Wally's tales

I read in the paper this morning a report where a citizen of Christchurch was called to account for his disgraceful behaviour by the Department of Child, Youth, and Family, that’s the (CYF) to you. His naughty action in their eyes was by allowing two of his children, aged nine and four, to play in a School Park Playground, and would you believe unsupervised. A commissioner no less from the CYF who ever he/she is, made a visit to their home to confront the parents, and advise them that a four year old and under the charge of a nine year old was not acceptable in their departments eyes to be left alone, unsupervised even in a playground. However, commissioner got a response that was not quite what expected. They were told in no uncertain terms to get lost. The family in question considered that it was the family’s responsibility to decide what was acceptable, and not the Governments. I don’t know who or what this organisation is, but it seems it’s another form of control. It’s large, we can see that, but one wonders exactly where this insidious form of control will end up. The former Government it seems had a price to pay to get it’s self elected, and it seem this organisation is part of that. This I imagine was another Hobby Horse from one the partners with votes who were hanging onto the coat tails of the Labour Party and required to form a ruling party. Thy probably had plans for many more of these ‘Control’ departments. Unfortunately for them, with the sweeping changes now being made by the new Government who have announced that these several thousand of these employees would shortly be without 200 hundred or so of their management staff for a start. These have all been deemed redundant, and it’s suggested that they look for another job.

They would have been very busy little ferrets if they were around in my youth. We were free to roam far and wide, the only proviso was that we turned up for dinner at night, and kept out of trouble. One would have thought that the CYF would have better employed looking after Playground and ensuring that they were safe. I think that this time they have got the cart before the horse.

Growing up, we had complete freedom of our town, we wandered far and wide exploring our domain. We didn’t have the luxury of playgrounds, and mostly played on the roads. We tested our courage by wandering into all the tunnels around Port Chalmers and even crawled through the narrow one that belonged to the Harbour board that pumped sand from Back Beach to Mussel Bay. We Climbed every tree of any size in the district. Crawled under the wharfs, as at low tide there was a rock base the wharfs were built on. My favourite spot was the fisherman’s punt where the fishing boats came to unload their catch. There were a lot of perks to be found there by assisting the fishermen. Sometimes we could hitch a ride on the Pilot Launch to take out the Pilot to a arriving ship or retrieve same from a vessel departing. Stevenson Cook moulding shop was another exciting visit to watch the pouring of molten metals into moulds. We hung around Captain Scoulay and were rewarded by the occasional trip in the Harbour Board Tug when the vessel was required for only a local berthing. He also owned a sailing dinghy and when he required ballast we enjoyed many exciting trips across the harbour to Portobello which always seemed to be a broad reach. I don’t think life jackets were invented then.

Another place of interest were the two engraving docks. Whenever a vessel was being berthed, we were on hand, to see what turned up when the water was pumped out. Always a variety of fish were trapped, and easily caught in the gutters that were now under the ship, exactly where we to be found.

In my youth, which is now many a long year ago,  then if you had asked me the question, ‘What is a Homosexual’, I wouldn’t have had a clue of how to answer the question and what they got up to. At that time, things such as this were simply not discussed. However from observation I had come to the conclusion that some people seemed to be born completely different and as well their sexual orientation was different to what was considered normal at that time. True, we had a few male friends and acquaintances who exhibited definite feminine characteristics, in total there were only about three or four, and that was from the population of our town which was some three thousand. From what I know now, there must have been many, many more, but they kept their true feelings concealed. In the main, I found these folk to be fastidious with their dress, fussed a lot and tended to like fine things of life. They avoided rough contact sports, and were more attracted to things like, golf, badminton, or perhaps even tennis all of which they excelled. In hindsight I could see they were very careful not to draw attention to their sexual preference. You could also wonder at this time, if there were any females who were exhibiting similar homosexual traits? From what is known today, there must have been an equal number. But back then, ‘Coming out of the closet’ just wasn’t an option, and from what I know today they wouldn’t have dared to test the water.

For me, all this changed when I went into the Services and the real world. Soon after I was on a troop ship and leaving New Zealand. On the same vessel it so happened that there were present a large number of American servicemen. They must have thought, ‘What a collection of innocent young Bunnies’ we have here. Which in a way was true. On the ship our sleeping quarters were situated on an open deck and we had to put up with a lot of through traffic. Amongst these Americans whose sexual education was much more advanced than ours, and some immediately set about making sexual advances to these naive young sleeping Air Men. I suppose, initially they couldn’t believe good luck. However this quickly turned to dismay, when the reaction they got was distinctly hostile, plus a threat to even toss them overboard if they persisted with their sexual approaches. This was something for them that was totally unexpected and certainly not on their agenda. We had been told many times, to fall overboard was bad news. But don’t expect the ship to stop. They quickly they summed up the situation and could see that it wasn’t an idle threat either. I have since wondered, where were all the women who had similar feelings towards their own sex. I think a lot must have just masking any of these feelings, got on with their life, probably married into a miserable existence. I thought once you could detect them if they exhibited facial hair, or even sporting a trace of a moustache, until it was pointed out to me, that this was only a hormonal condition. I was into the Army at the tender age of eighteen. We were at war and the Government of the day tossed the rule book out of the window and conscripted men from eighteen years of age up. I was a very young eighteen and had a lot of catching up to do. From time to time the Army did their best, they lectured us on most things, even sexual matters, bringing us up to speed on what we should know about life now we were instant adults. The camp Doctor ‘Doggy Moore’ thought it necessary to give these young men under his care lectures on sexual matters. One that he gave was so graphic, I can still recall it. He painted such a bad picture of women in general, that if he did the same today he would be ‘court marshalled’ and sent packing back to civilian life.

When we moved to Queenstown there were many opportunities in the Tourist and Service industry work. In this area there were many job opportunities, and it attracted many homosexual folk. They excelled working and running Hotels, Restaurants and even the Entertainment business. By now they made no effort to conceal their homosexual preference, and I wondered what all the fuss was about earlier. Life for them it would seem had changed, and they made the most of it.