I come from a proud line of soldiers. My father, Archibald McLea MacKenzie, was born in 1917. As early as he could, my father left home and joined the army as a Royal Artillery boy soldier. He enlisted in Stirling Castle where his grandfather had served in the Seaforth Highlanders. He was promoted to warrant officer in December 1939 at just 20 years old and was apparently the youngest warrant officer in the British Army. When he was courting my mother, he was arrested by a policeman on Brighton Esplanade. The bobby had ridden past on his bicycle, then rode back, jumped off his bike and arrested my father for impersonating a warrant officer. He just looked so young! He went to France with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the 115th Regiment, Royal Artillery and was eventually evacuated from Dunkirk.
After returning from Dunkirk, my father trained with the 11th Armoured Division in England before returning to France in early June 1944 with the 75th Anti-tank Regiment, Royal Artillery as a troop commander of 17-pounder Achilles Sherman tank destroyers. He had a successful war, received a commission and was awarded three Mentions in Dispatches (MiD) – two on consecutive days. He did not receive a Military Cross (MC), to his eternal chagrin. His commanding officer (CO) at the time recognised that he deserved an MC but said he was, instead, recommending another officer who was a ‘regular’ and not a wartime commission like my father. The politics of bravery, no less!
My father remained in the army post-war. I was born in 1948 and as a family we moved around on multiple postings including Egypt and Cyprus. Eventually my father began work in the Claims Commission for the Ministry of Defence and for a while we settled down to a more ordinary family life in Bushey Heath, in south-east England. But soon a more exotic calling came along, and we were posted to Singapore where my father worked for Headquarters Far East Land Forces. The war had ended only ten years previously so memories of the brutal conflict in the Far East and actual physical reminders were everywhere. Just across the road from our house, near Pasir Panjang, were trenches where the Malay Regiment had put up a spirited defence against the Japanese in 1942. The men of C Company, 1st Battalion, the Malay Regiment, led by Lieutenant Adnan Bin Saidi, fought bravely to the last. Scores of Japanese soldiers were killed or wounded. But, vastly outnumbered, the Malay Regiment was eventually surrounded and massacred. Lieutenant Adnan Bin Saidi himself was tied in a sack, hung from a tree, and used for bayonet practice.
One day when some friends and I were playing in the old wartime trenches near our house I found a rusty 36 Mills hand grenade. We played with it for a while until someone called the Royal Engineers. Frightened that I would get into trouble, I threw it away. Unsurprisingly it caused a bit of a stink because they couldn’t find it again.
My father was a very successful pugilist both when he was in the ranks and then later as an officer and won a number of trophies. I remember as a teenager challenging him, as boys do – I only ever did that once! He moved so quickly that I never knew where the slaps came from.
It had been an exotic childhood, living in four vastly different countries in just 11 years. But change was soon afoot once again. In 1959 my father decided to retire to New Zealand. He had received a job offer with the New Zealand Insurance Company. He was able, through his military connections, to obtain passage for us on the SS Captain Cook, which was returning to New Zealand with the 2nd New Zealand Regiment after a two-year tour in Malaya. My sister Fiona, then aged 17, was the only eligible young lady on the boat, so was soon chatted up by all the young subalterns, especially one who later became a lieutenant general – they might have become an item had my parents not disapproved because he was Catholic. Others on the boat, such as Brian Monks and Danny Waratini, would feature in my later New Zealand Army life.
As we were leaving Singapore we were anchored beside the fuel bunkers on Pulau Bukum, refuelling, and I recall watching with horrid fascination as huge sharks began eating the debris beside the ship. They would swim up to the food, turn on their backs, a huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth would open, the food would be gobbled up and then they would gracefully roll over to dive down again and swim away. We sailed to New Zealand via Freemantle, Perth, where I watched as late arrivals from the battalion overnight shore leave were trying to climb up the mooring lines as we were preparing to depart.
Finally, on a grey, wet and miserable day in December 1959 we entered Lyttelton Harbour in the South Island of New Zealand. My mother looked in horror at the little wooden houses clustered together on the damp hillside. Remarkably, my future wife Cecilia’s father, who was in the Department of Agriculture, came out with the other officials to greet the boat as it arrived in Lyttelton. It is, indeed, a small world.
