My Part In Fighting World War Two
Everybody in Box Hill took part in fighting World War II. We all had black-out blinds and slits in our car headlights to allow only pencils of light to illumine the dark nights. We had air raid shelters outside our public buildings, and a siren on the Town Hall to warn us of any threatened Japanese invasion.
A number of our boys from Box Hill had been killed in the Middle East and still others were prisoners of war on the Burma Railway and in the Changi prison camp.
In those days everybody was part of the war effort from the old ladies who were knitting khaki socks to send to the front, to us children in the kindergarten at Mrs. Cherry’s Horton Grammar School For Girls.
The trouble was that most of my friends belonged to the enemy.
One of my best friends in those last years of the war was Helmut Schwab. He was the son of German orchardists who lived not far from my home and one of the few children in the area who were known as Lutheran. Helmut was a good friend but his Dad had been taken away and placed in some kind of Australian prison which was specially built for Germans. Helmut belonged to the enemy. We little kids did not understand why these other people were our enemy, but we soon found who they were in our community.
In our kindergarten room we had a painting of a beautiful Australian farming scene with two horses pulling a plough up a ploughed field with the farmer behind. That painting had been painted by the famous Australian artist Hans Heysen. But after a couple of years of the war the painting was taken down in our kindergarten room. There were to be no Australian paintings by a German in our kindergarten!
Two other friends from our two fruit shops were Connie Ferlazzo and Nicki Cincotta. They represented the enemy too, although from what I had heard the Italian soldiers in the deserts of North Africa were pretty cowardly before the Australians at El Alamein and Tobruk. It was our boys, especially the boys from Box Hill, who showed the Italians what they were really made of. People used to still buy their fruit at the shops owned by Connie’s parents and Nicki’s parents but behind their back they were referred to as “The Dagos”. People in our street knew that they were not to talk about the war with them.
Our local paper, “The Reporter” had written articles about being suspicious of aliens who lived in our midst whose sympathies were bound to be with their homeland. There was a big poster on the railway station of a lady with her finger to her lips “shushing” people to keep quiet with the slogan “Loose Lips Sink Ships”.
My other two close friends were from very dubious sources. At the laundry I was very friendly with Sing Lee. He taught me to count to ten in Chinese even before I was four years of age and I can still remember those Chinese characters. Sing had a Chinese friend whose mother ran the milliner’s shop, Mrs Woo. At the outbreak of the war they had changed their Chinese names to English to avoid some of the racial antagonism in our community. The little girl at kindergarten with me was known now as Rosemary Wood although one look at her was enough to tell you that her parents came from China.
The real problem was that although these people were Chinese, the people in our town did not seem to make any difference between Chinese and Japanese. I heard my parents talking about our boys from Box Hill being tortured in the concentration camp with bamboo splinters being forced up their fingernails to make them talk, and of the “Chinese water torture” where gallons of water were forced in a hose down their throat distending their stomachs.
These were our boys that were being tortured on the Burma Railway and at Changi.
Our sympathies were strongly with our boys and not with these aliens.
For me, the war broke out in Bank Street just outside the Box Hill Technical School. My other friend Johnny Zigouras, the son of a Greek fish and chip shop proprietor, and I were playing on our way home from kindergarten. Ziggy and his family were aliens, but they were on our side. Somehow or other an argument started about the contribution of the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese. On one side was Helmut, Connie, Nicki, Sing Lee and Rosemary Wood. They were the enemy. On the other side there was only Ziggy and myself to defend Britain, the Empire, God, the Americans and the Aussie boys from Box Hill.
I do not know who started the fight but very soon all of us kindergarten kids were involved in one of the largest unreported battles of World War II. After a lot of shouting and pushing and dragging down onto the footpath and into the gutter the fight came to an end with a terrible scream from Rosemary Wood. Defending the honour of the Allies I had swung a right cross which landed fair and square on her nose which erupted into a fountain of blood. Rosemary was mortally wounded and like any girl ran screaming home.
The sight of blood and the sound of pain stopped the fighting. There was a lull. Then the Germans, Italians and Chinese ran for their lives leaving Ziggy and me victorious on the field of battle.
It was rather a hollow victory because there was no one else to witness it. However, something had been achieved, and we felt good.
Just what that something was we were not sure but somehow we had added to the war effort.
Two days later I went off to my new Sunday School. As I entered the kindergarten, in those last days of the war I saw a new picture on the end wall of our kindergarten. It showed a kindly Jesus seated on a rock and standing round him were a number of children from different lands and wearing the dress of their homeland. It was the first time I had seen children standing in a group where one was Chinese, another European, another African, another a Pacific Islander and another obviously English.
The truth dawned. As far as Jesus was concerned there was no difference between these children of different races. We learnt to sing a new song:
“Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
Suddenly our mighty contribution to World War II looked pretty shabby.
After all Helmut and Sing Lee and Connie and Nicki and Rosemary were all our friends. Perhaps if Ziggy and I could still be friends with Connie and Nicki, Sing Lee, Rosemary, and Helmut we might prevent this kind of war from happening in the future.
They were weighty thoughts for a five year old but in those days of World War II. I had discovered that beneath the differences of race and nationality, there was a common humanity and that Jesus loved us all.
I often thought about that picture as I walked up Bank Street, along the railway line to the top of the hill and No.5 Miller Street, Box Hill, a great city which was still a village where the adults were kind and where the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
