Some of the following is in the first person, written by Cliff, some in the third person, written by me based on his notes. ~ Ian.
It was more than two months before Cliff was passed fit for duty.
After arriving in hospital his condition had deteriorated, with his weight declining from 11 stone to “well below 8”.
He’d come into the ward seemingly self-sufficient — walked in, put himself to bed, made his bed every day — and, he says, just put up with the pain.
He had a history with pain, and a strategy for coping with it — swear like hell and get on with things. His approach to illness was similar — to act “sullen and aggressive”, especially towards the nurses. And he hated to be thought a shirker.
One morning the Sister came round to check on the patients.
“Normally our beds would have been made, but I was still lying in mine. The Sister was busy and impatient.
“Come on, out you get,” she said.
“Slowly I sat up and swung my feet over the side of the bed. My movements were dead slow and, as she saw it, calculated to annoy her. Because I wasn’t strong enough to stand, I was tentatively putting my feet on the floor and calculating how to make it to Lucky’s bed, when she grabbed me and pulled me violently off my bed — fortunately with sufficient impetus for me to grab at and land on Lucky’s. After she’d made the bed I somehow managed to get back into it.”
He tried asking Lucky how to play Two Up but couldn’t grasp it. He tried to write a letter but couldn’t do that either. At night he’d relive the experiences of the last few weeks, and his feelings about leaving the wounded man at Sidi Resegh.
Lucky knew him well enough to know that something was very wrong, and told Captain Hudson when he made his rounds that Cliff wasn’t too good. Cliff admitted to the Captain that he couldn’t sleep, which made the Sister mad. Why hadn’t he told her?
“Within minutes blood was being extracted for a blood test. I had an extremely high white corpuscles count, a temperature of 104 and pulse of 120. It appeared that I had to be nearly dead before the symptoms become obvious. I’ve always been like that. If I stop eating get worried, for I’ll be in a bad way.
“They dosed me on M&B 693 (Sulphanilamide), concentrated dynamite. To me it seemed worse than the complaint.”
In a letter home he wrote, “I do love to be independent and it will be the death of me yet. After the Sisters teased me, I became that darned mad with temper, that I wouldn’t ask them for anything to make myself more comfortable.”
It was a struggle to engage with visitors, and although he’d been looking forward to Christmas dinner it was a struggle to get any food down. He couldn’t remember General Freyberg’s wife visiting, but he did remember a visit by the General himself.
“Is his condition serious?” the General asked.
Sister said, “Yes Sir, it is.”
“Feeling better, Soldier?” asked Tiny.
“Yes, I’m okay, Sir.”
§
At home in New Zealand his parents and sister Evelyn were spending their Christmas holidays camped at Oakura Beach, Dorothy with them. There had been a cable informing them that Cliff was wounded, followed by another to say he was on the critically ill list, and another later to say that his condition was unchanged.
§
Cliff wrote:
As I had predicted in Whistling Wadi, my Mother behaved abominably. Most of the ladies in the encampment arrived to commiserate with her and there was a great feast of anguish and self pity. My wife Dorothy says that she, Dad and Evelyn were virtually ignored in the weeping and walling, and they eventually absented themselves from the proceedings to go and quietly talk things over.
My Uncle, a staunch Communist, had the firm conviction that the only people to benefit from wars were the capitalists, so on that basis one should not participate. Perhaps his views changed when Russia became involved.
My Aunt had actually told my mother, when they were waving me off at the end of Final Leave, “You shouldn’t have let him go to the war. He’s stone deaf in one ear, and you could have stopped him — it’s your fault if anything happens to him.”
Dorothy eventually tore a strip off my Mother, and demanded to be taken home. As she said, Mum had had me for years, and she, Dorothy, had not had me at all.
It must have been a relief to be advised that I was off the critically ill list.
§
As soon as he was judged strong enough, Cliff and Lucky were shifted to adjoining beds in a tented ward.
When he was on his feet again, Capt. Hudson asked Cliff why he’d seemed unhappy in the previous ward. Cliff said that after living so long in tents he supposed felt more at home in them.
§
Meanwhile, news arrived of the spectacular Japanese advance down into the Pacific, and with it worries about home. “That’s where we should be” was the opinion of most, Cliff reckoned.
Weeks worth of mail and parcels arrived. His letters took days to read, the words a jumble. They went unanswered no matter how he tried, and the parcels unacknowledged.
He’d been worried about mates held prisoner by the Italians in Bardia, and having been surrounded since mid-December, the port was finally taken by the Allies in early January. After five weeks in the compound some of the former prisoners arrived in hospital suffering from exposure, starvation and dysentery.
“One fellow I remembered. Usually a well built man, he now weighed 7 stone 6 pounds. Many were sent home, including our Section Sergeant and one or two others of our lot.
“The boozers seemed to suffer the most. Our Officers, McFarlane and Tonge, had been sent by submarine as POWs to Italy.”
§
Cliff wrote:
If I had been neglected previously, I certainly wasn’t now. I became a VIP. Several times a week, it seemed, my bed clothes were thrown back and I was examined and my symptoms discussed by Medical Officers of all ranks. I’m certain that every Doctor who visited the Hospital was brought to see me. Always naked from the waist down, I felt like Exhibit A. Any modesty I had ever possessed completely disappeared.
