Lindy Kato (Writer)

(Australian and New Zealand Army Corps

Granddad wasn’t an ANZAC, but like New Zealand, he joined the first world war in 1914. It is a mystery to me why Australia and New Zealand, and especially the Māori Battalion would go halfway around the world to fight a war that they barely knew anything about. For far too many it was a complete disaster. Every year ANZAC day strikes at my soul, and I find the day tough. Of course, I remember Granddad on lots of random days as well. And on Remembrance Day (11^th November), along with everyone that has laid their life on the line in order that the rest of us can live in peace.

Britain declared war on Germany on Granddads fourteenth birthday. He took it as a personal invitation. The barber signed his papers because his dad (my great granddad), never would have. I am cross with the barber, what right did he have to send someone else’s child to war? The recruitment officer was paid a penny for every recruit and that makes me angry as well because the minimum age was eighteen. The recruitment officer could surely see that a boy, thirteen and 365 days, was a child. In fact, he wasn’t the only one and he wasn’t the youngest, 250,000 child soldiers are thought to have enlisted in the First World War. Granddad didn’t die.

If you fought in WWI, you should have been too old to be called up for the second world war, but because he was underage then, he was young enough to get call up papers, not as a volunteer this time but as a conscript. By then he had a wife, a mortgage and four children. The other soldiers called him Granddad long before I did!

He was sent to the front line where he got blown up. This makes me angry again because the platoon was escorting prisoners back to camp when one of the prisoners pulled out a hand grenade and threw it. Someone was responsible for searching the prisoners and they did a terrible job. The platoon left my Granddad behind because he was dead.

An American army unit came through and saw him lying there. Their policy of ‘no man left behind’ meant that they picked up his body so that it could, at some time, be sent home. Granddad wasn’t dead.

He was sent to the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot. He was banged up and broken all over including a broken back and a missing eye. He was told that he would never walk again.

There were plenty of parties at Granddad’s when I was a child, he didn’t need an excuse, being alive was enough. It usually ended with his glass eye in someone’s drink!

Granddad was feisty, never tell Granddad what he can’t do! He had Nan push him to the edge of the hospital grounds, and tip him out of his wheelchair. For some mysterious reason there were railings there. I say mysterious because all over London, railings had been removed and melted down for the war effort. He would pull himself up on the railings and make Nan leave him there. In the end he got a job as a bus conductor on a double decker bus. Granddad I miss you 