Forces sweetheart remembers 1944

Press, 20 April 1988, Page 21

Forces sweetheart remembers 1944

By

GARRY ARTHUR

In 1944, Gloria Lyons was a very sick girl. She had tuberculosis of the spine and was in Christchurch Hospital for a piece of bone to be grafted on to her spine from her shin. Secured in a contraption called a Bradford frame, she was not even meant to lift her head off the bed. But even the strict hospital regimen of the 1940 s could not keep Gloria down, and before long she found herself the sweetheart of New Zealand airmen in the Pacific, i ; I Fighter planes were named after her, and the morale of at least half a dozen airmen of the R.N.Z.A.F.’s No. 4 Servicing Unit depended on the arrival of Gloria’s letters. I The 19-year-old had responded to a newspaper advertisement calling for people to write to New Zealand forces fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Her letters proved so popular that several Warhawk fighters were named "G Tor Gloria’! in her honour. ■ On a recent visit to Christchurch from her I home in ] Sydney, Gloria (now Mrs Gloria AustijjjjEames) recalls that to her of the five planes bearing her name was lost, either shot down or crashlanded. Although none of the fliers was she remembers writing to the R.N.JLA.F. and asking that ■, no more be named

after her. She thought she must be a jinx. They wrote back and said that asj long as there were planes around, they would name one after her.

i'l remember it as one of the happiest years of my life, that! year in hospital'— apart from, the pain,” says Mrs Austin-i Eames. “It was happier than, other wards because there was a soldiers’ ward underneath, and we dropped fishing lines out’ under the balcony and they! would send up fruit and chocolates and music. They were fan-' tastic. |‘T was out on the balcony in the sun, feeling sorry for myself, when I looked below and a! chappie was wheeled out who! had lost both his arms and his] legs. I shut up after that.” [ | Most of the other patients in the orthopaedic ward were much ojder than Gloria, and she used tq sing to them from the sheet music sent up on her fishing line from the wounded men below. 1 Sne ; was not allowed to sing “Home Sweet Home” because of ajll the tears, but on the day she v|as finally discharged, she stood at the end of the ward and sang “The Lord’s Prayer.” There was not a dry eye in the ward. |i She says there was another side [to her nature. “I was a bit of a devil in my woung days. Ari advertisement Appeared in the ppper asking for someone to

write to the boys overseas, and I went overboard. J wrote saying that I had a delightful twinkle in my sparkling eyes, and that my friend was a beautiful coppertop.” The response was immediate. Airmen started wjriting regularly to Gloria, and a fighter plane

with! a G in its name was repainted "G for Gloria.” ''Then the Navy adopted a girl in jGreen Lane 'Hospital, Auckland,” | Mrs Austin-Eames says, “arid! the Army adopted a girl in Duriedin.” j She had about half-a-dozen regular correspondents. One.'she ! i !

remembers, always used the sign of the Saint on his letters. They came to see her when they came home on leave, and after she left hospital she went to stay with the parents of one airman in Wellington. “Oh, the other girls used to be envious,” she says. “Some of them were good-looking blokes.” The subject matter of her letters was limited, she says, because she was “incarcerated,” but she had a vivid imagination and used to think up things to amuse therii. “At one stage I had a view of the Antigua Boatsheds from my balcony, and I saw the kids snowballing in the winter and playing around. I’d write about that. It was not a lot of drivel — I even passed on to them things that I read in the paper. They enjoyed getting the news.” Gloria’s letters became quite famous, much to her surprise. “I didn’t think that everything I wrote would be published in the press,” she says, "but it did get in the papers. There were numerous articles, and I started to get mail from all over the place. j "I’d been shown in the paper with ribbons in my hair, and some dear old soul sent me some more. Someone in the United States sent me a Saint Christo- - pher medal.” The Air Force thought so highly of iher that the squadron to which her correspondents be- * longed sent her a scroll with more than 200 names on it.

The six dr seven men who wrote regularly would tell her what they wbre doing, and what they wished they were doing. “They told me their inner feelings, and what they felt about the situation they were in. But there was not top isecret stuff.” The young Gloria Lyons kept in touch with two or three of them afterwards. “I had a romantic attachment to one,” she confesses, “jbut he wanted to marry somepne like his mother. I was too mrich of a larrikin — not what you’d class a sophisticated person,] whereas he was an absolute gent, a very nice boy.” Nothing came of the rather one-sided romance. “Fate decreed otherwise,” says Mrs Austin-Eames, “and anyway, I didn’t thing he deserved someone who had been chopped up.” The attractive young woman in the orthopaedic ward’s balcony had no lack of suitors, however. She used to make signals with a mirror to young men in another ward, and she had two proposals of marriage] In 1961, Gloria Lyons married Douglas Austin-Eames, and they moved to Australia. Her bone graft worked well, and she did not need another until 1976. Her husband dieri in August last year, and she decided’to come back to New Zealand to visit Shirley Ricketts of Efemuka, a friend she met in Christchurch Hospital. Old Air F]orce hands who remember her from 44 years ago invited her to the Brevet Club, and took her out to Wigram to see the R.NIZ.A.F. museum.