We disembarked and went by bus to a reception for the battalion at King Edward Barracks in Christchurch, before re-boarding the ship that night for Wellington. After disembarking we left the tender mercies of the New Zealand Army and spent a couple of nights in a hotel at the top of Willis Street. Even today I clearly remember the all-pervading smell of stale beer in the corridors. Wellington was not the cosmopolitan city then that it is now. Hotels were very basic and, as in the rest of New Zealand at that time, alcohol could not be served after 6pm, leading to the infamous ‘six o’clock swill’. We initially settled in York’s Bay, where I made friends with our neighbours the Atkinsons, a long-standing York Bay family. I had several trips on the beautiful wooden vessel St Michael, built by the inimitable Tudor Atkinson DSC, the family patriarch. I remember being extremely sea-sick coming back from Palliser Bay after one trip, much to the amusement of the nautical Atkinson family.
I attended Wellesley College in nearby Days Bay: a tough, no-nonsense, all-boys school where the leather strap was used freely on the hand. I had a Singapore wicker school basket that my mother insisted I used as my New Zealand school bag. I was very embarrassed to have to carry this on the school bus each day and my new Kiwi school ‘friends’ ridiculed me mercilessly. But with the sea at the end of the road for fishing, swimming and snorkelling, life was still good.
Finally we settled permanently in Wellington itself, and I attended secondary school at the prestigious Wellington College. The school had a grand, capacious assembly hall with a beautiful stained-glass window of St George fighting the dragon. In front of this window, on a raised platform, sat the various teachers, resplendent in their robes and mortar boards. The walls were covered with varnished boards remembering the many College old boys who had died on active service in both world wars.
Our Latin teacher was ‘Inky’ Deighton. Inky always wore his master’s cape and controlled his classes with a rod of iron. He had served in World War I as a sniper and we always tried hard to get him to recount some war stories. Occasionally he would oblige. A great favourite was the one of him and a German sniper locked in a deadly duel. They had been stalking each other for some days trying to identify each other’s shooting positions. With great drama Inky would state, ‘The first one to move died … he moved!’
I did not excel at academics but I was heavily involved in the school cadet corps, and spent several weeks each year at cadet camps in Linton Army Camp during the long summer holidays. I became the school’s senior under-officer. I vividly remember being on the rifle range during cadet camp one year and watching a number of Bren guns being fired together at the targets. I could only imagine the horror of having to attack into automatic fire like that.
I also belonged to the Tararua Tramping Club, which I joined when I was around 14 years old. I used to go to their meetings on a Tuesday evening in their clubrooms near the Basin Reserve and then go on tramps in the Tararuas in the weekends. The Tararua Mountains are north of Wellington and are a great bush-clad area with steep mountains, their tops covered in tarns amongst the tussock and alpine plants. We would set off from Wellington on a Friday night and do a night tramp to a hut and then do a circuit before returning to Wellington on a Sunday afternoon. It was hard work walking up riverbeds in the dark but worth it once you got into the bush proper. The tramping club huts were very basic with chicken-wire bunks and not much else. Some of the ‘long-drops’ though had the most amazing views over the surrounding bush-covered hills. This is where I developed my love for the outdoors and living in the bush.
I was seemingly destined for a career in the armed forces but at the time I actually wanted to be a veterinary surgeon or go into the forestry service. But academics continued to elude me. In 1964 I managed to scrape a pass in my school certificate exam and progressed to the Sixth Form to study for the University Entrance (UE) exam. I had done well in school cadets and in 1965 I attended the regular officer selection board in Waiouru. I passed the board and was accepted for the Officer Cadet School in Portsea, Australia, on the condition I passed my UE.
The UE was normally accredited based on the full year’s class work and exams. One Friday some friends and I ‘wagged’ school to camp outside Athletic Park to get tickets to watch the All Blacks play France the next day. Unfortunately, we were seen on television by the school headmaster who immediately refused to credit us with any coursework, so that we would have to rely solely on passing the end-of-year exams. I sat a few of the exams but my marks were appallingly low and I had no chance of passing. Eventually I changed my core subjects, replacing Latin, chemistry and maths with geography, biology and bookkeeping. I passed the following year. A military future now beckoned.