Mary Kisler’s memoir about her troubled father Jack opens in the most disturbing way. She goes back in time to one of many typically tense nights when she was a girl sharing her bedroom with her younger brother Mike. “The house is silent,” she writes. Sleep was possible.
On other nights, though, “ugly sounds” came through the walls and plunged the children into the depths of distress that can last a lifetime.
Kisler’s parents Jack and Ewie Arnott, who married in September 1945 just after his return from service in World War II, were unhappy. Sometimes, her mother would run down the hall and leap into Mary’s bed as Jack stood in the doorway “roaring”. Occasionally, the rows turned violent and Ewie and her three kids fled through the window. No one linked Jack’s aggression to his trauma as a long-term prisoner during the war.
Kisler, a highly regarded senior curator of international art for many years at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, retired in 2016. She is now curator emerita at the gallery and a heritage research associate at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, one of her many sources of information for The Dark Dad.
As with her earlier books related to her profession, Kisler’s research here is meticulous and took years to complete. The resulting memoir is raw and deeply personal.
Jack, who was born in Dunedin in 1914, endured two central tragedies in his life. The first was his violent upbringing – he was relentlessly thrashed by Bill, the man he believed was his father. Jack left home as soon as he turned 15, finding freedom as a labourer building roads in Central Otago and training as a boxer (watch out, Bill).
When war broke out, he enlisted in early 1940 at the age of 25, thinking, like so many, that it would be a quick adventure doing “something that mattered [which] would earn him society’s approval”. In an act of malice, an uncle told him about his real parentage on the day he sailed off to war in August of that year.
As a soldier in the 7th Anti-Tank Regiment, which was part of the New Zealand Artillery, Jack’s real training started in Egypt at Maadi Camp, south of Cairo, where they joined up with the Second NZ Expeditionary Force, led by the larger-than-life Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg.
Grainy photos from this period, which Kisler found after Jack’s death, indicate a man coming into his prime, forging friendships and, for the first time, enjoying “a sense of belonging”, as well as a few R’n’R adventures that made Kisler’s eyebrows “shoot up”.
Life in the army started to get real when Mussolini’s forces attempted to take Greece in October 1940, which was then invaded by Germany a few months later, drawing in Allied forces to support the Greeks, including New Zealand. It was here that Jack’s brigade came under sustained heavy fire for the first time, and they were the losers. The Allies were ordered to flee, Greece surrendered in April 1941, and Jack escaped to Crete before being directed back to Egypt.
Jack’s anti-tank unit was regarded as efficient, a quality much needed for the next push, Operation Crusader, “a muddled battle plan” in November 1941 to fight Rommel’s Axis forces in Libya. Significantly, Freyberg opposed it.
Kisler’s description of the ensuing Battle of Sidi Rezegh, which lasted a fortnight, is of scenes of utter chaos. On November 30, Jack was wounded, captured by the Germans and handed over to the Italians, with many compatriots. His second great tragedy had begun.
Jack suffered a terrifying three and a half years as a prisoner of war. He and thousands of others were marched, shipped and railroaded from northern Africa to a series of increasingly brutal camps in Italy. The further north they moved, the scarcer food became. From November of 1943, he spent the latter stages of his incarceration with thousands of other men in massive complexes in Germany in the drawn-out end days of the war.
His last camp, Stalag XI-B in northwestern Germany, was run by the SS. Prisoners starved on a diet of swede and potato peelings left over from the guards’ lunch. The camp was finally liberated on April 16, 1945, when the gates were thrown open by American troops and the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars. The men who had survived were skin and bone. A BBC reporter noted a distinct stench of rot in the air.
The last part of Kisler’s book deals with Jack’s recuperation in England and return to New Zealand, where he married Ewie Gray (christened Margaret Ethelwyn Gray), a woman he’d briefly met before the war.
But, as Kisler writes, “The man who emerged at liberation was a very different being.” With their new life as a couple in Dunedin, Jack was plagued by nightmares and walked the streets after dark.
They moved to Auckland where Ewie’s parents lived and Mary was born in 1947. Jack, who became a quarry man, drank and fought at the pub, hurled plates at home, shouted at his family.
It’s a relief to read that Jack and Ewie eventually settled into an easier relationship and that, after a real crisis, Jack sat down with Mary and talked about his childhood and the war. “There is no doubt that Dad loved us,” she writes.
Jack died in 1987, Ewie eight years later. The ending of Kisler’s tale evokes such a deep sense of sorrow that I went off and had a little cry.
The Dark Dad: War and Trauma – A Daughter’s Tale, by Mary Kisler (Massey University Press, $37), is out now.
