OUR VILLAGE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 118, 16 February 1928, Page 10

OUR VILLAGE

WHEN DRAINAGE WAS NOT LOOKING BACKWARDS He was in his seventies, but an extremely clear-headed and logically-mind-ed man, who had kept up with the pace of things through sticking to his job in the city and rubbing shoulders with all sorts and conditions of men much younger than himself. “I scarcely know what to think of all this hygienic pother,” he said, referring more or less vaguely to the pasteurisation of milk at the municipal depot, referred to in connection with the extension of the activities at the Rahui factory. “Do you know that in the English village I came from there was no talk of anything of the kind? That was seventy years ago, and things may be different there now, though the villages don’t change much, I am told. It was the village of Wilmington, in Kent, not so far from Seven Oaks, where the big railways accident occurred last year. We had no drainage there at all, save that what drainage there was made its way by devious means to the village pond, because the pond was the lowest spot in the centre of the village, and the village was the lowest spot in the country round.

“Yes, and what is more, the farmers and their lads used to wash their, horses in the pond, and slop roupd in it; and the cows used to drink out of it, and we used to use the milk they gave. Yes, and the ducks and geese swam in it, and we ate them at Christmas time, and found them good. I think we also drank the water, for I cannot remember anything in the way of a tap, and I’m sure we had no tanks. There might have been a well, but then it was not everyone that had wells. “Yet for all this I can’t remember anything in the nature of disease breaking out. The people lived on and on, and died usually between 75 and 105, never worrying for a moment about drainage or the lack of it, nor of the bacteria bogies that have been frightening the world for the past generation. Indeed, our village was considered a very healthy spot. My sister went back there after forty years’ residence in New Zealand, and the only person she missed was an old man, who was eighty years of age when we left. She was told that he died peaceably enough at 103.”— H.P.