Humour Amid Pathos
YPICAL of the sights we saw daily was a wizened old farmer who came to rest on my door step the first morning I was home. I watched him struggle up the street in his homely light blue cotton coat and trousers carefully patched in many faded shades of blue. His face was streaming with the heat
under his conical straw hat, and on his shoulder he carried a long bamboo pole on both ends of which hung baskets. These were packed full of his most precious possessions, bundles of clothing, cooking pots, food, and, in one basket sat a tiny two-year-old baby, dressed in brilliant scarlet with his funny little head shaved bald excepting for a tiny pigtail which stuck up vertically from
the top of his head. In the other basket, sharing equal honours with the baby, and packed so tightly that he could not escape, was a little fat pink pig! The old man had obviously walked a very long way and was very tired, and, as he settled on my door step to rest, I sent my Chinese servant out to speak to him and offer him a cup of tea and a bowl of rice to help him on his way.-(" What It’s Like to be a Refugee-An Observer in the Far East." Barbara J. Collins, 2YA, October 15.)
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 123, 31 October 1941, Page 5
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227Humour Amid Pathos New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 123, 31 October 1941, Page 5
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