Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

The
 F
am
il
y
25
now in her mid-eight—, late-late eighties now so, um, it 
was very quick, but they are. 
INTERVIEWER:
Since your-your sister lives, still lives in New 
Zealand and you live here, what’s it like when the two 
families get together, living in vastly, somewhat vastly 
diff erent cultures?
MAN:
Yes, although it’s not vastly diff erent. It’s not vastly. 
Th
ere are, um, the interesting thing is that when we 
come here, the 
Kiwis
come here, they expect the Ameri-
cans to be the same. Th
ey expect them to have the same 
ideas and the same goals and the same attitudes to life, 
and it’s misleadingly not true. So it appears to be more 
similar than it is. So, somebody coming here would think 
it was the same, but it isn’t. When we get together, um, 
and we’ve, I’ve been fortunate enough, every one of her 
children has visited here and stayed with me, so I’ve been 
able to introduce to them what it’s like to live and visit, 
uh, well, at least in Washington, D.C.
Yes, well, um, the interesting thing about Gallipoli 
in the First World War was that most people’s grandfa-
ther fought it, you know what I mean. On my mother’s 
side, all of my-my grandfather’s brothers fought at Gal-
lipoli, you know. It was a, it was something that, um, that 
captured the whole generation that were sent off —and 
mostly volunteered, by the way—sent off to fi ght, um, a 
disastrous invasion, disastrous invasion of Turkey. Win-
ston Churchill’s idea, by the way, uh, to do that. And 
um, the casualties, so—and I recently gave the lecture 
about Iwo Jima because they’re very similar in terms of 
campaigns—but, um, to give you an example of things 
that don’t usually happen in wars or in battles, for the 
New Zealanders, for example, the-the casualties nearly 
equaled the numbers deployed, so that is nearly 100 per-
cent casualty rate, that, which is almost unheard of in 
battles but, uh, and my grandfather was-was wounded 

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