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Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18894, 8 January 1927, Page 13

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I A NEW ZEALANDER IN ENGLAND. (WBITTEX for the press.) LOXDOX, November 3. Then change their skies, but not their minds, irho eome aeross the seas. Surely to no traveller are the Latin lines more applicable than to a nativeborn New Zealander of British descent making his first acquaintance with the land of his forbears. Sixty years ago my own parents left these shores for the south, and from the days of earliest memory I was accustomed to hear them and their fellow-emigrants talk of Homo when they were speaking of the land they had left so many miles behind them. Their children, too, grew up to speak, not of England or of Scotland, but of Home. With them, however, it was only a phrase of speech. Now, after some months in this kingdom, I realise that the New Zealander, born and bred though he be at the opposite Polo, is in truth at homo in this country. If he lias spent his days in Christchurch, and lands in London on a Sunday morning, he is at home at once. The traffic has vanished from tho streets, the immensity of the city has not had time to impress him, and tho air of Sunday calm and tho chiming of the church bells carry him back over the leagues of ocean to the southern city which he knows and loves so well. And as he moves about he sees the flowers and the trees with which (thanks be to those who took them out to Canterbury) his life has been familiar and which here seem to bid him welcome. Then, if he should wander into Hydo Park,' or Kensington Gardens alongside of it, lie will rub Ilia eyes to make sure that, he is not back in Hagley Park and tho Gardens, for the open spaces, and the oaks and tho elms and all the glorious colours of tho flowers say to him: "We are tho same as those in which your life has been spent." And if his first Sunday morning should take him further afield, as happened in my own case, into tho pleasant countryside of Surrey, the contented sense of being still at home will deepen in his mind. How like to Geraldino it is—the line fences, tho grain waving in the fields, tho root crops soothing tho eye with their greenness, the grass growing on the roadsides, the hills and the valleys in tho distance, and everywhere tho trees that never cease to charm. Yes, a pleasant land, and a home land to ono from our country, especially if ho conies to it on a sunny Sunday morning in the summer and passes through its mighty heart when tho traffic hns laid down to rest, when the bells aro chiming him homo at . the far end of the earth. when tho gardens, great and small, of the huge city spread before him, tho feast of Nature which lias always been his, nnd point tho way to the country beyond whero tho sleekness of the animals and the luseiousness of the fields and tho beauty of the trees —always the beauty of the trees —satisfy the instincts of his being. Choose, if you can. such a timo to set foot in England. It is worth while to receive the impression that' it will make upon you, and the impression will survive tho fogs and the bleak days that will com© ] a t er —that aro upon us now as I write. Even those will strengthen the idea that von are still at home. When I see tlio fog closing down upon London I think of many a time when I liavo watched tlio thick bank rolling up-tlio Avon and tho Heathcote, or stood on the Port Hills and looked down on tho pallwhich wrapped the city out of Mg ßut that is not tho whole of winter either in Christchurch or in London. In both you wake up of mornings to find the ground white with frost, but the sun sinning in a, blue skv—more often in Christchurch than in London, I grant you, but more often, too,'in other parts of Canterbury than in Christchurch. And wherever you are it is surely a. poor empty soul that spends its time grumbling at tho weather. The Lord lovetli a cheerful giver, and cheerfulness should inspire other things in life besides giving. Hie keeper of a little tea shop in Peterborough, up m the fen country, a low-lying damp part cut about by drains, something like the district round fai Tapu, where one might become rheumaticky ana querulous, knows that a contented mind is a gift divine. While consuming her excellent scones and tea, I copied out a verse printed on a tasteful panel on the wall of the bright little room. It might not come amiss if every tea shop in Dunedin were to follow her example, so hjere is the verse: —

It h'aint 110 use to grumble an' complain; It's .just as cheap an 1 oasy to rejoice. When God sorts out the weather an' sends rain, v Why, rain's my choice.

You will get rain here —rain in plenty—and dull grey days when there is 110 rain, when you muffle yourself up and step out briskly to make the blood circulate —just as you do at home. But if you have luck, as our party had,

you may motor' for 3000 miles through the length and breadth of the land tor sis whole woeks with the hood down the whole time, except for oiw solitary hour. Bo you want anything better tluin that? And all the time, as you travel about, you will find names that carry you back to your early haunts. Diinedin, of course, has reproduced whole patches from the nomenclature of Edinburgh. It has no Royal Mile 1 lorn Castle to Palace, but- it has its Musselburgh and Portobollo. to say nothing of Princes street and Water of Leith Scotland, too, I found to my astonishment, for I was previously ignorant of the fact, gave Christchurcii the name of its river and a suburb. Approaching Ayr I found on tho map a Hiccarlon and a lliver Avon, and niv companion, who knows Christehuivli well, told me we wero nearing tho origins of the Deans family, who named the Avon and the Kimirtou at tho Antipodes before the Canterbury Association appeared there on ' tho scfiue.

