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Chapter Nineteen
Rugby, Racing and Resting

It is a sign of grace in a combatant soldier if he seizes every opportunity possible to relax—in order, of course that he may be the fitter for the fight. To the average sapper this comes as no hardship. Trained under New Zealand's free, compulsory and secular system of education the three R's are well known to him. Resting is only one of them; he is equally familiar with rugby and racing, and all three together are the effective means of keeping him sane under garrison and jungle duties.

From the earliest days of Fiji the rugby game was kept up with enthusiasm. The hardness of the Albert Park grounds; the prospects of over-sweating; the difficulties attendant upon obtaining adequate gear, especially football boots; all these were nothing if a game were at all possible. Engineer teams, noteworthy for the toughness of their forwards, gave a good account of themselves, particularly in pre-Jap days. The long hours of perspiring digging failed to keep the rugger men, at least, from their Saturday game and, if at all possible, a mid-week game too, against other divisional' units or the Fijian Defence Force. It was not remarkable therefore that in more temperate New Caledonia the component parts of a divisional engineers' team gradually emerged. Both 20th and 23rd players having acquitted themselves with credit in the respective area competitions, it was a husky band which gathered at Nemeara to gallop over the lumpy paddocks in match training for the Barrowclough Cup, New Caledonia's Ranfurly Shield. Intervals for the cutting of niaouli and liquid refreshment were taken philosophically. No better description of pacific pioneers at play can be found than Kiwi's description of page 114the 'sudden-death' game against the ASC, won by the latter 6-0. In it occurs this pregnant phrase, 'the back lines showed enterprise in attack and ruggedness in defence' us, to a T. The later game in which the divisional engineer team played divisional headquarters as curtain raiser to the Barrowclough Cup final was an even better showing. The CRE had come across handsomely with presentation medals and the representative sappers quite outplayed the General's Own on the Moindah ground, winning the game by eleven points to five.

Then in May, 1943, while right on the top of our form, we starred in the Div. sports. Here as once long before in Suva there were no barefooted Fijians to show us up. A representative team with Dr. Gordon as shotputter and Ernie Hohneck as the tug-of-war anchor failed to win the sports but made up for it by giving some one the idea of a race meeting not with men but with the geegees. So it came about that racing became the morale booster of the Div. for several weeks. The Northern Racing Club and others put in many hours of good work erecting buildings and preparing courses. The local riders produced their hacks and sapper genius found the pedigree of 'Box Girder' and other sorry nags in the latest army stud book. Enthusiasm was not confined to soldiers. The French friends to whom we owed many a good French chicken and happy Sunday afternoon on vin rouge were brought along in lorry droves and jeep loads. The excitement provided by the big race day was to them but a small repayment for the break that their homes afforded us from camp life monotony. It was a reward, too, for the younger lads whose keen interest in soccer and baseball was at times embarrassing to their soldier teachers. Considering the minimum amount of secondary school French possessed by the majority of sappers it was interesting to find how well we managed to enjoy ourselves with monosyllables and the folies de jeunes filles: Kanaka tribesmen appeared at the races with the huge delight of children. They hung on the engineer-erected railings or draped the foreground, and the view, with their picturesque colours. Unhappily their zest for horse racing, whipped up by the successful first Taom meeting, led to the ire of the French authorities. No time could be spared for the Kanaka training of the champion Necal hack. In itself the turnover from the reed-thatched totalisator, 31,700 dollars, would have sufficed to stimulate interest in the royal sport. page 115The co-operation of allied officers, loaded with lucre, who landed by plane on the ground, was an added incentive, if that were needed, to carry on with the good work in other parts. If there were no horses available there remained those in New Zealand whose performances could be inaccurately calculated with the help of doubles charts. Even wooden horses on Vella, Mono and Nissan were capable of contributing upwards of 500 dollar turnovers to one Nibblers' Club alone.

For both highbrow and lowbrow there were occasional other entertainments—soccer, boxing and swimming, cricket, athletics and yachting, as well as varied forms of mental fag. In all these sports, however, as with rugby, the organised competitions between units, were in many cases held up by jobs which had to be urgently finished. Even the keenest of sportsmen, at such times, found siesta sackdrill a serious counter attraction. A swim in the shady depths of Nasinu's experimental farm pools or in the salty, barbed wire waters of Suva Point and Sawene Beach was a glad respite in Fiji. In Necal, rather to our surprise, sterner progress in swimming was enforced and, fir-shaded in many a babbling brook, water polo teams reappeared and brigade sports were swum off in pools improved by engineers and adorned with our valued timber as diving boards or access bridges. Cricketers, used to lounging under outfield palms in Fiji, had now perforce to make their own pitches. The 37th Field Park, after long experimenting, triumphantly found a cowdung plus clay composition (proportions are a secret), spread this with a trowel between wooden edging, and then rolled it into a billiard ball surface. They then improved their outfield with a planer improvised from rails and RSJs. Bourail Beach, with its visions of Waacs, and the fine curly combers breaking on the sands was, on Sundays, the happy venue for the easy-livers of the 23rd. The men of sterner metal scaled the 3,000 odd feet of red and blue splotched Homedeboa or Koniambo peaks, though chrome and nickel mines paled into insignificance when the gold of Guadalcanal valleys could be prospected for. The heather purple heights of Suva's Korombamba— 1,200 feet—the cannibal altars of Mbau Island and the swallows-nest caves of Kalambo, were a worthy Fijian training for such hikes as these. Through the niaouli glades of Les Trois Frtres, the deerhunters pursued the graceful Sumatra deer, while entomologists waved their fairy wands over the golden monarchs, page 116fluttering in hundreds above their favourite trees. In consequence, nattily constructed boxes with cellophane coverings for the safe passage home of the butterflies, were, though illegal, the burden of many a boardee.

