Youth and War Service
Holman had an impoverished childhood during the Great Depression. In his earliest years he was raised in a shanty at Yarra Bay in Sydney by a man named Holman who may have been his father. He was taken in by a local family named Schofield who enabled him to be schooled by the De La Salle Brothers at Surry Hills. There he met and befriended Bernie Purcell whom he would later play against and alongside in state and Kangaroo touring sides.
Toward the end of the Second World War Holman joined the RAAF as a Leading Aircraftman. He was a chef with 82 Wing, 23 Squadron and was posted to bases in Ipswich, Queensland and later after the Japanese surrender, at Morakai and Balikpapan in Borneo. The Squadron flew B-24 Liberators in a transport role, flying ex-Prisoners of War and other Australian personnel back to Australia.
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Famous quotes containing the words youth and, youth, war and/or service:
“Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)