen Judd wrote:
Yeah, I'm looking forward to bypassing the good old USA via Vancouver, unless they lighten up soon.
They still have common sense in Canada, don't they?
Unfortunately the last time I went through Vancouver Airport the US had set up their own US checkpoint right smack in the middle of the airport. They're like an occupying force.
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If I want my friends eyes to glaze over I can talk about the latest cool stuff in plant molecular biology and I bet it's the same for climate scientists. So asking scientists to communicate better is an easy thing to ask but harder to achieve.
cheers
BartThis reminds me of what Richard Feynman said when a journalist asked him to describe, in five minutes or less, what he'd won the Nobel Prize for and Feynman replied "Buddy, if I could explain that in five minutes or less it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize."
cheers
dyan