There was little more than a year between Cliff’s leaving Hikurangi and his sailing for the Middle East in 2 NZEF. During that year he’d met, fallen in love with and been engaged to nineteen year-old Dorothy McCarroll. In the following chapters I’ve tried, through his letters, to flesh out his relationship with her and her family, and his army training. Like his stories of the Depression, they paint a picture of what already seems a distant time — of experiences we haven’t shared and values we’ve set aside. Or so it seems to me. Even distances aren’t the same. Fifty miles was a barrier, not an hour’s drive.
As you’d expect, our parents’ love letters are deeply personal. I resisted reading them for decades and I’ve tried to tell the story now without oversharing their intimacy and awkwardness. Hopefully there’s enough left, though, to illustrate what I mean by those “values we’ve set aside”.
It’s frustrating to not have Dorothy’s replies. He writes about having kept them — it seems he may have sent them to his parents before embarking, perhaps on Final Leave — but if so they’ve been lost. ~ Ian.
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Cliff’s first letter dates from the 19th August 1940, when he’d just moved from Paparoa to Matakana. He’d only met Dorothy two months before, but the relationship was already serious.
His first impressions of Matakana weren’t positive. It was a washout, “wet, muddy and miserable”, although he ended up more impressed with the countryside on his morning walks down the road towards Leigh.
Now that Dorothy was fifty miles away, seeing her regularly face to face was out of the question. Letters would have to do, that and the free phone calls he connived to place.
It was important to keep onside with the other switchboard operators, who set them up for him. “The chap at Waipu is a belligerent sort of a cuss.”
There were sheep being driven down the road outside as he wrote, dogs barking and so much noise it was hard to think. He was boarding with another lovelorn young man and saw him writing to “My Dear Darling”, language he couldn’t bring himself to use, maybe the result of his “Lancashire breeding”.
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On the 28th he told her he’d received his enrolment under the National Service Emergency Regulations. “First ballot for Territorial service next month” — so there was a chance he’d be joining the army.
Despite the newspapers he couldn’t bring himself to believe he’d be fighting for Christianity and the good of all mankind.
“Militarism trains men to be beasts,” he wrote. When the war was over they’d be the men in charge of world affairs. “Some people ridicule the idea, but I maintain that the last war was the cause of this one.”
Still — “for all my spouting” — if he was asked to go he’d go.
His churchgoing had been in retreat, but in the middle of September he was asked to give a service at Pakiri. His mother wanted to know when he’d be home so she could arrange one for him there as well. Meanwhile it was taking him a while to appreciate that the men he was boarding and working with seemed to be pretty good blokes, even though he disapproved of their drinking and bad language.
By then he’d been able to spend a weekend at the McCarroll’s. He’d come away with a lock of Dorothy’s red hair and the feeling that he’d been “far from his best”. Dorothy and her mother seemed to agree.
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He’d fallen in love with her but doubted that she felt the same — he had the local boys to contend with, and her pen pals. Deeply insecure, he didn’t help his case when he wrote declaring that he was pretty good at catching the girls’ eyes. He could get a girlfriend “any day of the week” — just not one he could love and respect.
He could kiss the girls but he couldn’t kiss Dorothy. She wouldn’t let him, not at first, and he was embarrassed for having pressed her, apologetic for doubting her and remorseful for upsetting her.
It’s still uncomfortable being privy through these letters to their first love and mutual insecurities. Something seemingly transient that lasted for sixty-odd years, and that for the first six of those years had to be negotiated almost entirely through letters.
But he — they — wanted them to be saved.
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Cliff had come across Leslie Weatherhead, a liberal-minded Methodist preacher with unorthodox views about Jesus, the Virgin Birth and the Holy Trinity. Weatherhead had written several books, including The Mastery of Sex Through Psychology and Religion, which Cliff was reading. The book was still in the Baugh household in the 1960s and is full of wholesome, perhaps surprisingly broadminded, advice about sex within marriage. The two “how to” chapters were relegated to appendices and written for verisimilitude by Dr Marion Greaves.
Weatherhead disapproved of premarital sex, and warned of the dangers of flirting and petting. Cliff quoted him to Dorothy:
“Moreover, however lightly a man may think of philandering, he has not really escaped. He has dribbled away in harmful frivolity something that belongs to another who may be keeping herself for him with far finer self-control. The gold he spends like this belongs to her and when she comes to him as his wife he finds he has not quite so much in the bank of love to give.”
Over the next five years it must have been very hard for Dorothy to read in his letters about the girls he met and danced with, the nurses, the other women he encountered, but he was a serious young man of principle, brought up in a strict moral code, and flirting aside I doubt he strayed far from the path Weatherhead would have approved of.
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There turned out to be a fair amount of socialising at Matakana — the blokes he was boarding with, the tennis club and the church. A bunch of them had tea one night with a Baptist Minister in his thirties named Grieg who’d returned to New Zealand in bad health after serving as a missionary in India. Cliff was impressed with his photos of India, Egypt and the Holy Land. Jerusalem. Fishermen mending nets by the Sea of Galilee. The hill where Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount. “Dozens of other places we read about in the Bible.” Cliff would see some of this for himself in a few years.
