SCREAMING FROM MY FATHERS ARMS

As I was taken from my fathers arms my little body was shaking all over and I sobbed on my mothers skirt as she carried my three month old brother to the waiting car. The car was been driven by a neighbor to take my mother and brother and also my mothers mother, my grand mother to a bus in Wellsford, about an hours drive from the farm in Port Albert. My grandmother was a tough woman and was very stern and I was scared of her. Mrs Gillespie who drove us to the bust told me 50 years latter had she realized what was happening she would never of taken us.
   I met Mrs Gillespie when I went back to New Zealand in 1997 and she was in a nursing home but she remembered me and told me the story and she was very sorry what had happened to myself and my brother. We were never seen again for a few years.
Everyone in the district did not know where we were going.
As a 2 year old I do not remember the bus ride but know we were taken to Gisbourne  a town on the east coast of New Zealand.
My father was left behind suffering from malaria which he got while in the Middle East during world war two in 1942.
 A young Maori man found my father very ill at the farm and took him to the hospital for treatment. 
I remember we moved around allot in the first five years of my life and also lived on a farm in Hastings New Zealand.
My mother had been in the Woman's Land army and she was a very strong woman and liked farming.
So I was used to being put on a horse and taken all over the farm as my mother worked. I sometime wonder if that is when The illness I have started way back then?
There were floods and I can remember having to leave the little old run down shack we lived in and taken to a big wool shed where we slept for a week or so until the floods went down. I still can remember the smell of the wool and still like that smell.


When I was about three years old and my brother nearly two. Leslie fell into the river and started to float down the river.
I ran screaming to my mother who was milking cows across the river. I had to run over a small plank to get to her.
My mother came running and she jumped into the river gumboots and all and it was a miracle my brother was saved.
I have always loved the water but my brother didn't and that is why.