EAST COAST SNAPSHOTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 411, 9 May 1947, Page 8

EAST COAST SNAPSHOTS

Bu

SUNDOWNER

HAVE pointed out before that most of the farmers on the East Coast had to leave home to go to school, and that the marks are still on them. On some the mark is so deep and permanent that when you meet them away from home you don’t immediately recognise them as farmers. But that was not the case with Ralph. I knew that he was a farmer before we met, but I RALPH would not have gone wrong without that information. There was his size to begin with-not his mere bulk, height, width, and ‘circumference, but the development of all those muscles that farmérs use until they can hardly use any others. There was his colour — sun-burn and wind-burn on skin drawn tight by exposure. And there was his gait: though he was not, like most farmers, stooped, he was heavy on his feet as all men are who spend their lives on an uneven surface. But there was something more. He was a farmer who felt proud to be a farmer, whose father and grandfather had been farmers, and who would have felt it a reflection on them to polish himself out of the farmer pattern. When he took me to his home I saw that it had everything that professional men in the cities have in their homes, comfort, conveniences, refinements, culture, all of which he appreciated. But he remained a farmer. Five minutes after he introduced himself I could see his ancestors behind him, and he knew that I could see them, and was happy. I take off my hat to him. When he was not fighting his country’s enemies overseas he was working for posterity at home, with the same deep conviction in both cases, and the same _ searching doubts of his personal worthiness. Once when our conversation came somehow to religion, he told me that he had never doubted the existence of God after lying wounded on the Western Front among the dead and dying. "It worried me at first when hard-swearing, hard-living men who believed in nothing and respected nothing, fought and died like heroes: It worries me still when I think about it. But when I lay wounded myself, and heard man after man addressing himself to God with his last breath, I knew that God existed, and my faith has never left me." I hope it never will. * % * | SAW Uncle Bert for two hours and laughed all the time. I also argued with him all the time. It was like holding to a cow’s tail on a wet hillside: if you let go you fall in the mud; if you hang on you end in-a creek or a fence. I found it safest to hang on-to talk back at Uncle Bert, laugh back at him, and once or twice shout back at him. It was good and exhilarating fun while _it lasted. Uncle Bert UNCLE saw me coming and BERT got ready for me. at He took me through his garden, one of the best on the Coast, and when he had filled me with nectarines and peaches, walked me through a gate into a fenced-off patch of bush. Then it began,

I was one of those adjectival fools who advocated planting pine trees. "Who said so?" "I say so. You think native trees won’t grow." : "I think they don’t grow very fast." "There you are. I knew it. Well, how old is that rimu?"

*T don’t know." "I know you don’t. But I do. And I know how old that ