OSTRICH TO A.R.P.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 146, 10 April 1942, Page 10

OSTRICH TO A.R.P.

The Remarkable Metamorphosis Of My Friend Hanson

Y friend Hanson down the M street from me has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis since the Japanese entered the war. I once used to boast of him as the most unshakeable ostrich that I had ever met. Politics -local, national and international-had never bothered him, and I doubt if he had read so much as an article on international affairs. He lived, I think, in a sort of vacuum, nicely insulated from the world’s worries except insofar as they affected his own pocket and comfort, which up to a few years ago was very little. (He had ridden through the depression smoothly, thanks to a settled job in a settled sort of busimess which had paid a dividend all through the lean years.) Munich left Hanson calm and unworried. Perhaps those are the wrong words; uninterested would be better. At the outbreak of war he was shaken up sufficiently to look concerned for nearly a week. Then, so he told me, he adjusted himself, and after that neither the invasion of the Low Countries nor the fall of France, nor the Greece and Crete campaigns shifted him one inch from his suburban complacency. It would be e@ long time before the war affected him personally, he explained to me con-

fidentially over his front gate one Saturday afternoon. Of course- you had to pay more for a lot of things and his wife complained about silk stockings, but on the other hand he was making better money than ever before, and next year it looked as though he would make an extra hundred pounds at least out of overtime. PS Ba * IMAGINE the days following the attack on Pearl Harbour were among the grimmest in his life, if one excepts the fall of Singapore. He came up to my place one night for a heart-to-heart talk on the situation. He had seen some books on world affairs in my library and a large map of the Pacific on a wall, and I seemed the -handiest person to explain the whole thing to him. "Look here," he said; "I’ve heard a lot about this yellow peril and so on, but I never thought much about it. You know you can’t believe all you read in ‘the papers. But it looks really serious now, doesn’t it? And all this about digging shelters in your garden. What’s your opinion? Do you think yourself that we are likely to be attacked?" I suppose I was sectetly flattered as well as amused, for I sat him down and gave him a drink and produced the map of the Pacific and said, with as much of an air of wisdom as I could summon "up, "Well, its like this. . . ." And I brought him as up-to-date as was in my power, a * * ]t was a very elementary lesson, I’m afraid, but I will say that when he left a couple of hours later I could see that

his suburban complacency had gone for ever, Results came quickly. The following day I saw him staggering home under a huge roll of blackout paper, and Saturday afternoon, as if by magic, a mound of earth appeared in his back garden, and when I went round to show dutiful neighbourly interest, I found him sweating on the end of a long-handled shovel, his slit trench already half dug. "TI don’t like the way things are shaping in Malaya," he said, leaning back against the side of his trench and wiping his forehead. "If they should get as far as Singapore it will be a big step in our direction, won’t it? Unless they drive west to India, of course." I could not help being profoundly touched, to the extent of taking along my own implements and helping him to dig the rest of his trench. "I shan’t go down too far," he said. "The water lies pretty close to the surface in winter." So we: threw the earth up in even mounds around the trench, evened off the bottom, and dug a sump at one end. "There, doesn’t look too bad, does it?" said Hanson. "I was reading ‘last night that slit trenches are. just about the best protection of all against the sort of attack we are likely to have. Though Haldane says that in Spain, the second story of well constructed buildines And so on, at some length. I began to realise that Hanson was going from one extreme to the other. His kitchen, I found when we went inside, was lined with maps, the Pacific, Europe, a large map of the Russian front, and one of

the Middle East. I also noticed several books on the war, including one by Liddell Hart. He told me that a few days before he had joined up with both the local Home Guard and the E.P.S., but they had persuaded him that it would be difficult to do justice to both," and that in the meantime it would be better to concentrate on the Home Guard. He was also taking lectures in first aid. " There’s no sense in leaving first aid entirely to women. If I were the Prime Minister of this country I would see to it that every able-bodied man attended ‘compulsory. lectures in first aid." * * * ND ‘as the war in the Pacific progressed, so did Hanson’s interest in A.R.P., E.P.S., Home Defence, allied war strategy, and the country’s general war effort mount. With the fall of Singapore he added a roof to his slit trench, and with the battle of Java two feet of ‘earth on top of it. Meanwhile he was drilling furiously, and reading up world affairs even more furiously. Undismayed by his previous lack of interest and knowledge he was even blossoming out as something of an authority on all sorts of matters related to the war. Soon at E.P.S. meetings, you would hear such things as " What do you think, Hanson?" and "Ask Hanson. I bet he has an answer to that one." Some, who knew, as I did, how recently Hanson had ceased being an ostrich, were inclined to laugh at him and observe that now the war was in his own backyard Hanson had _ suddenly become concerned about his own skin. I did ‘all I could to counter this sort of criticism, It was true enough, as far as it went, but it applied to thousands of Hansons throughout the country, and it was certainly better that he suddenly become enthusiastic about the war than that he should remain with his head buried in the sand for the duration. Hanson’s latest enthusiasm is gas respirators. It may sound far-fetched, he says, to suggest that the Japanese may use gas here, but you never know. A lot of things that have happened in this war sounded far-fetched three years ago, and we should look well ahead. Every man, woman and child in the country should have aé_ respirator, and the Government should subsidise an industry to make them. As I said, it really is a remarkable

metexnorphosis.

J.G.

M.