I first had contact with Reg Fulton toward the end of the Second World War. He was Mr Fulton to me then. I was just a kid. My father would send me down to the township every Saturday evening to get him a copy of the 8 O’clock Edition of the Auckland Star. It was the sports edition and had a full coverage of the day’s results. It soon came to be that I also fetched a copy for Mr Fulton who lived just around the corner and was an invalid in some vague way. I didn’t mind. He always gave me thrupence to spend. My father gave me nothing.
Apparently, Mr Fulton had forgiven me or perhaps he was able to push from his memory our first encounter some months earlier. I had been going around in our area selling raffle tickets ‘for the Patriotic.’ Someone had wished several books of tickets onto my mother and she, being shy and somewhat less than patriotic, had off-loaded the selling of them onto me. Mr Fulton had bought no tickets but had used the occasion to vent his anger on me. His gripe was that the government had completely forgotten the soldiers of the previous war. They should have been looking after them first, that was their responsibility, that was what they had promised. “Instead they coddle the present blokes who’ve got a cushy war anyway. Every-bloody-thing laid on for them. Forget the bloody Patriotic!” He became very red in the face. In some unexplained way it was all my fault. I was only eleven but I was being appointed a government representitive and its failures were being heaped on my shoulders.
When he wanted something done for him though, I was expected to forget this. Apparently he had. He asked if I would mow his lawn. It was paspalam, a big lawn, and the mower was a push mower as most were at that time. It was hard work. Much to hard for Mr Fulton to be expected to do. It was not just his war wounds. He had a bad ticker as well. Push himself and he could pop off just like that. His three daughters, all a lot older than I was, had always done the mowing but the last had just married and left home. He paid me a shilling which pleased me even though the
THE MALINGERER Page 2 thrupence for getting the 8 O’clock was included in that shilling.
The main reason why I was pleased to work for him was that he was a real live war hero. My personal war hero. He’d been in the Great War and been wounded at Gallipoli. He always made me a cup of tea when I’d finished the mowing, I drank tea at home. His wife was never there. Since his War Pension was totally inadequate, she had to work to keep them solvent. Fortunately work was readily available for women at that time with the war being on. They had apparently had a very hard time in the depression when there was no work for her. Actually, he wasn’t at home all that much himself. I’d have to catch him home to do the mowing.
As I got to know him better, I began to press him to tell me what it had been like in that First War. We knew all about Gallipoli from school but what had it been like to be actually there? I couldn’t have asked for a better guide. He had an ability with words and could paint a scene in its exactness. I could see that he appreciated having an audience too.
I became, in effect, part of the 3rd Auckland Company under Major Dawson: could hear and feel the roar of our naval guns, 15 inchers some of them, giving Johnny Turk what he deserved, and the answering Turkish fire from their emplacements on Cape Hellas. We climb down the side of the Lutzow together into the waiting lighter one of a string that is to be pulled inshore by a steam picket boat.. We have been loaded up like mules, rifle of course, trenching tool, three days rations, 200 extra rounds, and that is only a part of it. The sea is, thankfully, like glass. We are crammed in shoulder to shoulder, sit rifle between knees, and most of us are using the momentary inactivity to enjoy a cigarette. We may be busy soon although the rumour is that we will see no fighting today. Bridges’ Australian Division is already ashore and, by all accounts, having immediate success. We are surprisingly calm, just eager to get on shore, eager for the great adventure to begin. We still think it’s going to be a picnic. We are soon going to learn differently.
I was vicariously at his side right through the Gallipoli Campaign, experienced the lice, the flies, and the stench. I also came to share his anger at the bungling British Navy who landed us below
THE MALINGERER Page 3 rugged country several kilometres north of our correct landing place., the open and cultivated Maidos Plains which would have given us a clear run through to the Straits of the Dardanelles. Right from the start that more or less killed our chances of ever taking the peninsular. So much for the British Navy’s lauded efficiency. I was to hear this from him again and again. He had lost some good mates at Gallipoli.
He was angry at Major-General Godley foisted on us by the British Government. The wonder organiser of peacetime was, he said, an absolute disaster on the battlefield, wasted men wholesale. He was dismissive of every other Imperial Officer as well but his greatest anger he reserved for Churchill who had dreamed up the whole fiasco. He was scathing of the idea that Australia and New Zealand had come of age at Gallipoli: that this stupid mess had been epic and holy. “But isn’t that the British way?” he would say. The Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava was a case in point. It was ill conceived and the orders given were misunderstood so that the Brigade charged the wrong enemy and received about forty per cent casualties. Yet it became an heroic triumph helped along, of course, by that poem by Tennyson. He was insistant that the officers involved should have been shot. “Maybe they should have shot that bloody Tennyson while they were at it.” There was the more recent debacle of Dunkirk where an ignominious retreat with the total loss of badly needed equipment was hailed as a great moral victory. He would also go on at length about that ‘bastard’, Churchill, in the then present war had admitted himself quite prepared to abandon Australia and New Zealand if the need arose.
