EIGHTY YEARS OF HAPPINESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 238, 14 January 1944, Page 14

EIGHTY YEARS OF HAPPINESS

EIGHTY YEARS IN NEW ZEALAND. By G. E, Mannering. With 42 illustrations. Simpson & .Williams, Christchurch. HE trouble with most people who lead happy lives is. that their stories die with them. They are too busy being happy to. keep diaries, and too absorbed in things of the moment to be retrospective. But G. E. Mannering had a father who reviewed his life for his descendants at 70, and so the son, finding himself still interested in life at 80, sorted out his magnificent collection of photographs, and using them as signposts, wrote his autobiography round them "chiefly for my own family and connections." It is a splendid gift for his children, but too good to be left with them. Hundreds of others who at present hardly know his name will wish to share that part of his life’which gets into these 255 pages and he, will not be able to keep them out. For he is the business world’s happy warrior-the man that every banker would choose to be, diligent and discreet in the bank itself, but with so many wholesome interests outside that age has never caught him up. It is in fact as curious to see him defeating time by enjoying it as to realise that he has escaped seeing ugly things by the eagerness of his interest in their size or shape or colour or movement. . The ‘nineties, for example, were not years of depression to him but years in which he crossed the Tasman in a buggy, or first met the Westlands, or joined the ‘Liedertafel, or married, or moved to Hastings, or shot the Waitaki in a canoe, or made his first crossing of the Sealy> Pass. Summers were never too hot because he spent about half of them in waders; winters never too long and cold because the longer they were the more golf he had, the more climbing, or the more glee-singing. And so it goes on for at least 70 years, since he is already an adventurer at 10. It is strange to think that he has lived through social, political, and industrial revolutions without becoming aware of them; but it is necessary to remember first, that bankers don’t talk, and second, that’ perfect health blinds us to disease. If he is still in 1944 the boy who in 1874, "in complete nudity," carried’ an armful of young gulls across the Ashley, "one with a firm grip on part of my anatomy," that is the kind of old age we should all like to have, and the kind of answer we should all like to have been able to make to time.