ROUNDABOUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 38, 15 March 1940, Page 20

ROUNDABOUT

By

Thid

« THE LIMIT ON THE LIMITED UT a New Zealander on a in daylight, and he will ride for 300 miles (on the average) without saying a word. ‘But make him ride at night... He will chat. He will swap magazines, win the war, accept beer, cigarettes, or fruit. He will shout happily with the rest when the lights must go out. He will be as nearly natural as it is possible for a man to be and still ride in trains. In the South Island, there are not many trains which run at night. South Islanders are permitted to look at the scenery. In the North they have to hide it. To this end they have invented A Thing they call The Limited. As all travellers know, the arrangement is perfect. Unless you fly, whenever you travel from one end of New Zealand to the other, you must wait a day in Wellington. This is the final nicety in a long series of nice tortures, The idea, I suppose, is that a rest is indicated. But Wellington is not one of those places where rest is easily come by. To the stranger it acts as one pole of a magnet to another. It is a city of strangers. One more arrives. He is no more than another tear in the torn veil. He is lost. He does not know where to find Courtenay Place, and if he does, then there will not be enough of the spirit of the City upon him for the proper enjoyment of that secluded spot, He will soon spy out the greens of the grounds of Parliament Buildings. But even in the remotest corners of the land they have heard of Parliament and he will know that in this place enough time has already been frittered away. Coming or Going So he walks about on the hardest pavements in the world. He may find the Public Library, and enter, hoping to read. But, especially now we have the new building, he will probably decide it is more profitable to enjoy the outside. He is suspended in a void. Behind him, the Boat or the Limited; before him, the Limited or the Boat. To appreciate it thoroughly, you must travel second-class on the Limited. To go First, or in a Sleeper, is selfish (and please note the class distinction in the capitals). No one in those more hallowed places can take advantage of your intermittent slumbers to enjoy the wonderful joy of dropping his case intermittently upon your head, or his tea in your lap. No one can swing his beam over from his half of the seat to crush yours against the wall and soil your trousers with feet lifted from the swilling, rubbish-despoiled floor. No one can

* achieve the infinite pleasure of resting his greasy head upon your shirt. or breathing into your pocket. To travel anything but second-class is as bad as using blunt nails would be bad for a masochistic fakir. Life is something which has to be done thoroughly, or not at all. It demands al/ your tears or no sadness. It takes all your laughter, or the joke is only half a joke. It requires you to travel second-class on the Limited, whether it is before or after your day in. Wellington. Ghost Towns As I have done, and do, for there are other things to be bought besides comfort. In fact, this is coming into my head as we pull out of Taumaranui. Has anyone ever seen ‘Taumarunui? Or is it a ghost place, flanked by its brother ghosts Te Awamutu, Taihape, Puketutu, Ohakune, Karioi, Turangarere, Horopito? These are surely not places where people live? They are names on dirty station fronts. They are two rows of rail instead of one. They are lights dim in smoke, They are frost and rain, and wind, and floods, and slips, and gaunt dead trees against the moon. They are not, I am certain, inhabited places. Who has ever recognised as human the shapes that walk through the darkness which lies always upon them? Who has seen people, here, real people, eating in those formless caricatures of houses over there beyond the track; people talking, people making love, or marrying, bringing up children, reading the paper, or going to the pictures? No one. Not even the young lady who shares my seat, and lies at this moment in such a position that I must stealthily remove my coat to make more room, In this matter, she is no more discerning than I. In other ways, she has the keen eye of the true critic, Reading Over the Shoulder Encouraged by the editor, I had with me Harold Nicholson’s Bible for Britons, or "Why Britain is at War." Unashamedly, she read over my shoulder. By way of retaliation, I turned out a book which discussed in a small but sufficiently improper way those people for whom (they are saying in England), Belisha of the Beacons went down with the flag of impropriety flying. She did not blush. I reverted to Nicholson, She bubbled over at last... "Are you any the wiser?" she asked, I hmmed, in a manner calculated to disarm the censor, who is always with us these days. She accepted the book and read for two and one-quarter minutes. She returned it. "They write too dry for me," she said. For her, Europe is as far away as it was before they made Bristol-Beauforts, and as remote and strange as these mystery towns are remote and strange for me; and for my friends of the Limited, in a country we have never seen,