RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31097, 28 June 1966, Page 30

RANDOM REMINDER

OVERSIGHT

You hear some hard luck stories sometimes, in fact on most days of the week, and inevitably resistance to them buildsup. We feel like laughing, now, every time one of our golfing colleagues tells us how he needed only a 7 at the last hole to beat 100 for the first time in his life but took 29 because he broke a leg half-way down the fairway and isn’t sure whether the fall was caused principally by the bolt of lightning which struck him or the enraged bull which tossed him immediately afterwards. One gets a bit bored by these trivial excuses. But just occasionally,

one can feel the heart strings being plucked as if by a particularly sentimental Irish angel. And one could not but sorrow deeply for the Christchurch secondary school youngster who failed English at the school certificate examination. That was at the end of 1964. AH last year, the boy worked with rare industry. In all his other examinations, he had passed with flying colours, but English worried him. So he spent most of 1965 studying English, practising on old examination papers, trying desperately hard. Everything pointed to him passing by a comfortable margin. And when the examlna-

tion day came, he was elated. This was an English paper he could do something with. He wrote furiously, fully, and effectively. He raced home after it was all over and was able to tell his mother that he simply knew he had passed English this time (the other subjects were never even in doubt) and passed with something to spare. She was delighted for him; he had worked so hard. She told him to sit down and she would make him a nice cup of tea. Gratefully, he took off his coat and slung it about the back of a chtir. And it was then that he found half his English answers, still in his pocket