TELLING THEM!

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 51, 1 March 1941, Page 8

TELLING THEM!

AIRMEN'S "MAORI."

LEAVE IN LONDON.

MR. JORDAN A "COBBER."

(By Sergeant-Pilot I. L. REID, R.N.Z.A.F.). SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, Jan. 7. Paddy, down In the vague half-light of the tube station, was wandering in a land where only closing time is vile. But he was still capable, taking the letters phonetically, like a primer child, of reading "New Zealand" on our shoulder tapes. We were waiting near midnight for the last tube to Leicester Square. So was Paddy. He rolled toward us, tumbling over the legs of sleeping fugitives from the night raiders. "I'm Paddy Byrne, and I love New Zealand," he vouchsafed, in a brogue that rose against the thick, noisy hum that seems to fill the hollowness of all tube stations. "I'm Paddy Byrne. Ask them if they know me in Reefton. And in Blackball . . . and Denniston . . . and Clutha . . . and Hokianga. They all know Paddy Byrne."

He rolled into the train with us, muttering in his melancholy brogue of hell-busting years in the minefields, £100 ch-eques from the gum diggings, fights with Dalmatians and Maoris, two-up rinus that lasted a week in Recfton. . "He's been there, all right," said Mac, from the corner of his mouth. Paddy sung sentimentally of the ship that took him to San Francisco nearly .">(> years ago. of Mary, a colleen he met beside, a utile. Then he tugged two quarts of stout from his greasy garbadiiie coat ;in<l insisted that we and the New Zealand Digger who joined us at Karls , Court should drink. The liquor wanned his throat. Above the racket of the wheels he sang again . . . this time of Michao] Collins.

Poor Paddy. He was o*s, he told u«, blasphemously. And to-morrow he was leaving port again. "Been in the fo'castlo all my life," be announced, salting this afterthought with such a rush of richly maritime swear words that we grinned uneasily and avoided the. unfriendly btaie of the four other passengers.

We left him friendly, but embarrassingly drunk, in a mist of disinfectant and dust, preferring his bottle to the porter who swept the chocolate papers and sandwich wrappers from the strip of forbidden territory between the lines of sleeper* and the platform's edge. We looked back from the bottom of the escalator and saw him stagge.r into the grotesque mosaic formed by sprawling arms and legs, heard his broken brogue rise and fall in that sing-song Irish fashion . . . "Was out there 40 years ago . . . fine boys . . . drink with me ... in the morning . . ." • • • • Rewi's Immortal Speech. We plead self-defence. We hope our Maori friends at home will understand.

These girl friends of ours, educated in Continental convents, spoke fluent German and faster French than we could follow. And we knew from their nods and purposely ely smiles that they spoke of us. We vvpre embarrassed, arid then annoved.

But even then it shook "Mae," from Paeroa. "Dork." from New Plymouth, and "Jce,"' from Daimevirke, "when I opened the campaign to humble these cultured lasses when we entertained them to lunch at the end of our 48-hour London leave.

"Nganiawahia." I muttered angrily to Mac. "E te puke te awamutu paeroa hokianga tiki tiki pukeputu!" He caught on swiftly. "Maungaturoto papatoetoe otahuhu," he snapped, hooting the final syllables, "e lmingi mungi taipo . . . tuatara kia ora pupuke takapuna waipiro!"

They took their snub, and we had a new gag.

Now we argue fiercely in pseudo-Maori in crowded railway carriages and tubes, in the crew room, at institute concerts and acrosK the ehower room floor. A string of Maori place names has become the text of T?e\vi"e immortal speech of defiance across the palisade at Orakau and invariably brings a thunder of stamped applause from our unsuspecting English flight mates. Alternate lines of the University College haka, exchanged by Mac and I, are delightedly accepted as an argument in Maori about the usefulness of wing forwards.

But we think Doggy, from Wanganui, who is with a fighter equadron up North, hae gone too far.

"... I took Tier for a trip up the Main Trunk," ho wrote this week. "I told her that cold harsh English could not express what I felt about her and that only the liquid cadences of my native tongue could say that her eyes were like translucent depths, mirroring the kowhai; that her teeth were the .sheen of puvva *hell on a dawn-lit beach; that her waiet was the curve of a kingfish's back. . . ." We take a poor view of it. Doggy has gone too far. • • • • "One of the Boys." Ask the Digger you meet in the Strand and he will tell you: "Old Bill Jordan ie one of the boys! My oath he is!" And Mr. Jordan ie. Hie reputation ae the "cobber" of the Xew Zealand sailor, airman and soldier has spread amongst the English units. Unofficially, he ithe guide of every New Zeahuider on leave in "the Big Smoke." Hi* invitation, "Come and see me when you're up my way," ieeued whenever he inspects a dotachement, is no bland, official gesture. Take the day he came down here. When the station commander left him alone with the boys he showed swiftly where the troops stand with the High Commieeioner in England for His Britannic Majesty's Government in New Zealand.

