THE ESK VALLEY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 410, 2 May 1947, Page 12

THE ESK VALLEY

By

SUNDOWNER

BURIED VALLEY

home by a letter that had chased me for 700 miles and caught me within 12 miles of its starting point. It was an invitation to visit the Esk Valley to see "a marvellous piece of rehabilitation," and I am very glad that it reached me while a visit was still practicable. It is almost impossible to imagine to-day what the Esk Valley was like | WAS overtaken on my way

after the flood of 1938, and if no photographs had been taken the

stories told would not be believed. Even if they were believed they would not convey much of the truth-bring back the alarm, the confusion, the destruction, the 70 years of lost endeavour that swept suddenly down to the sea. But it was what did not go to sea that was the immediate’ problem and has played a large part in the miracle since-the buried fences, barrages of logs, uprooted trees that were smothered again, and on top of everything, from a yard to two yards of sterile silt. It was a case of erosion hitting a community suddenly, savagely, and apparently beyond hope of recovery; not merely a judgment on | our heads and a punishment for our sins, but capital punishment; the end of everything there forever. So it must have seemed nine years ago. But to-day there is a smiling valley again. The grass has come back--not the original grass, not’ good grass, not perhaps permanent grass, but a covering for the silt and a defence against the second kind of erosion by wind. Lucerne has sent its roots down to the original soil and the original moisture and in favourable situations is yielding three cuts a year. Fruit trees have been replaced and new

. Shelter hedges. Buried willows have come to life, shooting up fantastically at right angles to the fallen trunks so that they are now strutted at their base against both wind and flood. It is all completely deceiving, and with the great poplars added--the biggest, both English and Lombardy, that I have ever seen-it is easy to forget that there ever was a flood, and difficult to believe that it was a flood of devastating dimensions. The present scene, studied after the story of the events as they were recorded at the time in the newspapers, if it does not rob erasion of all its terrors, makes it far less terrible than it is safe for. New Zealanders to think it is. I am not one. of those who

Droog on erosion ali day and dream of it all night. I think some of its aspects have been made more terrifying than they are, and I was not surprised to find the East Coast more.

stable than anyone would guess from the photographs in Dr. Cumberland’s important book, I knew that the worst would be there and the best passed by, and that when you pack 50 strong photographs into a book of 200 pages you have a very misleading impression of the 200 miles of country from which the photographs come. But it is not good for us to have our erosion alarms too quickly dispelled, and when I saw what nature, with a little help, had done in the Esk Valley in nine years, I knew that there was a warning there as well as encouragement, and I would sooner be silent about it all now than seem to suggest that erosion is several parts propaganda. I should, however, like to know how much erosion there was in the Esk Valley before the Napier earthquake, and what signs there were after the earthquake that the valley was in danger. oe = ry

MEN IN THE MAKING

tell @ _ 'T is certainly a "marvellous piece of rehabilitation" that the signs of the flood have now to be looked for to be seen and understood. But. I am not sure that the most marvellous example of rehabilitation in the Esk Valley is not happening somewhere else, and _ that those who want to study it need go no further than France House, the interdenominational Boys’ Home situated about a mile up from the Post Office. I

had no idea that such a place existed when I turned up the Valley road, and

I imagine that very few of those who pass it on their holiday jaunts to Taupo have any more knowledge than I had when I called in one morning before vi I still don’t know enough to be dogmatic, and I am in any case not quali-

fied to speak confidently about any experiment that is in part at least religious, When I asked the Superintendent. to tell me what the institution was, he

said, "A farm home for boys who have no home, or who for some reason or other can’t stay there." "Tt is not a reformatory?" "Not in the least. It’s a place for normal boys who lack normal home advantages. They come at 10 or 11, and stay with us for five or six years, and they are as normal and healthy when they go as we know how to make them." "You put health first?" "Always. We draw no line between health of body and health of mind. We believe that one depends on the other." "It’s'a farm as well as a home?" "A farm of 50 acres. We have our own cows, and pigs, and poultry. We grow our own fruit and vegetables. Come and have a look round." I stayed the rest of the day and all night, and what I saw still surprises me. The Superintendent, there can be no harm in saying, came out of a*bank. His wife came out of a hospital. They have no children of their own. But whether it was luck, or instinct, or fine character, or a still active memory of their own childhood’s needs, they have arrived at a system of education that allows for nearly everything that is wholesome and strengthening and excludes everything morbid and oppressive. There is first, of course, the beautiful home itself, and the beautiful setting. It is an institution in that it has dormitories, discipline, and rules, but it is as little like an institution as such places can be, and discipline looks after itself. "If I ‘got caught to-day," the Superintendent told me, "and felt absolutely compelled to flog a boy, I would not know what to flog him with. We get along very happily without those things." In itself that might not have convinced me, But I had arrived without any warning at all at the most awkward time in the day. There was no opportunity to brush up, and-as I speedily saw; no need. The dormitories, lavatories, bathrooms, living and recreation rooms were spotless without being forbidding. There was order everywhere without chilliness. There could be no question about the quality of the discipline. But that was gnly the beginning. It was the life outside that impressed me most-the intimacy with the animals, the amount of work done without any supervision, the usefulness of the training (from milking cows, to knitting), the relationship between the boys and "the Boss," the fullness of each lad’s life (something to do, somewhere to go, somebody to go with all the time); all that, with the knowledge each boy had that he was a "trusty" in the neighbourhood, free to wander over any farmer’s land and to go unaccompanied to town or the pictures. | : The visits to town were particularly interesting. Since there isa good deal of work to be done round about, most of the boys have some money, and each boy who has money has his own account in a ledger kept by the Superintendent but available for inspection at any time. If therefore a boy wants to go to the Pictures on Saturday he asks to see’ his account, If there is money in it he gets what he asks for unless the circumstances are unusual; but he soon learns to keep his account buoyant, and blames nobody but himself when he has to stay at home. That was one touch of reality that I thought admirable, but nothing interested me quite so much as the fact that the boys were not merely permitted but encouraged to go primitive at week-ends if they so desire, It works something

like this. Duties end about 10 or 10.30 on Saturday morning, and at that point each boy who feels the urge may draw rations for 24 hours and retire with a mate to a hut he has built on the riverbank or up a tree and live there like the Indian or backwoodsman he now feels himself to be. I examined some of the huts, and whatever other quality they had they were all secret retreats, built by the boys’ own_hands with scrap material (logs, bags, boards, planks, ,waste iron, or stones), clean, private, and for use. I could easily understand that a superintendent who knows boys as well as that, and trusts them as far as that, would not know where to keep a cane or a cat. (to be continued)