AROUND WELLINGTON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 73, 15 November 1940, Page 18

AROUND WELLINGTON

By

THID

The City Revisited And Two Significant People Encountered

T is a long time since I have l been around Wellington. There has been a war since then. Although I have not yet reserved sufficient energy from the war effort to find out from the files just when I was last around Wellington, I have an idea it was in the days of the Maginot Line. Could anything seem more utterly prehistoric? Since then I have not been observing with that abandoned partiality of the sticky beak that was wont to accompany James on his eccentric walk. I have become, for one thing, a reader of newspapers and a listener to Daventry, or to London as the BBC would now suggest we must believe. 1 Meet Harry For another thing (to return to matters of more immediate importance) I have not felt like writing about Wellington. Lately, however, certain things have been happening which require the benison of publicity. Just to-night, for example, I met Harry, one of those doughty males who cleans and sweeps whole blocks of offices in the time it takes a complaining female to chop the lettuce for a midday salad. (Women readers please note that I am not attempting to inveigle Harry in upon my side in a certain raging controversy, I need no help. Besides, Harry is married, and his wife likes a glass of stout.) But it was neither of women nor their thirst that Harry and I spoke this evening. It was about Maurice Clare’s String Orchestra, which was playing at the time. | (I should explain that the rattle of the typewriter inside, and the rattle of the trams outside, and the rattle of Harry’s broom everywhere, persuaded me that acoustics which would stand so much noise might as well put up with a bit more.) However, nasty asides where they should be, which is aside, Harry and I enjoyed the NBS String Orchestra. I said to Harry, knowing like (I’d checked with the programmes): " That’s the NBS String Orchestra." "Ah," said Harry, just as knowing, "they play some catchy little pieces, do they not?" " Yes," I said, " quite bright." "You know," said Harry, "it’s a great thing when a man’s legs are just getting him down, for him to have a little bit of music." Followed the tale of a route march "the last time" and how the band used to come out a mile from camp and set their shoulders straight again. Since Harry had just finished mopping the room, and was about to retire on

the home flank, it was not possible to observe Mr. Clare’s effect upon him, but since his knowledge of music is on exactly the same par as my own, I can say he enjoyed what he heard of the concert, because I did, and our tastes are remarkably similar. His wife, for example, recites beautifully. Harry tells me about her rendering of "The Battle

of Waterloo." There is nothing I like better. Mr. Clare will by now be aware that he is appreciated, and in good company too. Another Friend Harry has his complaints, He has been on night work now for nigh on five years and he’s getting "fair fed up with it." A holiday now in progress will set that right, although I doubt that it will make his legs any younger than the String Orchestra could, or even that super-whoop item which someone in the NBS insists on calling ‘" Brittelodia’; but Harry’s complaints are nothing to the mute complaint of another friend of mine, who walks each day along one certain busy street where the shops are large, crammed, and gaudy. I have not yet spoken to him. There has been no occasion for words, and James is no longer here to prompt me into the rudeness of importunity. I met him first one day while I waited outside a shop. The windows of this shop, I would have you know, were just full as windows ever will be filled, and the bits and pieces overflowed into the entrance and along the aisles and up high shelves and they even hung from the roof. It was impossible, I found on experiment, (Continued on next page)

AROUND WELLINGTON (Continued from previous page) to walk into that shop without brushing up against hosiery, Manchester goods, linoleum, corsetry, shop walkers, shop talkers (all women), and shoppers (also all women). Cigarette Butts On this magnificent tribute to the spirit of the Merchant Navy I had turned my back and was observing the passers by. He came up along the edge of the footpath where the drizzle drifted in, and he wore a hat that turned down to match the downward turn of his nose, his mouth, his heels, his trouser cuffs, his back, and doubtless also his mind. He looked neither right nor left, and I wondered that day what his eyes might be seeing. The next day (oh yes, curiosity took me back) he came at the same time, as regular as a parson’s preoccupation and Saturday night. This time I discovered what his eyes say. A vision of some poor hovel where he lived, you think? Or happier sights of some better place where some day he had lived or some day might hope to live, Fate, Hitler, and the Social Security Act permitting. No, not these or any other fine things. Simply cigarette butts, I had not seen him coming. I had a cigarette, three-quarter smoked, and I was tired of it. Like the shop behind me I suffered from superfiuity, I flicked it away. It missed the gutter and stopped smoking two feet out on the road. Then the man came along, and again his whole personality seemed to be fixed exactly two and one-half feet on the paving block in front of his ragged shoes. He walks slowly this man, and it seems as if he never sees anything; and yet in that moment when I felt him

coming past me he swooped off the footpath and was back like a flash, cigarette doused and the butt in his pocket. Wonder and Envy A good journalist would have followed him, but I still have some squeamishness and all I can do is wonder where he goes each day. You feel sorry for him, of course. My description has been so touching has it not? And yet in some ways I have it in me to envy him. The idea is preposterous, but then he is one of those

preposterous people who fail to realise that life means living, and is not easy. With such as he the nearest way to find the truth is to imagine the least likely possibilities. And one of these which I imagine about him is that his eternal search for butts thrown on to the street has kept his mind off Hitler and the fate of Homo Sapiens. More of his sort and there would be no dictators. But no, that is too fanciful. Any more like him and there would be no cigarette butts. You can’t have the scavenger without something to scavenge.

All of which is quite meaningless; but some day when I have the courage to return to that place at that time I am going to ask him if he knows there is a war on, and I am certain that his reaction will be very interesting. I have an idea that the war will not seem so important to him as the cigarette I shall offer him, and in that event I shall be quite puzzled about the whole business as I am now. And those are the two most significant people I have met in Wellington since Dunkirk,