"TAKE THE SLOW TRAIN..."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 272, 8 September 1944, Page 18

"TAKE THE SLOW TRAIN..."

Written for "The Listener"

by

M.S.

S.

Pre Auckland Express had just left Ohakune when the guard dug me out of an uneasy sleep to tell me he had a seat for me three carriages along. I trailed after him rather unwillingly through the swaying darkness. I had settled in when the man in the adjoining seat woke with a jerk and asked where we were. We talked. He was getting off at Taihape. Yes, he lived there. It was very quiet there now. We exchanged views on the effect of camps near small towns. His son was coming home from Bougainville. He had managed to get sufficient excitement to prevent the boredom that comes from constant reconnaissance work, but we agreed that the adjustment necessary for peace would be more difficult. So.many boys wanting to fly. We talked about changes in transportation and then he asked a question, "Have you ever seen this part of the country in daylight?" I had to admit I hadn’t, but that twice I'd been fortunate enough to pass through on a moonlit night. He related, in the hurt tone of a man who loves his home district, how frequently he had met with the same response, and suggested I would enjoy taking a slow train some day to see the country between Taumarunui and Marton. I agreed, and we chatted about ‘various things until Taihape loomed out of the darknessy and I said, "Good-night," and settled down for the sleep I badly needed. 3 * * % BUT his question he not slept. It has been reiterating itself over, and over again,-and I feel that it is a question important enough to bother people other than myself. "How many New Zealanders know the towns on the Main Trunk merely as a series of pleasant or irritating stops. on their journey to or from Auckland?," "What do" 1 myself know a Taihape?" That it is close to Waiouru, and that the aunt of a friend of mine lives there. «~

There must be dozens of travellers who know Te Kuiti only as a refreshment station, and Marton as a place where you can get a sit-down meal. I, as a North Islander, know more about the countryside from Christchurch to Dunedin than I do about that from Marton fo Auckland, because’ the former train journey takes place during the day. I realise that many people, in the days before travel restrictions and petrol rationing, motored along the main highways of both islands, but even so, many towns of the North and South are remembered only as a series of ill or well-equipped motor camps. "What does the average New Zealander know of his own country?" Every primary school child can tell us of such wonders as the thermal regions and the Glow-worm Grotto at Waitomo or the "majestic mountains, glorious lakes, immense glaciers, magnificent fiords, and bushland of the south," but even if we have visited these tourish resorts ourselves for a brief trip in the Christmas vacation or on our annual leave, do we know any more than the British and Canadian delegation, who have just passed through New Zealand? I think not, * * =e UT it doesn’t matter that most air force trainees know Blenheim as an uncomfortable little town with cramped eating-houses and two theatres, yet know little of its sluggish provincial interests or the anxieties wrapped up in a B.M.S. recital or C.B.A. bazaar. It’s. unimportant that visitors know Wellington as three or four narrow, noisy, windswept streets, because they lack the time or the energy to leave the city area and climb the hills. It is just unfortunate that passengers a-wait-ing a connection at Frankton know Hamilton as a large main street with three bridges and a river, but know nothing of the lake fringed with daffodils and wattle in the spring. And we cannot blame the winter visitor to Christchurch for missing the evergreens of the north, None. of these things matter greatly if we know one part of our country well, can share that knowledge, and can relate our emotional response to its people, its roads or its streets, to the.general response which we give to the words "New Zealand." Those who listen to the "Boys Overseas" session will understand when I say

that to. no two servicemen does New Zealand mean the same thing. Among those hurried, unstressed words repeated and repeated it is possible for the sympathetic listener to glimpse the speaker’s idea of home-provided you have been to Waimate, Gore or Otorohanga. It is our lack of knowledge of how the other chap lives that is the important question. a * * HE farmer (with his three sons overseas), carrying on production with the help of a couple of land girls, grouses about the wharfie earning his £10 to £14 a week. While the wharfie working 94 hours in a week curses the farmer for looking after his own interests, It is the woman who draws up at the hotel in a car and tells us at dinner about the slack civil servants and postal authorities who refuse to work on a Saturday afternoon, and who asks a little later "Does the train pass through here then?’’; together with the man who kept 200 hens before the war but who now keeps 10, because he will "be damned if my eggs are going to any (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) b-- b-- Market’-these are the kind of people who decry the Government officials and members of Parliament as incompetent scoundrels. So it occurred to me that it is now time, when reconstruction is the word sipped with morning tea, to take the slow trains and see the country living, for the Express leads to hasty conclusions. What’ do you think?