Where Peasants Take Parachutes As a Matter of Course

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 17, 4 February 1937, Page 12

Where Peasants Take Parachutes As a Matter of Course

Patriotic Jumpers in Old Georgian Province

PAST my window a big white object fluttered down into the crowded centre of Tiflis (says a writer in the Manchester Guardian),. I rubbed my eyes. "Did you see that parachute?" I said. But no one would believe me until I made them look at what I had seen. Only a few hundred yards. away, in a clearing among the houses, stood a tower, a Wooden and steel erection looking like a, Meccano model. From the crane at its top hung a large parachute, and soon, from the little penthouse under the crane, we watched a man emerge, his hurtling body disappearing behind the houses in a flash. ri « • • t fHAT evening, in the Park of Rest and Culture, we investigated another of these aids to airmindedness — though their popularity is an odd way of showing one's trust in the Soviet Air Force. The Georgian youth who seemed in a casual sort of way to be its custodian ran up the woQden steps and showed us how to do it. You stand in the little manhole at the top, and the music and lights from the Park seem suddenly to he far away; the rent in the fabric, which gives it thSjt real Russian look, takes on alarming proportions; the 100-foot drop looks ?0Q— but still, perhaps, no Englishman has done it before, at least not in Transcaucasia. You strap on the supports round shoulder and wuist, stand on the edge, and prepare, like a magician of old, to experience the sensation of flight by leaping frdm a high tower. Leap Into the Night. ipBis leap into the night is the worst part. You cannot help clutching the straps and hoping that they will not cut you too much; you remember tales of Russian inefficlency; you wonder how your friends at the bottom will inform your» relatives. Then, closing your eyes and bending your knees, you jump. For a few age-long seconds you are falling, feet first but fast, and then the parachute fills, your straps pull you up, not too jarringly, and you are floating down into the hands of the attendants. They unstrap yop, the parachute is hauled up by crane and it is ready for the next foolhardy or patriotic sky-pilot. * * * * TT seems a great adventure, but the Georgians, strolling round in their clean white tunics or sitting and watching you from the seats below, take it quite for granted. For a rouble they can experience tfte same sensation whenever they like. Can and do, We sat in a smart cafe which looked out on to a square where the proletariat were dancing most respectably to capitalist fox-trots, slowly and earnestly and badiy. But the Georgians seem to take their pleasures as sadly as the English.

Even the vast portrait of Stalin in the role' ot family man beaming away at his daughter as he gives her a toy does not. inspire them with cheerfulness. The Rest and the Culture are all taken seriously, On our way back we lost the tram route. The talkative tram conductor, who had left his machine to guide us to the Park, was gone. People were friendly, but our Russian was poor. Suddenly a small, bright-eyed boy, dark and good-rleoking, who in England would have been in bed four hours back, appeared out of nowhere, . talking flpent German. With the pride of a twelve-year-old burdened with great, responsibilities he led us through Tiflis, talking all the time. He was a Tartar, the son of an engineer who worked at Baku. Five languages he spoke with ease, German, Russian, Armenian, Georgian and Tartar. As a matter of fact, most young men of Tiflis know three of the last four tongues. Eager Questions. JJE wanted to know whether England was far away, farther than Moscow, and whether we played many games, but otherwise he was content to answer our questions. He accepted postage stamps, foreign coins, and a visiting card with the greatest glee, but what really attracted him was the news (not entirely acpurate) that one of us was a famous footballer. The signed photograph of this portent will presumably take an honoured place among that small boy's dearest treaspres, unless it is put in the school museum with the stamps, No other payment would he take, and with a cheerful "Aqf Wiedersehen" he disappeared into the night as he had come.' These Caucasian peoples are very friendly, if only you can understand their various tongues, Language Barriers, Qur small Tartar friend from Tiflis taiked in German; in Ordonjonidze, the fast-growing town at the other end of the Georgian Military Highway, which straddles the Caucasus, neither German nor eyen Riissian carries one far, but the real friendliness of the people breaks down language barriers. In an underground eating-house we were treated by two economics students of 22 to vodka and its usual accompaniment pf sliced onion and tomato, at what must have been a large expenditure to them. The little stonefloored room, bare of rug or ornament save only the inescapable portrait of Lenin, was full of rough faces, which, through the haze of garlic and bad tobacco, looked absurdly reminiscent of Low's "Bolsheviks." But one, a handsoipe yqpng ensweer from Kiev, could speak halting German, and when the news got round that some English from the Intourist hotel had actually come so far from the usual tourist haunts,

they went out of their way to be friendly. First they sang to us, mournful catches of Slav melancholy which were hard to follow but impossible to ignore. They then played on piano and fiddle, and then a bearded Cossack in white tunic and black sheepskin hat rose up from one of the tables and showed us a Caucasian dance. He put tremendous energy into it, his body flew up and down, his feet twinkled, but his arms were folded motionless. Wilder and wilder grew the pace, but only after a time when any Englishman would have dropped exhausted did he slacken and stop. * * * * T ATER came a more "respectable" dance, an American fox-trot pf dubious rhythm, at which a square.-necked, redjawed man in a cloth cap insisted on dancing with an English girl in spite of her hobnajled shoes. To dance with no less a person than the Secretary of all the Transport Workers in the capital of the North Ossetian Soviet Republic is an experience not given to many Englishwomen, Adherents of Soviet. A LL the men present, and there were no Russian women there, were, as far as we could upderstand thejn, flrm adherents of the Soviet regime, though they admitted that it had been unpopular at firs,t and that prices were still too high. But one at least wanted to sample other countries —the little wizened fellow who played the piano in the two-ipan" orchestra. He was an oldish man, shabbily dressed and wearing a moujik cap, his eyes supk deep in a clever face, lined and wrinkled like the sand in a dried-up water channel. Hesitantly he sidled up to us and asked: "You SReak English?" So far, so good, but furtjier ponversation was not so easy 4 * * * JJATHER was it like grappling with a deficisnt penny-in-the-slot machine. Each of our questions had to he writtep down in English, Next came a lopg interval for thought, and then, as often as not, an answer spoken in perfectly intelligible English. But no other procedure produced any effect. The reason was soon revealed. He had learnt English by correspondence course from Moscow, had never heard it spoken, and had only once or twice had any* opportunity of speaking it. His crownjng ambition was to come tp England. We left with an urimistakable and inescapable impression of progress, material,- moral and intellectual, which strikes one in these Caucasian republics. To see a grpwn man spelling out a child's reading hook in the street is a cqmic but at the same time a most inspiring sight. The new generation of Caucasians, with timi? parachutes and dancing and higher education, will not be the "noble savages" that their grandfathers were.