She wrote of her experience as a New Zealand woman in this predominately male environment, saying that the English girls got a lot more compliments than colonials did.
“The mere fact of my being a New Zealand girl” she wrote, “was enough for them to take me into their clan, so to speak. They treat a New Zealand girl quite differently. It’s very funny. They will lie down and die for you, if necessary, but you are expected to be very understanding, and put up with no end of teasing; and not to expect any pretty compliments, because you won’t get them. You are a bit of a pal, while an English girl is a girl to be flirted with! “
Her diary entries open a window on her life and experience. Her fiancé was killed in the war and then another boyfriend who planned to marry her also perished.
When her older brother George died near Ypres on his 21st birthday, she recorded these lines:
“14th December 1917. Somehow I felt afraid last night and put it down to the dread of bad news. I went to work…. I went down and a wire was handed to me. Oh it was awful. Just full of official wording that George had died of wounds in France. The formal words lessened the blow a little. I felt staggered. Yet, how I have dreaded this.”
Her younger brother Brian was killed in action in 1918.
“I have come to the conclusion,” she wrote, “that love is the most upsetting thing of all in this world, so I’m leaving it alone.”
After the War
Over the course of her service, Deborah faced the horrors of war – blown-off arms and legs, disfigurement and the agony of soldiers slowly dying from the effects of mustard gas.
As her diaries reflect, she handled it all with grace, courage and compassion.
Returning to New Zealand after the war, Deborah married returned soldier Seymour Spencer. Wounded at Gallipoli and gassed in France, Seymour suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Deborah received an MBE in 1920. She drove heavy English cars for the rest of her life, never accepting the luxury of power steering.
After a long life in Auckland as a mother and grandmother, Deborah died on Anzac Day, 1979.
Listen now to this interview of Deborah’s granddaughter from Radio New Zealand’s Spectrum.
