SOLDIER PATIENT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 15 May 1928, Page 3

SOLDIER PATIENT.

CLAIMED B Y MOTHER

AFTER 12 YEARS.

One Of the most remarkable stories of the Great War reached a happy muL ing yesterday morning, says the feyd" ney ALorning Herald of May 2, when, at Oallan Park Mental Hospital, Mis. E. L. M‘Quay, of Stratford, New Zealand, met and identified as her son George the soldier patient whose- name and antecedents had been mysteries to the military and civil authorities ever since he was found wandering the •streets of London, his memory a blank, almost ll years ago. When a photograph of the man was shown to Mrs. M'Quay recently, she declared most positively that he- was the son of whom she had heard nothing since his departure for the war with the fifth Nety Zealand reainforcements in 1916. Se backed her belief by a description of birthmarks. Even then, though, there remained to those seeking to- find out who the man was the fear that some trick of fate might be leading her to false hopes. New Zealand Government Officials tried vainly to persuade her not to attempt the i2OO-mile journey to Sydney that might only have disappointment at its end.

It was with the utmost relief that those present at yesterday’s reunion saw' Mrs. M‘Quay—after starting at tiie sudden realisation of all that the years and the war had clone to the young man who went out from her side a dozen years ago—walk confidently fto her son’s side, and heard George M'Quay talking to hi® mother with an ease and familiarity which show'ed that, mot knowing exactly who she was, he at any rate knew that she was someone who had been intimately associated with the vaguely remembered incidents of his early life. Those who were with Mrs. M'Quay yesterday will long remember the Spartan calm that she -showed through all the strange interview that followed, an i liter view* "so often tragically interrupted by the son’s lapses into forgetfulness of everything around him. Mrs. M'Quay went to Oallan Park almost immediately after her arrival from New Zealand by the Maunganui. She was all excitement and all hope, as she told ,a group of newspaper representatives how certain it had once appeared that her son was killed in action, how strange had at first seemed the suggestion of friends that the man w'hose identity was mystifying Sydney people was her son, and how definitely -she w:as able t 0 accept those suggestion® when once his photograph came into her hands. She drew all the comfort- in the world from the knowledge that, within the next few' weeks, he would be taken back to New Zealand and placed in a hospital near her home.