Men

Some days I wonder why I am here?  In Aix-en-Provence I mean.  I have thought about the bigger existential question as well, but I figure greater minds than mine have yet to answer that one so I will leave it to the experts.

Anyway, my short answer is that I am here because I was disappointed in a relationship.  Yes, “Bloody Brian”.  He knows all about it, and doesn’t take that reasoning too seriously.  He is right, of course.  There is a distinction to be made between the reason for an action, and the thing that triggers it.

The thing that triggered my launching off on a little late life adventure was the unwanted (by me) end to a short, but exciting (again, for me) entanglement. The fact that the relationship was almost certainly unsuitable and doomed to failure from the start made no difference.   After living in a state wavering between happiness and misery for a year and a half, the thought of returning to a half-life propelled me to take action.

The reality is that I actually simply got on with life, and things turned out pretty well.  I had daughter Amy’s wedding to look forward to, and I proved I was not totally unloveable by fairly promptly meeting another man.  Who knows how that will turn out, but I am learning lessons late in life.

In the meantime I planned and booked my trip to France, which was something I had wanted to do for quite a long time.  I have been threatening friends, family, and work colleagues that I would sell up and simply run away for years now.  There have been lots of reasons to want to run away.  And there has always been that feeling that somehow life’s chances were slipping through my fingers.  The real reason I am here is that I want to be.  I may not enjoy every moment of every day in my exile, but I am here because I choose to be.  So thanks “Bloody Brian” (I know he reads this) for being the trigger.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering, I am not fending off Gallic men in all directions.  I am just too old, even given the reputation of the French for appreciating older women.  I am invisible to the younger men, and those my age are either short, fat and balding (most middle-aged men in France fit that description), or firmly attached to a Madame.    And for those who know the difficulties I have negotiating the wine samplers in Farros – a French accent is no longer cute when they are actually speaking French and you cannot quite understand what they are saying.

Not that I’m looking anyway!

Where was this going?  I know I had something in mind when I titled this piece.  Oh yes, back to Grandma.

William Pera Aperahama was born in 1892, and married my grandmother in 1914. I don’t know when he joined the Army, but I suspect it was not until after he married, because by the time he embarked for the European war in April 1917 he already had two sons and a daughter on the way.  He could not have been conscripted, because Maori could not be conscripted until almost the end of the War.  Instead, along with a raft of other young Maori men, he volunteered for the Maori Pioneer Battalion.

What I do know is that he looks absurdly young in the portrait photograph I have on my wall at home.  Clean shaven, with a steady gaze and very handsome, he stares out of me in his uniform with no idea what his future held.  By the end of the war his he was a sergeant, but his health had been destroyed and he was lucky to live.  I imagine, like so many others, he came home an entirely different man than when he left.  If my grandmother was looking for a different life, she certainly found it.

The Pioneers were not generally front line soldiers – although they could be when the occasion called for it.  Instead they dug trenches and drains, laid rail lines, erected wire entanglements, and buried artillery cables – often at night and close to enemy lines.  They were useful, but ultimately disposable, and just as likely to get blown to smithereens as any digger or other soldier.  

His company arrived at Devonport in England on the HMWZT Corinthic in June 1917.  They were in plenty of time to take part in the battle for Passchendael Ridge, in which there were 3700 NZ casualties in one night.  By March 1918 they were on the Somme, which is where I assume he got mustard gassed.  I would think that nine months would have altered the clear-eyed look of the young man in my photograph quite a bit, although later photos show he remained a very handsome man.

Exactly what happened to him in France remains a mystery.  At the end of the War the Battalion advanced on foot towards Germany to take part in securing the country.  As they approached the German border the English high command decided it was inappropriate to have ‘native’ soldiers controlling the German populace, and they were ordered back to the English Channel to embark for NZ.  As a result, the Maori Pioneers were the first intact battalion to return to NZ, where they received a heroes welcome.  But William Pera Aperahama is not listed among those who arrived at Auckland on the Westmoreland in April 1919.  

It seems most likely he was too ill to travel and remained in hospital in England.  It is not clear when he was returned to NZ, but I have seen a poignant postcard from my great-grandmother in Jersey in which she laments the fact that she missed the opportunity to meet “dear Billie” because she did not know he was hospitalised there.  I can only speculate as to the reasons my grandmother had not enlightened her, but suspect that she had not been entirely forthcoming about her husband’s ethnicity.  I may be wrong.  I hope so.

His eventual return did not signal a return to normality.  Whatever normality was for my grandparents, which was certainly not what anyone else would ever have recognised as normal.  He returned to spend two years in a sanatorium while his lungs recovered.  I understand that at some stage my grandmother bought him home and nursed him back to health.  From a story written by one of my mothers two older brothers, I know that she put them into care for that period, and had a job running a women’s clothing store.  The story makes it very clear the boys were not happy.

Who knows what effect the war and illness had on their relationship.  I do not know what drew them together in the first place, but I would be willing to bet it was largely their mutual exoticism and physical attraction.  Instant parenthood must have put a strain on that attraction.  But there were ties that bind.  If nothing else, my grandmother displayed compassion and her own brand of loyalty.  But when a boy was born in 1922, he did not have the same father as his older brothers and sister.  Another boy and girl would follow, to the same father.