This photo from my father’s WWII photo album is a bit of surprise because he’s lighting up a cigarette. I never knew my father to smoke, so guess he gave it up after the war and before I was born. I’ve never smoked nor did my mother.
The photographer is the mysterious Gary I mentioned in the last post and looks like Dad didn’t realize he was being photographed. My dad and his father (who died in 1943 in New Zealand) were, I gather, very close. I never knew my paternal grandfather.
My dad was the eldest of three boys, the other two being Peter and David who both lived in NZ. I met my Uncle David a couple of times before he died in October 2006 and he looked quite a bit like Dad. My uncle Peter is still alive and we speak on the phone occasionally but we’ve never been close. I am thinking of visiting him in February though when I go up to Wellington to speak at a conference.
Back to the cigarettes. The caption mentions De Reszke cigarettes that my grandfather sent over to where Dad was stationed. Because this photo appears next to The Chin photo in Dad’s WWII photo album, I am guessing it was taken in 1942 in the Sudan around Christmas time. I wonder how long a care parcel took to ship over to the troops. Must have been six weeks or more.
The other surprising thing is that it’s so very unlike my father to appear in a singlet. I always knew him as an immaculate dresser who was very obsessed with shiny shoes. I well remember two things from my childhood – the 5BX exercises that I did with Dad every morning at 6.00am, rain, hail or shine; and straight after this, the polishing of his shoes and my school shoes with black or brown tinned boot polish.
Actually, I have to laugh about all this. The 5BX exercise programme was developed for the Royal Canadian Air Force in the late 1950s. I don’t know how or why Dad came across this programme if it was developed in the late 1950s because he was living in Australia by then.
Perhaps it was trialled during WWII in Canada where Dad undertook his pilot training at Dunnville, Ontario with No.6 SFTS. I remember that Dad had a booklet full of the exercises, which you can now download for free. Health experts probably consider these exercises outdated but, every morning at 6.00am, my Dad would wake me up and we’d go outside and do the exercises together. I still do them; not religiously at 6.00am but whenever I’m out in the fresh air. Dad was a great believer in fresh air and slept with the windows open, even in winter. I do the same, go figure! And the shoes. To this day, I look at people’s shoes and if they’re not sparkling, I so want to hand them a tin of boot polish 
Like father; like daughter.
