The re-enactment of a World War II dogfight above Auckland. Peter Best recalls a teacher telling students how she watched dogfights over British skies. Photo / Natalie Slade
The re-enactment of a World War II dogfight above Auckland. Peter Best recalls a teacher telling students how she watched dogfights over British skies. Photo / Natalie Slade
“We haven’t learned a thing from history,” says Peter Best. But he believes we need to.
The Eketāhuna resident was 3 and living in England when World War II began.
“It was a horrendous war,” he says.
Although he has no memories of the Blitz, when the skies over Britainwere filled with German aircraft for months, his teacher would tell the children stories of sitting in the garden watching the dogfights.
He grew up in the village of Sheet, near Petersfield in Hampshire.
Peter Best (in the coat) with his parents, brother David and sister Janet. Another sister was born after the war.
While he recalls the excitement, he remembers his mother making him get under a table with his brother David and sister Janet, after an air-raid siren went off. They would look out from under and see her.
“Her face would be white with fear.”
These days, he will sometimes hear the fire siren go off and it will spark a memory of those days.
The children would see a boy on a bicycle riding in the village carrying telegrams and they knew a family had lost someone.
The village was not so isolated that they were untouched by the war — many children lost their fathers.
Men in trucks would occasionally come by and grab anything that was metal, all which presumably would be melted down — fences and gates and even toys were taken.
Peter had a tricycle he says was his favourite toy, even though the front wheel was broken, and he was upset when the men threw that in the back of their truck.
He was 7 on June 6, 1944, the day the allied forces invaded Normandy — known as D-Day.
Even in the village, they witnessed the build-up to the planned invasion.
Troops from the United States and Canada would camp in the village, playing with the local children and giving them treats.
Peter recalls his brother told him a story of encountering a Canadian soldier in a Jeep when a convoy stopped near the house.
An ambulance drove by going the opposite direction and the soldier said: “I’ll be lucky if I make it back in one of those.”
As a young teenager, Peter would join as a cadet in secondary school — a reaction, he believes, to the idea that Britain wasn’t prepared to go to war in 1939.
“Britain was never going to be unprepared again.”
He would later use that same training when he moved to New Zealand, for compulsory military training.
