Saddest date for a birthday

William Parsons, who turns 97 on Anzac Day, in his Turangi home. Picture / Amos Chapple

Almost a century of memories play in Bill Parsons' blue eyes.

He nods his head, adjusts his hearing aids and settles himself on the couch beside me, agreeing that "the world has changed a lot in my lifetime".

Bill turns 97 on Monday, the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.

His birthday is forever tinged by the memory of thousands of New Zealand soldiers who died there.

Bred from hard-working settler stock who farmed dairy herds in Taranaki, Bill remembers the men returning from World War I.

"I don't think it's a day to celebrate a hell of a lot," he shakes his head. "It's a memory." A memory he has filed with events such as the 1931 Napier earthquake, the Great Depression and the election of the first Labour Government.

His experience of war is vivid. He has lived 60 years since the end of World War II and fathered four sons, but still looks to the floor as he talks about the battlefields of El Alamein and Monte Cassino.

For years, fathers and grandfathers who fought have secreted their memories, seldom speaking of the battles, but Bill has shared his often with son Fred.

"It's important so people understand," he says. "I don't consider we won much from the war, apart from putting down a tyrant who was going to make a different world."

He rubs his gnarled hands together over the stump where his right thumb used to be and changes the subject. "Engineering accident," he laughs.

He worked for the Public Works Department before and after the war. In 1955 he was working in Whakamaru when his thumb caught in the tipping tray of a truck. It was 3.30am when the doctor in Mangakino, unable to save it, finished cutting it off.

Before the war, from 1926 to 1929, Bill slugged it out working to build the rail line from Taranaki to Auckland. He helped to build the railway tunnel at Tawa Flats in Wellington, and was underground in Wellington when the Napier earthquake struck.

His stories jump from one historical event to another - "during the Depression years I worked down south searching for gold."

He pats my shoulder and laughs, saying they were paid 15 shillings a week. The Government took a 10 per cent cut of anything they found.

Things improved when the first Labour Government, under Michael Savage, came to power and introduced the welfare state, he says, before he is interrupted by home help who bring lunch to his Turangi home every day.

He launches into a tale about driving to Gisborne to take his wife Sara's headstone to the masons. The Maori woman, his "firm friend" for 57 years, died in March last year. He misses the woman he met one day fly-fishing after the war when her dog got tangled in his line.

He remembers the simple things - the births of his four sons Fred, Robert, William and Grant and the day Fred called him and told him he had married a Japanese woman.

He was working at Waikaremoana when war broke out in 1939. On June 26, 1941, Bill sailed for the Middle East on the RMS Aquitania with the Railway Construction Engineers.

He built railway lines throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

"The Germans bombed us again and again - a few men lost their lives. But this was nothing compared to El Alamein or Cassino.

He survived an explosives accident in which he lost - as he puts it - "half his face", broke his arm, broke his collarbone and his ribs.

In Florence he was saved by a pile of dirty washing he needed to do when three of his friends went to look through an abandoned house which had been booby-trapped with mines. They were blown up.

He has drunk tea and smoked with German prisoners of war, and he has witnessed the hatred in which he says the Germans were trained.

A purple scar on his lip remains 60 years after he was shot by a German soldier. The bullet hit his own rifle, which propelled into his face before another German soldier threw a grenade, peppering his right arm and leg with shrapnel.

"You can forgive, you cannot forget, that's my style," says Bill.

He was invited back to Cassino with the New Zealand war veteran group last year but refused to go.

"I have a memory of so many chaps that I knew, and that memory survives today. I saw chaps lying there dead, friends of mine."

On Monday he will rise at 5.30am for the dawn parade, put on his jacket and pin his medals alongside a poppy. It will be his birthday, but also his day to remember good friends who did not come home.