China Calling

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 385, 8 November 1946, Page 22

China Calling

HRISTCHURCH has recently been visited by James Bertram, CORSO organiser, and has exacted from him the somewhat hair-raising price of three public lectures in two days and a 3YA broadcast on the third, In return, however, we are able to pay a tribute to one of the most remarkable personalities of contemporary New Zealand and, in a curious way, one of the most important. It is not merely that he speaks, as he writes, with a directness and sincerity that assure him definite and lasting influence whenever he cares to exercise it; there is, besides, a definite value for the isolation-conscious New Zealander in hearing from one who has seen and, worked in such momentous occasions, and left on them a visible and individual mark. To this small and self-aware community a native working and adventuring abroad seems to carry some part of its own developing personality as it struggles towards existence. Therefore to hear Mr, Bertram has a significance apart from his message; but it must not be thought that his message and his cause take any place’ but the first with him and his listeners. He told us what we had not known before, that the ship which brought him back last year from Japan landed him in Lyttelton, so that he spent his first day in New Zealand after eight years of war and captivity wandering along the Avon and looking at the city and the country, checking it up mentally against the cities most recent in his experience, ‘There wasn’t much left of Tokyo and what was left of Manila was rather a mess , . . There had been too many corpses, corpses in the river at Shanghai, corpses in Tokyo Bay..." Mr. Bertram’s methed of serving his cause is to make us partakers of his own experience and realise the ultimate unity of all human | conditions and fortunes.