SATURDAY, 2 JANUARY I didn’t get up until nine o’clock yesterday. Dad had already left for camp. I felt tired all day. Barry and Clarry and I sat around on their back steps, yawning at one another. Clarry’s mother called him to come and lie down while she put some wet cloths on his legs like that Australian nurse was talking about. Twenty minutes later, she came out to where Barry and I were. ‘He’s asleep.’ Today Clarry said, ‘Let’s go out to the cemetery, eh?’ So we headed off, along Western Lake Road. Grandma and Grandad MacKenzie are buried there. They both died when I was little; I can just remember them. Dad reckons they were worn out by the Depression years in the 1930s, when there was hardly any work, and people were really poor. Mum’s parents are buried in Palmerston North. There were quite a few people at the cemetery, tidying graves and putting fresh flowers on them. Over by the soldiers’ graves from the Great War and this war, an old bloke with grey hair had his arm around a lady, and I think she was crying.
