According to his wife, Pat's father died in the 1918 Flu epidemic when Pat was almost 6. His mother had two younger children, married again to a widower with two sons, and then she had another daughter. Pat was left to be brought up by his father's mother, Kiri Perekara, who was by then quite old. She died in 1939 aged 105. When Pat was about twelve, one of the Leslie family took him home, much as one would take a stray dog home. From then on he lived with them, working on their farm, more or less as part of the family. Mrs Leslie helped him to get his Proficiency Certificate. He went shepherding planting pine trees, anything he could find in the depression. He eventually got a job as a linesman.

From there Pat enlisted in the Army, as a signalman. He made Mrs Leslie his next of kin and made his surname Leslie.

He was a survivor. He never smoked, so he used cigarettes as currency. He was the camp barber. He said he survived because he could sleep wherever he happened to be. He was very grateful for the Red Cross, said he wouldn't be alive without them. He was very thin when his wife met him, when he was travelling round Britain at the end of the war. They married in Edinburgh after a six week courtship.

Mrs Leslie had saved the allowances made to her, and gave it back to him when he returned from the war. The money together with the gratuity returning men got, and his wife's small savings, enabled Pat to buy 142 acres of scrub and fern, which they made into a dairy farm, on which they lived for 32 years.

The early years were very difficult. Pat had post traumatic stress. He had terrible nightmares and explosions of temper. Only other wives of POWs knew what it was like. He never talked about his four and half years inside. He had black moods when he just took off to the back of the farm. His various minor war injuries gave trouble and earned him a full war pension, but he continued to work very hard.

He sold the farm in 1980, but kept 50 acres to raise a few Herefords and bought a house in Kamo. AWMM