THE POINT OF VIEW
there a week or so ago. Motoring through the hills just as we arrived at the city, we noticed, rather by accident, a narrow little road dipping suddenly and out of sight. It was the sort of road you followed if you had any time at all, so very precariously we manoeuvred its hairpin bends, its slips, its pioneer bridges, and in an astonishingly short time there we were-face to face with one of the places you feel you’ve sought all your life, A deep and narrow valley enclosed by a horse-shoe of mountains that rose steeply, like an arena. The ridges glittered white against a blue sky. Yellow light overflowed them, spilled its way down between the blue shadows into the greenest lush grass that cows ever munched. The tiny stream slipped, silver, into the dark of a few close-huddled macrocarpas. Lifting our I was in Wellington when the snow was
eyes to it all and the early morning, we saw at a glance that it was surely, the ideal valley. Without even recognising the zig-zag path, I leapt up the tussocky slope that stood for front garden to the only farmhouse. Last year’s pet lambs stamped at me, and chickens scuttled. A woman appeared, from the rear; a child dragged at her skirts. "What a place!" I gasped. "Surely you’ve the pick of all the sights in New Zealand here!" She looked at me and pushed her fingers through her hair. To my astonishment she took every word I had said as sarcasm. "You're right there," she said, "It’s a crying shame, that’s what it is! No electricity, and the road-did you come over those two bridges?" "But," I gasped, bewildered. "It doesn’t lead anywhere!" "It leads here, that’s where it leads," said the woman, looking at me intently. "Yes, but-if they did it up people would come here!" The woman stared, turned on her heel, entered the house and shut the door. "Of course I’m a fool!" I thought, jerking my way back down the tussocky slope, where my car waited for the adjustment of its spare wheel. "It’s all a point of view!"
Ann
Slade
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19390901.2.16.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 10, 1 September 1939, Page 10
Word Count
363THE POINT OF VIEW New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 10, 1 September 1939, Page 10
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