My symptoms were apparently confusing. They’d established that I’d had a deep seated pneumonia, but couldn’t decide what else could be causing the trouble.
The Doctors, I think, were undecided what to do about my bullet. If it wasn’t giving trouble it could stay where it was. However it hurt more than a little when I walked, and so it was probably my decision that it be removed, which required an X-ray to locate it.
I had red lines permanently drawn on my stomach, and I was poked, prodded, and asked numerous mainly unanswerable questions.
The X-ray was quite amusing. An elderly man along with one other, conducted proceedings. Because my hip bone was in the way, they couldn’t establish how deeply imbedded the bullet was. It must have been important to know that, because they spent the best part of the two hours trying to find out. A large, cold metal plate was laid on my stomach, and, after some fiddling about, complicated calculations were made to establish the depth below the plate.
None of the answers made sense. At one stage, I asked the older gentleman how far in it was. He said, “According to this, two feet!”
§
The sulphanilamide did its job well and he recovered quickly. His letters home talked of watching football and hockey games, of tea and food being piled upon them, and of being entertained by June Thacker and Robert Taylor and two attractive girls, “one English and one Egyptian”.
“All but six in our ward were Up patients. Lucky had to rest his leg. Hoppy, in the other neighbouring bed, had a paralysed leg but used to hop around on crutches. Hoppy was only 20 years old. His daily visits for manipulation therapy must have been extremely painful. He would come back almost in tears.”
There were Mac and Shorty and Bill and lots of others whose names escaped Cliff, but were good blokes all. Whistling Wadi was a regular subject for conversation. One man from 21 Battalion had been caught out in the open like Cliff at Sidi Resegh. Wounded, he’d shammed dead all the first day and crawled out the following night.
Their favourite, the most cheerful and long suffering, was Popeye, with his mangled legs. Popeye had made his slit trench too big. There’d been a large rock in one end of it, and after great labours he’d removed it. In doing so he’d made room for a mortar bomb, with which he’d had a disagreement. The bomb won.
“A stupid thing to do,” said Popeye. Never leave room for a mortar bomb.”
It was a standing joke. Bloody fool, making your trench too big.
Nothing much could be done for Popeye except give his legs a daily dusting with sulphanilamide. That was Lucky’s treatment too — sulpha powder and the hole in his leg stuffed with cottonwool.
It took Cliff a while to accept the two Sisters, but in the end they were tops. “Very efficient, forthright and firm yet gentle and understanding with their patients. Our tins of oysters were collected and we were treated to oyster fritters, which they made for us. They made scones, and went to all sorts of trouble to provide extra comforts.”
§
He continued to be swamped with letters and parcels from both New Zealand and the Middle East.
Visitors too. John McIlroy was a regular, and Walter Young, another lifelong friend, but also people he hadn’t met before — friends, and friends of friends, of Dorothy’s
.
One Maori patient was sent home and by a strange coincidence met Cliff’s future mother-in-law on board a train. They didn’t know each other, but in the course of conversation discovered that they both knew Cliff.
Ben said, “Ask Cliff to write to me.”
“What’s your address?” asked Mrs McCarroll.
“Oh, just tell him I’m getting around!” said Ben.
Another letter came from George, Cliff’s much abused workmate at Sidi Resegh.
“He’d had our transmitter installed in a trench when 21 Battalion were overrun by tanks. He had managed to escape in the truck, leaving the radio equipment behind. My gear was safe and he was going to send it to me.
“George came to see me later, full of apologies for driving out and leaving us at Sidi Resegh. He was very relieved to be told that he’d done exactly what I’d have wanted him to do. George, I’m sad to say, died as a Prisoner of War after being taken prisoner during one of those disastrous attacks we made on Ruweisat Ridge, at Alamein.”
§
Cliff wrote:
On the 22nd January I was on the operating table being administered a spinal injection that left me conscious but without feeling from the waist down.
My bullet couldn’t be positively located on Xray, so it was a matter of opening me up and hunting for it.
Dr Hudson and Major Wells, assisted by an Orderly, carried out the operation. At first it was quite interesting. I watched the incision, which felt like a pencil being drawn across my stomach, and listened to the unintelligible conversation in medical terms that I couldn’t understand. They searched here and prodded there, and then, on discovering my interest in the proceedings, instructed the Orderly to place a screen across stomach, to prevent me watching. Very disappointing.
It probably took about two hours before I was back in the ward again, full of excitement and giving a vivid description of the proceedings to the others. My enthusiasm was short-lived. I developed a most unbelievable pain in my back, and Sister Whitten was urgently summoned to administer a needle. She took some persuading as she couldn’t believe that the pain could appear so quickly.
Capt. Hudson gave me the bullet the following morning. It was brass jacketed with a bruised nose. A cavity at the rear end indicated that it was perhaps a tracer. The following few days were rather distressing. I’d had a cough before the operation, and this continued. Anyone who’s suffered a cough and an abdominal operation at the same time will understand what it was like. This was before the days of what is called “early ambulation”, so I was confined to bed for 18 days.
I had plenty of visitors. Bert Stringfellow, a childhood playmate who was to be killed in Italy, came to see me. Len Hunter arrived and we had a long chat about Sidi Resegh. Paddy Lynch had been badly hit in the hip on the following day and had gone home on a Hospital ship. Paddy was a nice bloke. Len kindly lent me his camera, which I made good use of. There were other visitors too, names I can’t remember…