Babies on a Battleship

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 222, 24 September 1943, Page 11

Babies on a Battleship

has my review of Stand By For Action (August 27), I described as ‘‘overdone" the episode in which two babies are born on a battleship. A correspondent (J.W., Wellington), writes to say that she remembers having read that the whole episode of mecthers and babies on a naval ship actually did happen on a British destroyer earlier in this war. This correspondent goes on to say that, while she always enjoys these notes and appreciates that a critic’s job is to criticise, she imagines that I go fresh to my job and "rarely after a pouring wet, trying day coping with two small, fed-up boys." In her own case, she says, her one night off a week ig "often thankfully and restfully spent at a light, reasonably good, cheerful, but un-deep picture (e.g., To the Shores of Tripoli)." So she asks whether our little man could perhaps cross his knees for this brand of picture as a special sign for people like her! It’s not an unreasonable request, but the little man (who, by the way, has four children), feels that if he started crossing his legs for one section of picturegoers, he’d soon be asked to stand on his head for another, or blow his nose and wiggle his ears for a third, and would end by getting completely tied in knots.