“Yes, I did remember as it is 100 years since the First World War,” he said.
“And did you know my father fought in that war?”
I could feel a story coming on so suggested he put on the gas ring to boil the kettle for a cuppa.
Abel lives without electricity, relying on gas for quick cooking and his fridge. He has a small generator for his TV, and solar lights. Solar garden lights produce several hours of light in the evening, and Abel also uses a solar torch and bed lamp.
He has solar hot water in the summer but is yet to find a solar-powered transistor radio. He has a huge wood burner to cook on and provide heat in the winter and his water supply is gravity fed. A small raised vegetable garden gives him a continual supply of vegetables with spinach, tomatoes and beans growing up bamboo poles while kumara, kamokamo and cucumbers spill over the ponga garden walls and watercress is sourced from the nearby creek.
Inside, the dwelling is like Aladdin’s cave with walls covered with laminated news cuttings and photographs. Who would want wallpaper when you can be entertained with memories all around your living room walls?
I was attracted to a sepia toned photograph of what looked to me like a rugby team and Abel proudly pointed to his dad, Wiremu, who at 29 was chosen for the 1911 Maori All Black rugby team. Then in 1912 and 1913 he was invited to play for New Zealand so you can imagine this humble shepherd cum fencer from Gisborne was super fit when he applied to join the New Zealand Expeditionary Force to fight for his country in World War One.
Not long after leaving NZ Wiremu was promoted to Lance Corporal then after a lengthy stretch of combat he was enlisted with the Military Police and given one of the 1000 NZ horses to help with his duties. But it was his stamina and can-do attitude that saved him when disaster struck in 1917.
World War One was known as the chemical war as both sides used gas and chemicals housed in mortar shells to fire at each other. The Germans marked their shells yellow and so the contents were named mustard gas which disabled and harassed their enemy. The gas could stay active in the ground for days or weeks causing the victims’ skin to blister and their eyes become sore. They also suffered internal and external bleeding and it attacked the bronchial tubes causing great pain. Fatally injured victims often took four or five weeks to die. Wiremu came in contact with the gas but suffered only a mild attack, allowing him to stay on in Europe until the end of the war.
Back home with his wife and family, Abel remembers his dad trying to get relief for his breathing from a strange contraption involving a tennis ball and a glass tube which his dad pumped and squeezed in his mouth. He received a war pension and occasionally would get a bit of fencing work.
Their happiest times were when they were sitting on a wooden bench out the front of their Gisborne home in the early evening when the Salvation Army Band came by on the back of a truck and played hymns and war songs right outside their house. They felt really special.
Wiremu slipped quietly away to the happy hunting ground in the sky at 70. A true legend who we will remember on April 25.
But I hope we don’t have a repeat of this story. A visitor entered a returned services bar one Anzac Day and asked for a double whiskey.
“That’ll be $9,’’said the bartender.
“Hell, if you’d charged like that at Gallipoli we would have won.”
