CHRONOLOGICAL TIMELINE - TU

Father returns from WWI (around 1918)

After seven years Father ‘freed us all’

PITA’S STORY

(c. 1925)

The family move to Wellington

Uncle in parliament help the family

Rangi and Pita go to work at the Meat Works

The girls stay home with Ma

Ma only gets half the Widow’s Pension of a Paheka woman.

Ma joins the Ngati Poneke Club ‘a home away from home…’

Pita meets Jess (the girls from the cakes shop/dream girl)

Tu goes to boarding school

Pita is injured, so gets a job at the railways station as a sweeper

Uncle tells him he will need to work twice has hard as the white man for the same money.

1940 The Centennial Celebrations (Treaty of Waitangi) – Pita feels like, ‘ a showpiece and a clown act.’

The Ngati Poneke Club perform

Pita leaves the railway and gets a job in the Ford factory

Rangi join the Maori Battalion and goes to war

The girls including Jess are manpowered into the war effort

Pita decides that he should go ‘to help end… and the mess of himself and what it did to dreams.’

Pita tells Jess he can’t see her any more

Pita asks Ani Rose to marry him after the war, but she puts pressure on and they are married before he leaves.

Pita goes to war.

TU’S STORY

1943

Tu ‘runs out of the iron gates and off to war.’

Maadi Camp (Italy) Tu meets up with Pita and Rangi

Tu is told Pita’s story. ‘It’s none of my business. I’m not his confessor.’

First sighting of Monte Cassino and homesickness. “For now I live under other men’s mountains..’

The bombing of Cassino

Tu and Battalion to find way to Rome. Get laid up in a gutted hotel. Tu becomes scout and after killing, cover himself in the blood of his victim to avoid capture. ‘Now we are pale ghosts of men.’

Tu is seriously injured while running towards a voice calling his name.

Rangi finds Tu among the ruins of Cassino and tells him Pita is dead. (Hun boy)

Rangi tells Tu ‘the story of Rangi and Jess.’

Rangi is found dead, along with Johnny, on the road to Riminia.

While waiting to face the tigers Tu tells his own love story.

A year later Tu is in a convalescent home in Senegellia (on coast of Italy) and works out what had happened to him. He decides he cannot forgive his brothers.

1945 (16 August) war ends – 1 year 8 months after Tu left Wellington.

January 1946

Tu arrives back in Wellington

Tu returns, with Anzac, for 2months to his ‘everlasting mountain.’

1963 (19 years after his return from war)

Tu writes to Rimini and Benedict as he hands over his war diaries.

Tu writes again to Rimini and Benedict, telling them about himself and he pleads with them not to follow in their father’s footsteps.