In the meantime, Mel had found a furniture factory in South Melbourne who had actually had some shapes to bend timber into the shape of skis. In Vienna I used to go skiing every weekend in winter. I got myself a piece of four by one blackwood and after having it steamed and bent I actually cast a fair pair of skies out of it. The bindings were made of bike cables and the steel springs which I found at Henderson’s spring factory.

The other three of our quartet begged and borrowed and stole skis and stocks and sometime towards winter we actually were ready to go up into the snow. Mel managed to secure a hut for us for ten days, up in Mount Hotham, where in summer the main roads department used to store their gear and it stood empty in winter.

We took the train to Wangaratta and from there we went by bus to Harrietville where we hired two donkeys to carry our gear up into the mountains.

We had a wonderful time skiing the slopes around our hut and then a few day later decided to ski down towards the hotel. On the way down, unfortunately my left ski went into very soft, deep snow. I toppled over and finished up snapping the tip off my ski.

After recovering the broken tip in the deep snow, I finished the run down towards the hotel on one ski, much to the applause and admiration of the people standing on the balcony who had been watching me all along. The maintenance man at the hotel gave me an old kerosene tin and between us, we made a sleeve to fit over my broken ski and reinstated the tip of my left one. This served me well enough, until the end of our holiday and when we came down to Harrietville, 10 days later, we were told that the war in Japan was over and peace had broken out.

Church bells were ringing and people were dancing in the streets when we arrived in Flinders Street Station in Melbourne and this went on for several days.