SERMONS IN STONES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 158, 3 July 1942, Page 9

SERMONS IN STONES

N English visitor to New Zealand once said, "What I miss in New Zealand is ghosts." Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps on stormy nights the ghosts of Tara and his warriors steal over Wellington harbour, and Kupe eats his shellfish on Red Rocks. But generally our ferro-concrete structures have not the requisite aura of antiquity. In Great Britain it is different. Air raids over England have levelled many famous buildings, and maybe laid their ghosts, too; but beautiful as were the great abbeys, the courts of law, the cathedrals and churches that have been destroyed, it was not merely because of their structural beauty that they have attracted visitors from all over the world. Each had its memories and its historic associations, and these cannot be destroyed. Here lived Charles Lamb or Dr. Johnson. Here kings were crowned, and here princes murdered. From this place John Cabot set out on his voyage to America, and here Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk and learnt of the adventures which he immortalited in Robinson Crusoe. , The new BBC series, The Stones Cry Out, which will be heard from 2YA on Friday evenings at 8.2 p.m., beginning on July 10, is in the nature of a memorial anthology of some of the great buildings that have been blitzed. But listeners should not expect a long description of what the buildings looked like, or a long recital of dates and the happenings that took place in them. Each programme is a dramatic interlude: it may take the listener back into the historical past, or it may be based purely on fantasy, as, for instance, the arraignment of Hitler by the ghosts of the Old Newgate prison with Judge Jeffries on the Bench. You may hear the Templars setting out to reconquer Jerusalem, or Shakespeare performing in Twelfth Night in the Temple Hallor you may come into the present and hear how the London East Enders faced a blitz. The programmes were written and produced by several notable producers, including Louis Macneice, and they cover a wide variety of famous buildings, such as Westminster Hall, St. Paul’s, Charterhouse,.Austin Friars, St. Thomas’s Hospital, the Royal College of Surgeons, and Madame Tussaud’s,