SMALL HOMES IN EDEN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 February 1940, Page 10

SMALL HOMES IN EDEN

REMARKABLE STORY. Brick boxes . . . bungaloid growths, terrible little houses. Everyone knows the expression which people use when they see green fields giving way to small new dwellings. Healthier housing is an ideal which everyone applauds, but when the healthier houses appear in places which were formerly scenes of rural

beauty, then the reality causes the ideal to suffer.

That is what happened when Catherine Court, returning from a long absence abroad, found little houses springing up in a valley overlooked by her ancestral home. She was so indignant that there was no place in her mind for the realisation of what all this meant to the overcrowded families in the neighbouring town.

This, for her, was the last straw in a series of misfortunes. Her young husband had been killed, in a motor smash and she herself had been seriously injured.' From comfortable circumstances she had suddenly descended to genteel poverty. And now the landscape which spoke to hex* of all she loved in her native country was being, as she put it, desecrated. She vowed war on the man who was responsible Adam Probert, legal war to the last penny of her possessions. And beyond that were there not the financial resources of Lyddon .Strang, a distinguished middle-aged lawyer whose one desire in life was to win her? She had refused him but Such is the opening situation in a remarkable story written by Peter Benedict whose brilliant novel “Day Star” was hailed as an exceptionally original and skilful work. The title of his story affords a clue to the original note of the whole narrative—“ Rents are Low in Eden.’ That is the story which will set readers of the Wairarapa Times-Age talking in the near future. “Rents are Low in Eden," is the next serial for the “Wairarapa Times-Age." It begins tomorrow and. no reader who enjoys a good story of life today, life as we know it, will wish to miss a single chapter of Peter Benedict’s moving and romantic work.