SUNSHINE ON THE FARM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 60, 16 August 1940, Page 24

SUNSHINE ON THE FARM

Sir,-Although I am not by any means convinced by his sentiments, I am glad you found "One Who Remains an Optimist" to tell your readers that there is always sunshine on the farm. I must admit, when I wrote "There’s Always a War on a Farm" (issue of July 19, page 12) I was looking at one side of the picture only. I recognise that the sun does shine on a farm. In fact, so long as I am not actually on a farm, not getting up hours before sunrise, nor going to bed hours after sunset; so long as I am not doing any of those things I tried to describe for your readers; so long do I think wistfully, like your optimist, that fresh air and clean toil are preferable to life in a city. But if you are able to secure from me this grudging admission that my article suggested prejudice one way, you must allow me also to charge that your optimist’s article showed prejudice in the other way. I know, myself, a good deal of the happiness of farm life, but I felt justified in taking the liberty of painting a somewhat morbid picture of it to offset the rabid romanticism shown by people like your benevolent optimist. If he knows of many dairy ferms, or small mixed farms, where the owner and his wife and family fiad time to play tennis and eat strawberries, then he is lucky. I know there are some, I have lived on them. But much as I admire the people who own them and run them, and much as I envy them their farms and their gentle lives, I cannot help noticing that these lucky ones are people who have either owned their land since the days when land was cheap, or who have inherited it from forbears who got it cheap and were able to build prosperity out of it, There are many of these people. Most of them have settled now on small homestead sections, relics of bigger blocks which they have cut up and sold profitably as land values have appreciated. Many even of these fortunate ones were weeded out by the Depression and reduced to what has now become a struggle against mortgages, with no time for tennis, no time for strawberries. What I really had in mind was the farmer who has started more or less from nothing any time during the last 15 or 20 years. He has a small mixed farm, or a dairy farm. Cows come largely into the picture; he carries a flock of sheep, mainly for the fat lamb market. He has no capital beyond his own energies, and these he must flog day after day, Sundays not excepted, to earn the interest on it. His children grow up to unbending tradition of constant labour. When they leave school there is not much hope that more than one in six will be able to go to a secondary school. The boys must take to the tractor, the girls to the nearest eligible bachelor. There is no room for a tennis court on the home section. Its. place is taken by vegetables, and the flowers which are about all the delight the farmwife has in her life, There is no wire for the tennis court, no money for nets, no time to mow the green or give a clay pan a bitumen surface. And, most. of all, there is no time for tennis. During the week-ends some of the family may get away to the nearest town or village for

a game; but they all play badly, a fact I can vouch for, and it is no wonder. If it is only possible to be successful in this country, reasonably well off, reasonably rich in leisure time, by inheriting the fruits of someone else’s labour, then it is high time we woke up to the fact and’ examined ourselves. I say that is the only possibility of making a decent life out of farming now. It is also, in fact, the only possibility of success in any other field. The national economy is such that the single energies of one individual, no matter how ably and vigorously he directs them, ate insufficient to bring him unaided out of the general ruck created by our halfpie Socialism, or half-pie State Capital-

ism. There are thousands of small farmers to bear me out, thousands of small shopkeepers, thousands of small operatives. Your Optimist will understand that I see his point of view. If he is a politician, as I suspect from the roseate paint that flows from his brush, then he will probably fail to understand mine. All politicians are blind in one eye. I do believe in looking on the bright side, but that is not to say that I must turn my back to let the storm take me from behind-THID (Wellington). ;