And besides tho names of places you also find tho names of people wellknown at home. In Ayr, again, you see a statue of Sir James Fergusson, one© a Governor of New Zealand (among other public activities), and the father of the present Governor. In London, at the top of Constitution Hill, just by Hyde Park Corner, you have the statue of the great soldier who gave his name to our capital; and among the hiring vou are constantly meeting people of all classes who lnako you feel at homo by claiming kinship with New Zealand because they havo relatives of some degree out there. Without any display of sentiment there is conveyed to you the feeling that you arc no stranger, but one of tho family. For this the soldiers of New Zealand who wero hero in the Great War are much to thank: thev havo left a sweet savour in England and wo countrymen of theirs who come,here now enjoy the benefit of tho reputation which they established on this side. And, then, we are a small country and the youngest of Britain's offshoots. Mr <T. L. Garvin, tho gifted writer in the "Sunday Observer," recently referred to New Zealand as tho Benjamin of tho dominions—the youngest, the furthest off, and perhaps for those reasons alone a little dearer to the mother's heart. But. whatever the reason, the New Zealauder is made to feel at home when lie comes here. And he must be destitute of emotion if he can como to this home without feelings of gratitude to Providence that he is one of this people. The pageants of tho present, tho memorials of the pa.st, combine to help tho belief that his raco, with all it* imperfections, is at heart a band of brothers closing up itß ranks in time of trouble, and whon dangers have been surmoiinted commemorating through centuries the crises through which it Ims passed without bombast or ignoble prido. A few days ago the Brigade of Guards unveiled a memorial to Guardsmen who fell in the rj.v„t War. Behind each regiment in full dress marched in mufti men who had at any time served with it. Thousands of former Guardsmen were marching there in civilian clothes—the silk hat and morning suit alongside a cap and rough suit of tho labourer, tho young fellow who had just left the colours alongside the grey-head whose soldiering must havo ended many years ago. And the oldest Guardsman of them all, General Higginson, over ICO years old, stood beside the Duke of Connaught almost throughout tho hour occupied by the march past —sheer willpower keepirig the frail form on its feet. If you doubt whether tho present generation has as much determination and courage as that old general, go to such a display as tho Air Force gave a week ago for the visiting Premiers. Birds of the air seemed no more skilful or daring than these young flying men, voyagers no less courageous than the Elizabethan seamen who carried the flag of England across the seas and defended her shores from invasion by the foreigner. Who with blood in his veins can look unmoved upon the "figure of DrnVp set up on Plymouth Hoe or read the inscription uoon the. Armnda monument overlooking Plymouth Sound — "God blew with His - winds and they were scattered"? Tho New Zealander who comes here must surely feel that he has come to a home of inspiration, and that he is fortunate in heir to say that lie, too, is a citizen of Britain.

The ''New York Times'' praises tlie tranquil life of thp universities:—

The skilled performer in any of the arts but literature must have a training whose technique sets him apart from ordinary men. His education in the handling of painty and brushes, chisels and marble, counterpoint, and chords, columns ana domes, is a thing for the rest of the world to admire but not to share. But, the -man of letters has no such monopoly of his art. He has merely pursued it. further than the labouring man who knows how to order a meal in English. The language is common property. The man who develops his manner of using it to the plane of art may use tools that are more finely tempered, but the.v are of the same-shape as those employed by the most commonplace writer. Words must give the thought its visible form. So the man who aspires to write with grace and distinction tries to create an artificial separation. It should last long enough to. give him the feeling that he is working in a medium as different from the speech of the man in the street a.s a dry-point is different from a circus bill board.

Resources and associations of university life offer just such a retreat. ("The Times" says). The undergraduate is provided not only with an education, but with a mode of life, leisurely, tranquil, suitable to study and quiet thought. The men who were steeped in the beauties of the peaceful streams and meadows around Oxford or Cambridge, who passed long, quiet years in tho cool courts and gardens of the colleges, who found congenial friends and tutors t read much classical and modern literature, and exchanged ideas with stimulating minds, naturally boro afterwards the mark of those years. Undergraduates enter classes nowadays wliih are guaranteed to turn thein out "sure-fire" playwrights or novelists or short-story writers. They specialise in something which will bring them speedy fame and wealth, and rare little for the pleasures of quiet, leisurely reading.

For the first time (says an exchange) 0110 of the best journalistic headings ever contrived is to bo used for a book. Of all chroniclers of events and persons in the literary sphere as it turns Mr James Milne is the most experienced and the kindest. His new volume, (which includes amongst other ■ talks about writers the account of an afternoon with Lord Morley amongst the shelves that walled all round the great square room at Wimbledon that was almost more like a public hall than a private apartment) is "Pages in Wnitincr.'' What memories that recalls. For years a weekly heading whe> the "World" was brilliantly edited by Edmund Yates, it was one of the cleverest touches of his skill.

The Slippery Slope (some one pointed out tlie other day) is becoming a formidable Parliamentary rival to the Thin Edse of the Wedge. On a recent day we had it on both sides:— He liked to think of the Bill as. representing a slipway down which the great ship would slide away from their hands and their control. It would go to another firm, to another nlaee, tn be fitted up.—LieutenantColonel Moore-Brabazon. The ship of State was sliding down the slippery slope into Socialistic national control.—Sir J. Nail.