Gunner's exorcism an enduring theatre of war

By JULIE MIDDLETON

Actor Michael Burton performs his one-man play, Gunner Inglorious, tomorrow for the 82nd time.

Sitting in the audience at the Auckland War Memorial Museum will be the man who inspired it with his 1945 book of the same name, war veteran Jim Henderson, 85.

Though he heaps praise upon Burton's work, Mr Henderson, who lives in One Tree Hill, admits he will watch the performance with difficulty.

He tries to dissociate himself, but that's hard when the scariest time of his life is being replayed on stage.

Once again he's a World War II gunner with five comrades, face-to-face with Rommel's army in North Africa. During his first 10 days in action, all his friends are killed around him; he is wounded and left for dead.

The Red Cross rescues him. His left leg can't be saved and it is amputated at the knee.

Squalor and degradation accompany him through 19 months in an Italian military hospital.

In an attempt to halt "evil dreams", Mr Henderson committed his memories to paper after his return home in 1943. The vivid result has sold more than 100,000 copies in New Zealand.

For Mr Henderson, the book did the trick: the lurid visions stopped.

He pushed the war from his mind; he didn't and doesn't talk about it, and after the war forged a successful career as a writer and broadcaster.

He is full of praise for Hawkes Bay-based Burton, 48, who made his book into a play about two years ago.

Burton, who lost two relatives in the war, says performing the play on Anzac Days moves him.

"A lot of the importance for me now is to create a climate where wars can't happen again."

Mr Henderson was a 20-year-old "no damn good" copy boy at the Nelson Evening Mail when he volunteered to go to war.

He should not have been allowed to go - he has been largely blind in his left eye since birth - but just before the Army medical, someone told him the sequence of letters on the eye chart.

Mr Henderson still can't explain why he volunteered, except that comradeship played a large part.

Going "was like being in your footy team or basketball team ... the spirit of all the cobbers together." And, he sighs, "it was a crazy love of Britain. Absurd, really."

* Gunner Inglorious is performed at the museum's Manaia Room at 12.30pm tomorrow. Entry is free.

Encountering the horror

Jim Henderson, the Gunner Inglorious, on:

BEING UNDER HEAVY FIRE:

I raise my head. That's Webbo, three yards away. Shoulders hunched up. Hands clasped, the knuckles white, eight knobs of putty. Lips moving, moving soundlessly. Eyes closed. Praying,

Webbo praying.

Well, that's okay by me. I just can't pray.

POW-WHEE.

Head smartly into the sand again. That one got the shield of the gun.

POW-WHEE again.

Too damn close.

POW-WHEE.

Oh, Sweet, with your dark hair and your lips that echo when I kiss them, oh Sweet, right down away below me through this sand and earth and rock and lava, right down at the other end of the world, in New Zealand.

"Hullo, Sweet," I whisper. ("Webbo" is fatally shot a few minutes later.)

BEING WOUNDED:

I can feel the bullet going through my left foot; I can feel its white-hot track. It seems to take a long time but now it's out on the other side of the foot and the pain ends ...

"I just fall over ... then SMACK. No pain this time. As if someone has hit me a tremendous blow in the thigh.

"I'm conscious all over. I've been hit, and hit hard. A spin and a lurch and a great honey-coloured disc comets towards me and I am falling back, back into frothing darkness all around.

BEING IN A FRONT-LINE GERMAN HOSPITAL:

The clouds of anaesthetic thin a little and I look up. I am still thinking I am in my dream, lashed to the gun.

Bending over me is a German doctor. On the left lapel of his tunic I can see in monstrous size the swastika and eagle badge of Nazi Germany. This sinister symbol seems to fill my entire vision.

"Oh ... German," I say, trying to recoil from him.

The doctor leaned closer to me. One hand went to my left wrist, the other stroked my forehead. "No," said the German in slow soothing words I have never forgotten.

"No, that's all wrong. For you, my friend, the war is over. Remember we're friends now, we're friends."