Local resident in new book

By Frank Neill

Khandallah resident Noeline Ritson features in the new book “Stories of Service – Wartime memories of Ryman residents”.

The book is Ryman Healthcare’s seventh annual Anzac Day book.

Noeline, who is 105, is a resident of the Malvina Major Retirement Village in Burma Road.

When she was 23 she heard the army was looking for women to work in the Middle East and decided she would like to go.

She showed the application to her parents.

“My mother started to cry and my father was grumpy so I thought ‘this is no good – I’ll tear it up and not go’,” Noeline says.

“Six weeks later the New Zealand Air Force wanted recruits and I thought ‘I’ll do my bit’. Being in New Zealand, that was okay.”

Noeline went to Whenuapai, where she worked as a medic.

“The matron said: ‘I don’t think you’ll stand up to it my girl’. I said: ‘I think I will’.”

Noeline proved the matron wrong and stayed in the Air Force until the end of the war in 1945.

At Whenuapai they worked in a small hospital in a nearby house and the hospital staff were billeted in local homes.

They had to treat pilots for serious injuries following many Tiger Moth accidents, as well as treating diseases and illnesses like influenza.

Noeline worked at Whenuapai for about 18 months before she was transferred to Seagrove Station, just out of Papamoa.

She was also sent to Hobsonville’s No 1 hospital, where they treated “the boys coming home with skin complaints,” she says.

“It was like an ordinary job, but you had shift work until 10pm.”

However, “you were restricted and you couldn’t leave the station without a pass and you had to be in by 10pm.”

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