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key to easing into the new environment. More than any other sport, the game of rugby served to break down class differences. Deere’s low status was brushed aside with a ‘game of rugger’ some weeks later. In winning this first rugby game by an extremely wide margin, he and his compatriots had demonstrated to the Englishmen that ‘we wouldn’t be such bad chaps after all and that, perhaps, under our rough exteriors there existed people like themselves’.
    At the civilian or elementary schools the young men trained eagerly for the moment that had brought them thousands of miles from their native lands: the experience of taking to the air. The hatchlings were initially familiarised with the flight controls and the engine, and then progressed to execution of the all-important take-off and landing.[24] How to handle an engine failure, forced landings, low flight and turns all had to be mastered before the Anzac fledglings were considered proficient enough to leave the nest in solo flight—invariably in control of a biplane.
    Deere’s irrepressible desire was evident in his first unaccompanied flight, which was preceded by a circuit with the instructor who, after disembarking from the machine, stood beside the cockpit and gave the over-excited Kiwisome final pre-flight advice. Barely able to suppress his enthusiasm, Deere promptly forgot the instructor and opened up the throttle, forcing the officer in mid-sentence to dodge the aircraft’s tail section as it roared past, with the resultant slipstream tossing him to the ground.[25] After touching down, Deere was so pleased with his first effort he immediately took off again, much to the consternation of the flight instructor, who, in the process of trying to give him a piece of his mind, again found himself cast to the ground by the Tiger Moth’s slipstream. Deere and the officer repeated this graceless ballet once more before the Anzac finally landed and cut his engine off. He was confronted by the red-faced officer, who tore strips off the young New Zealander. Deere, however, in his post-flight euphoria, was more fascinated with the man’s large moustache which had collected fat drops of dew from ‘kissing’ the grassy airstrip.[26]
    Spurdle had his first solo flight in New Zealand and years later still remembered with great clarity the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) Flying Instructor uttering the thrilling directive, ‘Go ahead—and don’t prang it.’ ‘There are no words,’ he recalled, ‘however magic to describe completely the thrill of having, for the first time, a whole aircraft to oneself. The absence of that rasping, chiding voice of the instructor in one’s ear, all the troubles a mile below and the shining wings slipping through the whispering air. And the Sky—that huge beautiful arena.’[27]
    Pupils who survived the training then considered placement with bombers or fighters. At the time most observers gave greater weight to the future of the much larger machine. Orthodoxy held that bombers could prevent a repetition of the interminable misery of the Great War’s trenches by directly attacking industrial production and enemy morale, thereby crippling an adversary’s war-making capacity. It was also believed that the bomber, as an offensive weapon, could strike unexpectedly anywhere, and, even if intercepted, its powerful defensive armaments would fend off fighters. This fostered the widely accepted maxim ‘the bomber will always get through’.
    With this in mind, many elementary school instructors and students were of the opinion that the bomber offered the best possibilities for future advancement. Some trainees, like Olive, also felt experience in large bombers would aid them in their eventual entry to multi-engine airline flying. Although to Olive’s mind the ‘fighter was a machine of the past’, his chief instructor was adamant: