PEACEFUL SCENES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 December 1942, Page 4

PEACEFUL SCENES

IN PORTUGAL IN WAR TIME FISHER FOLK AND THEIR FAMILIES. RESTRICTIONS ON SUN BATHING. (By John Balten in the “Manchester Guardian.) A swarm of red and brown sailed feluccas was skimming oyer the bar, dark-skinned fishermen rowing as well to get the best speed from their craft. Some were tying up to the steam dredger at the harbour mouth, for it was just sailing out to dump the sand it had sucked up, and the fishermen might gain several miles by this means without effort.

From the Duro came the gay painted "sardine drifters and the tunny drifters, every funnel a different crazy-pattern of lozenges, square, circles, bands, stripes of colour, each hull crammed with men and nets. They chugged out into the swell and down the pinescented Portuguese coast, past the lazy windmills and the little white cottages to the fishing-grounds. They can tunny fish in Portugal, as well as sardines. No crafty playing from luxury yachts of the big sporting fish but plain, workaday gaffing after netting, and no pictures in the paper of them and their monster catches either. When fishing is your bread and butter it isn’t romantic. Ashore, as the sun got higher, the graceful women with the jet-black hair hastened to the springs with baskets of washing high on their heads, their bare feet just sounding on the already hot paving-stones. They crossed the cobbles and the tram-lines as if these were a soft carpet. Some went to the shore, where a spring gushed out' and it was cool. An hour or two later, outside their cottages and tenements, the washing was spread on the grass, and in the noonday heat they sprinkled the clothes with a water-can to bleach them whiter. Shoes Worn By Order. Wrinkled fishermen sat cross-legged mending their brown nets by the beach, and round them stood the idle and the curious, hands in pockets, smoking, talking. They were bare-footed too, and right up to the city boundaries you didn’t meet a shoe on a poor man or woman. But crossing into the city the law said you must be shod. That’s when they stopped, fixed on their sandals, went respectably on. And just as soon as they came home again over the boundary off came their shoes and the hard, brown feet twinkled along the pavements. In the little red-brick market, threecornered and red-roofed, the country people were ready with their vegetables and fruit. New Potatoes, green peas, beans, cabbages, fresh salads, cherries picked before the dew was off them; big oranges and fat bananas jostled the meat and the fish. Arms held up to balance a basket or hands on hips and legs apart, the women stopped to, talk and look and buy. Bent, black-shawled old women bustled about spending their centavos on some small luxury. BEGGING CHILDREN. The sun rose higher,' and in doorways and on steps the lazy men dozed. Barefooted, close-cropped children begged hopefully, small, coloured clay saucers outstretched in brown, monkey-like hands, for the week-end brought St. Anthony’s Day, and you can’t have a fiesta without fireworks. The ox-carts rumbled over the cobbles and women fetched water from the fountain gushing into the narrow street. The rich, of course, can take no risks, and their water arrived by lorry in fancy wickercovered bottles at a shilling a gallon, guaranted pure and free from typhoid germs. Down on the shore, a few holidaymakers lay in the sun, but they were hot and uncomfortable in their bathing costume and two pairs of trunks. Portugal, prudish about many things, oddly unconcerned about others, insists on respectability when bathing, and inspectors see that the minimum of flesh gets the minimum of sunshine. Mary, the washerwoman, went aboard the ships in harbour with her loads, and her daughter waited patiently on the wharf until she was called’ to run up the gangways with the laundry. She was hatlegs and bare-legged and strong, like her mother. Washing, selling cherries, and oranges and onions to sailors, and maybe slipping past the Fiscal Guards with a few bottles of vinho for the sailors, was genteel work to Mary. Last war she was carrying sixty-klo baskets of coal on her head day after day down at the river where the barges discharged, and 'her fine black hair was worn thin with the weights she put on her head. A GERMAN COLONY. In the suburbs, German children played in the grounds of the Deutsche Schule, and little blond-pigtailed girls stared with hostility at passers-by, especially if they were the hated British. In the synagogue next door the Jews prayed for peace. There were posters in the streets advertising the visit of the famous Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and of the German pianist Gieseking to the city. German propaganda it thorough, and the concerts, had been a success. The British, loving music, had regretfully to keep away from the concert-hall. They couldn’t go in wartime. Portuguese idlers' leaned against the propoganda shops, the barbers’ and the grocers’ and the bars where British, German, Italian, and Japanese war pictures are displayed, according to the feelings of the owners. The pictures were mostly old and they had their backs to them. At the Bolsa the business men bargained and walked the exchange floor, and in the British Chamber of Commerce building cooldressed women made things for the Red Cross and planned bridge parties. Out at sea the feluccas had dropped their sails, and the men spread their nets. At nightfall they would sail back across the bar, all pulling on the oars the sooner to be home to their bread and onion and their glass of wine. The water sparkled; and ashore the idle, the rich, and the sick slept. Only the strong, brown, bare-footed women worked, skimming the oven-hot pavements in the warmth of the early summer afternoon. »