Ho ran big fingers through silver wisps Of hair, heaved on top of a lecture room desk and grinned in his br>.ad, whimsical way. "Xow, boy», tell me all about things. I was -<i sergeantmajor in the last war, you know. My heart is in the sergeant's mess. I never thought then that the turn of the wheel would make me High Commissioner 25 years later. Maybe in 20 more years one of you will be sitting in the chair I sleep in now." They were talking fast in 15 seconds. "Bill" Jordan had won 'their hearts. • • • • Talk with Steve Donoghue. Extraordinary the acquaintances you make in the pubs here. People use the "local" as a club. In the appropriately named "Horse and Jockey." lonely roadhouse across on the top stretch of the windy downs, we talked with Steve Donoghue, famous jockey, who arrived in a big RollsRoyce. A stumpy, broad feat mod. slow and serious-speaking little man, in an immaculate brown suit and overcoat. "I've nearly 40 horses there." he said, in his faintly North Country burr, urging anxiously that we should vint his nearby stable*. He's a front-ranking trainer now.

DonoghueV hands were the story of his personality —strong, tough-looking hands, with useful sinewy fingers. They helped to build his reputation as Kngland's greatest horseman in several decades.

And in the Ludgate, in Fleet Street, a lively little man with a bright eye, a wagging white goatee, dandyieh, out-of-fashion clothes, a flat satchel and an air of ineffable confidence. Moot Mr. Cooper Hobbs, defender of Horatio Bottoniley. "'Seven years I got for it," he answered the newspaper man who introduced us. He offered his snuff box. We pinched, sniffed and held back our sneezes.

"You've provided some fine stories in your time, Cooper," said the journalist. "You'll get two columns when you go, you old scoundrel." "Two columns," chirped the old man. "Sink me! I'll get a page. Yes, thank you, New Zealnnder, I will."' • • » • In Fleet Street. In Fleet Street, too, we met the poet Edward Shanks, who called us "damned fools" for reading his work, and offered a sprig of heather for our caps.

\nd a £00-a-week crime reporter from the "Xcws of the World," who took us to explore the cellars of the old Cheshire Cheese, where Dr. Johnson, his biographer, Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith. IX-foc, Addison and Steele talked in their rolling, ponderous periods of times, customs and scandals; where Ivdjrnr Wallace sat in session with the famous '-ltish" Club; where London reporters and printers gatlier to-day, despite air raids and desolation, to drink from the inn's famous rose bowls and argue in the strange language of their trade. We left there smoking ten-inch flay pipes, just as Johnson and Boswell did. Few could imitate colonials seeing London Ms successfully as we do.

Mv father fold mo once of a Maori who' went shooting with him 30 years a ..,i The Maori cooked the pigeons tlTi'V shot, but refused his share. Instead he drank the billyful of fat in which the birds were cooked, and finished off with a piece of current cake unwrapped from a newspaper and ■dunked'" in sweetened condensed milk. but that seems m> worse to me than the nijslitly supper of my Knglish mess companion* —big, flat slices of lively cheese, pickled onions and a smothering of hot pickles And the whole washed down and left to float all night in a pint of strong, black stout. '•One thing I'd like for supper." said the Devon man who sat alongside me last nis-lit. "is a pint of our home cider. We feed it with liver and steak. Two or three pint* "ill tank you. In the old days a rat or two in the barrel didn't 'matter. Some of the old places don't care to-day, either."

I drank several pints of bitter cider at a very old house when I was in Devon a 'month ago. 1 wonder?

Spasm of Misery.

We nil- this week permitting "iir-ri-Ives ;i prolonged spa«m of misery. Not homesickness —jn>t told—bitter, bitter, bone-biting cold.

The Miuw i< whir-pering now oiit>ide tho winduw. W<- >iiw it etched :«-siiii-t (ho wing tip list\ igatiou and falling J Jar-1 the cockpit window when we taxied in from ni-lit flying.

Many of tlio New Zeuhinders, parti eularly tlio Aurklawlcrs. lia\c not touched snow before. It added glamour to their Christmas, but they are complaining to-day, llorc's the reason. Christmas cards liavo arrivc-d from the people wllo billetp<l us in TSermuda on the trip across, and the pictures of that exclusive paradise have routed unhappy memories. The nmtrast between a mournful present and the memory of a fragrant past interlude is too easy to form. Those Christina,, cards bring a sweet nostalgia—a faint >rent of hot sand and Atlantic breakers, of wisteria and orchid.*; the clop <>f horses' hoove*, the roll of carriage wheels, the clink of long glasses and tinkling ice; and a too£ieen tennis court, and a drink with a millionaire on the terrace of a luxury hotel, looking out over miles of sunlit ocean to the mingling of sea and sky. Outside my window the snow has been whispering all day. I wish I was home again.