One absolutely beautiful Sunday he had the boarding house to himself. Everyone had cleared out before he’d finished work. It had been his turn to clean the offices. You could see your face in the floors and tables. The old bloke next door was out in his garden as usual. He seemed to live out there. The cows were heading home for milking, with the cockies and their dogs behind them. There were thousands of sparrows in the bushes next door. You could only see one or two but if you let out a yell they went up in clouds … and he was lonely. He missed Dorothy, missed sitting together on the fallen pine, missed talking, missed being out riding, missed her animals, her horse Peter especially. Still, he was listening to Nelson Eddy sing The Rosary on Merv’s wireless and that made it easier.
On other days he was impatient, bored and “thinking hard about getting a better job with a little more remuneration and better prospects”. At least the Post Office was permanent and “the wages would be good in a year or two”. Being out of work was miserable, and he still had vivid memories of a tough life working 16 hours a day for 10 shillings a week plus keep.
All in all, the best thing to do was stick with what he had. If he did go to the war he could be sure of a job when he returned. Meantime he applied without much hope for a transfer back to Paparoa.
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When he wrote on Monday 7th October Dorothy had had a sore throat and the weather wasn’t good, but he had another concern — a trip home to Hikurangi for the weekend. He was hoping Dorothy would be going too, to meet his family. He’d written his Mum a long letter asking what she thought of the idea, and trying to cheer her up a bit. He didn’t say anything about her response.
“Poor Mum. She is a problem.”
“I hope it is fine for the weekend. Do you think you will be able to go? It will be quite an experience for me and please believe me it’s getting me quite worried. Have you ever been to Hikurangi? It isn’t a very thrilling place, but as it has been my home town for years, it has attractions for me. However you will be able to form your own opinions. The inhabitants are mostly pretty rough but they have some very fine qualities. The Lancashire accent will be a bit strange to you too. So really, if you go it is going to be very interesting to watch your reaction.
“I don’t think you have come in contact with many different types of people as yet? Have you? Personally I have mixed with very many and if I try hard I can make myself at home almost anywhere, I think.”
Apart from that, appeals against territorial service were starting to come in, quite a lot from around Matakana.
He was going to Bible Class at Big Omaha with Margaret in Mr Hickman’s car. She was interested in him, which was embarrassing, but at least she remembered to bring the Bible Class syllabus, which he tended to forget.
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On Wednesday the 9th, after apologising for some “miserable thing” he’d written, he announced that he’d been sworn in on a trip that day to Warkworth for the army medical exam — “so I suppose I can presume that I am in the Territorials now.”
They’d arrived at 10.00 and didn’t get away until 3.00. It had been a day of waiting around in the cold, sometimes naked, for their physical exams. Impatient as usual, he grizzled about the bloke ahead of him who had an ailment of some sort and took ages with the doctors. Cliff was accepted despite being deaf in one ear and needing glasses, but the chap he’d gone with was rejected for some reason.
After a couple of pages gossiping about mutual friends and his work cobbers, he said that Dorothy was the only reason he didn’t want to go to camp. His other ambitions were pretty lofty but the greatest was to get married.
“You are my cobber now and what I need is a cobber for life.
“I am not asking you if you will marry me, that would be a bit too sudden even for me, and I make quick decisions sometimes. I suppose if the truth be known I’m a bit scared that you’d say no! And I never could stand no for an answer.”
On the back of the last page he wrote in pencil, “Just received a letter from Mum. She says that I should know that I’m welcome to take anyone home and she gives you a hearty invitation.”
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Cliff wrote again the following week, after he and Dorothy had been home to visit his parents. It seems they’d all enjoyed it and he hoped they could spend the entire weekend there some time. He was very grateful to her Mum and Dad for letting them have the car…
Please thank them once again for me and and tell Mum I send her my love.
Lawrence, Mrs Watt’s little boy, was badly mauled by Maurice’s dog Jock yesterday morning. Consequently Jock has been shot. Jock must’ve pushed Lawrence over on his face and he certainly made a terrible mess of him. Several bad bites on the back of the head, shoulder badly chewed, hole through one of his fingers, his back thoroughly bruised. Don’t suppose it was a dog’s fault entirely. Lawrence was teasing him and trying to take his bone, I think. He is six years old.
Cyrus says that Mr Aickin (staff clerk) rang the boss yesterday with regard to replacing me. They are to work short staffed until the girl starts. Mr Aicken said I had to enter camp on the 18th and that the notice calling us up had been posted yesterday… Seems to me I’ll have to do some hurried packing. My motorbike is a bit of a problem. Can’t decide what to do with it until I know where I am going. May try to join the motorcycle unit…
Saw Frank Exley yesterday. Home on final leave after a fortnight in camp. He says they have been issued with tropical kit and it is rumoured that they are going to Fiji or the islands. Possibly they’re going to Africa. The ones going away are those with previous army experience…
Hullo! Just had a ring from Les. I’m posted to North Auckland Regiment, Whangārei Camp.
At least he’d be closer to Dorothy and his family.