An Ageless World

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 71, 1 November 1940, Page 7

An Ageless World

ERE is a little bit which shows his (John Buchan’s) ideas of reconstruction in England after the Great War: "Would anything remain of the innocencies of the old life? I was reassured by two short holidays. One was a tramp in the Cotswolds, from which I returned with the conviction that the. essential England could not perish. This field had sent bowmen to Agincourt; down that hill Rupert’s men, swaying in their saddles, had fled after Naseby; this village had

given Wellington a general; and from another the parson’s son had helped to turn the tide in the Indian mutiny. To-day, the land was as quiet as in the beginning, and mowers were busy in the hay. A second holiday took me to my Tweedside hills. There, far up in the glens, I found a shepherd’s wife who had four sons serying. Jock, she told me cheerfully, .was in France with the Royal Scots; Jamie was in ‘a bit ca’d Sammythrace’; Tam was somewhere on the Arctic shore, and sair troubled wi’ his teeth, and Davie was outside the walls of ‘Jerusalem. Her kind old eyes were infinitely comforting. I felt that Jock and Jamie and Tam and Davie would return and would take up their shepherd’s trade as dutifully as their father. Samothrace and Murmansk and Palestine would be absorbed, as Otterburn and Flodden had been, into the ageless world of pastoral." (Miss G. M. Glanville, on John Buchan’s autobiography-"Memory Hold the Door." 3YA, Octodber 8.)