Ned and Katina - Patricia Grace

Ned and Katina - Patricia Grace (2009)

Television in New Zealand, has graced us with such wonderful modern Christmas classics as Deuce Bigilow - Male Gigolo, and Big Daddy. I am sure they have 12 year old boys running the stations, how pathetic.

So I have turned to dvds and books to pass the evenings. Ned and Katina got a good write up in the local paper some weeks back, so I was pleased to see it had turned up in my reserve pile at the library. Patricia Grace is a well known Kiwi writer who was approached by the Nathan family to tell the story of their parents.

Ned was a young Maori man who in the second world war, went to fight in the Maori Battalion. Sent to Crete, after the British and Kiwis withdraw he is left with others to fend for themselves in the hills surrounding remote villages. Provided with supplies and food, they put the locals at risk, but are welcomed and protected for as long as they can. Katina is a young schoolteacher, whose family become friendly with the young kiwi, and a friendship is formed.

After betrayal to the Germans, Ned and a mate are sent on to Prisoner of War Camps, where he keeps sending letters to Katina. Unsure of her feelings, as he receives no replies, after the war he fights for the right to get married and returns to Crete.

Katina then comes with him to New Zealand, first living in Northland before coming south to Wellington and then back North for retirement. They travels several times back to Crete, to meet up with family and to represent New Zealand at commemorations and services to honour the dead.

Many of the stories within this books are ones that we would find unbelievable in a novel. And as so many of these old folk die, I wonder what stories die with them. One is where Ned and other dignitaries attend a meeting where they meet a woman who with her husband in the warm, rescued many hundreds of kiwi and Australian soldiers, and sailed them to safety in their boat from the Crete coast. Discovered by the Germans, they were then put into a concentrations camp and then came home to live in poverty, until the RSA intervened to provide them with a reward and a pension to live on.

So a 3/5 for this story that the family must be proud to have on their shelves.