Still other adventurers in those days sought fish in the salt water mosquito marshes off the Caledonian coast. Lacking the Kanaka's wood-bespectacled skill at spearing, they had little success, but they learned to admire the superb aerobatics of the little swifts in cropping moustiques. The weary sought organised tours by lorry to such delightful spots as Pam, home of the ultimate mosquito, Tiebaghi mine, the largest and richest chrome mine in the world, Pagoumene or Houailou to see the sea, or even for a whole week to the transit camps in the capital. The capital, regrettably, had fallen into a complete inertia from which even a beer garden in its middle failed to awaken it. Souvenir hunters had to be content with palming off polished pennies on the more gullible of the allied forces. There were even fewer souvenirs to be had in Noumea than had been the case in Suva after the New Zealanders had finished their buying. Tn spite of dubious possibilities debated by the People's Vice, organ of Divisional Engineers Headquarters, it appears that week-end leave was not entirely unknown among the companies. We never again repeated, however, the carefree Fijian week-ends of taxi-ing around Viti Levu's 320 mile coastal road, or slipping across to Levuka, the Empire's most easterly township, to see how the colour problem may be swallowed up in a cosmopolitan cricket club.

Then, far away, beyond the seas and mountains which separated us from the pen friends of Kone, and where there was no Voh or Temala to gather fruit from, we turned our hands to woodwork and metalwork. These recreations had first come into their own with the gouging of gaiac wood into many a fine shape, but it became a passion when mahogany grew at the back door and when broken planes were to be had for the picking up. With the help, therefore, of both natural and artificial shells, and hacksaws officially and unofficially borrowed, the Mono engineers triumphantly won the 8th Brigade arts and crafts competition and the Vella engineers judged the 14th Brigade arts and crafts competition a tremendous success. The 44-gallon 'double bass 'of the 'Rhythm Rascals' symphony orchestra, 20th Field variety, was unfortunately not exhibited.

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With no cleared ground for more than a game of tenni quoit or of basketball we managed to lose some more perspiration oh both. The Yanks from the army units stationed nearby came to visit us and showed us how to play basketball their way. The memories of baseball, first attempted in Fiji, were revived. At Biloa boxing nights the engineers were represented both by pugilists and vocalists. Vocally, at least, we won the tourney against the Americans. We enjoyed the facilities supplied by our carpenters for swimming and diving. We failed to show the Americans how, in this case, but as far as the Third Division was concerned we walked off with the Joroveto aquatic tourney with 38 points to the runner-up's 23. The coral beds off the coast lent themselves to shell hunters and swimmers who, minus their jungle boots, courted septic cuts. Sea-masked sappers swam after the coral fish between rainbow coloured bunkers. Lobster pots of liana were dropped by optimistic professors on the edges of the shelf. Early difficulties about shocking the Jap aviators by swimming in the nude disappeared with the disappearance of Jap aviators. We were then free also to paddle the native canoes a little further out into the straits and admire their speedy cut even when propelled only by coconut leaf fronds. On Mono, and to a lesser extent on Nissan, canoeing gave place to the more exciting sport of yachting. Such early attempts at yacht building as Sapper of Lauthala Bay, Suva, were supplemented by fresh attempts and the Treasury Yacht Club was the final full-blown fruit. Dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores these engineer creations would have left the quinquireme of Nineveh tide-bound on a coral shelf.

In other spare time at Christmas, 1943, we staged a tug-of-war and pulled the provosts, almost, off their beetle-crushers. We collected pigeons with practised shots, and murdered little bats in their underground caves 'for examination purposes only.' Our inventive genius produced a series of washing machines which made it no longer necessary to get sharp little shell-fish in the feet while standing at the coral spring or to draw water laboriously from a rather smelly sulphurous well. We had, of course, in the far north no kindly French madame to wash for us, for a consideration; no beaming Charlie to cart our laundry through the hut calling out numbers in oriental sing-song; and no hot point to pop into a benzine tin full of clothes and so save lighting up the copper.

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Highbrow standards were maintained by chess clubs, personnel largely from sappers, and also by the quiz contest men who held their own with the best on many an intellectual night in the recreation tents. We contrived, when necessary, to make our fun, like we made our 'plonk.' We were never really at a loss for something to do since ceiling inspection through a mosquito net was an ever present resource. Resting, we have no occasion to doubt, is the summum bomim of the engineer's life and wasn't it Shakespeare who quoted sleep as 'chief nourisher in life's feast'?