A year or so after the peace came, my family moved down to the Waikato. I finished primary school and high school and was appreticed for five years. I was some years out of my time when I moved back to Auckland and boarded with my widowed aunt who lived several houses down from where we used to live. By then it would be the early sixties. Reg and his wife, Daisy, were still there although they had moved into their recently-built house six doors down from my aunt.
THE MALINGERER Page 4
I would often meet Reg on the street dressed in Whites with a bowls’ bag. He would be on his way to catch the bus at the corner and we would say ‘hello’. It was normal then to give a polite salutation to everyone you met whether you knew them or not and Reg no longer seemed to know me. Or at least, he didn’t acknowledge that he knew me.
I was impressed at how kindly the years had dealt with him. If he wasn’t seventy, he was running it close. Sprightly is the word that immediately comes to mind to describe him. He had a real spring in his step. He seemed to glow with health which just couldn’t be right. He’d been wounded rather badly at Gallipoli.
I commented on this to my aunt and she laughed. My aunt was a close and long-time friend of Daisy Fulton: had been a bride’s maid when Reg and Daisy married in 1921. “He never was at Gallipoli: never was wounded. He was in the group that was left behind in Egypt and was invalided home from there with a heart murmur.” “But he had a picture taken of him on Lemnos when they were moved out of Gallipoli to be reformed and work up replacements,” I protested. And again she laughed. “Was he all kitted out on a horse, with bell tents in the background, and was it captioned ‘Wild West’?” I had to agree that that was the photo. “He still has it,” she said. “He’s very proud of it. It was taken in New Zealand when he was one of Massey’s Cossacks.” I must have looked blank for she explained. “They were a supposedly voluntary and patriotic force, farmers saving their beloved country from the evil unions, but in reality they were organised Territorials. They were used to break the 1913 Wharf Strike. In effect a chance for war games, officially sanctioned violence.”
And suddenly a few things became clear. Reg had never given me the one-man’s view of the battle which is all that the soldier in the thick of the fighting can give and usually that with some difficulty. Just staying alive was uppermost in his mind. Reg had seemed to know in detail what was
THE MALINGERER Page 5 going on throughout the entire theatre. It was the view of the battle that a general had once had from a hilltop commanding the battlefield. It was an historian’s view. Facts garnered to be collated some time later. Reg had read himself ashore at Gallipoli. His first-hand colour would be the borrowed reminiscences of R.S.A. cronies.
He had never helped defend Quinn’s Post, never been to Second Ridge or Shrapnel Gully, never taken part in attempts on Chunuk Bair. He had never been on Lemnos even though he was able to describe the green end of the island in some detail. My hero was no hero. He was froth.
“But just a heart murmur?” I pursued, puzzled. I knew that malingering had been as rife in that war as in the second and that the medical authorities had been under a great deal of pressure to declare men fit. Many men had been sent back into the line who should not have been. Genuine cases of shell-shock had been shot as deserters. To be convincing enough to slip through the net, one must need a special kind of cunning. To continue to fool the doctors for forty years and remain eligible to draw a war pension was amazing. Now , having got past sixty, he was home free.
I wondered how he could have done it but that was something that my aunt could not tell me. It appeared that whenever a medical check had been due, he had always managed to have a relapse and fail the tests. In between times, he had been fit enough to play bowls. In fact, he had been able to devote his life to bowls.
It seemed though that he couldn’t do anything else. Not with his dickey heart. From the early days it had been that he had to be careful how much he did around the house, it had come to be in time that it was safer for him to do nothing. He might make himself a cup of tea but only if there was no- one else around to do it for him. Apart from that, Daisy and the girls had done everything. His position had been that of Star-boarder rather than the man of the house. He remained star-boarder with the girls long gone. My aunt told me that it would never occur to Daisy to ask him for help even with such a light task as doing the dishes.
“But surely she can see through him,” I said. “If you and I can see that he’s a complete phony,
THE MALINGERER Page 6 why can’t she? After all, she’s a lot closer to him than we are.” My aunt smiled at my ignorance.
“Women can be totally blind when it comes to a man.” she said. And added, “Which is lucky for men.”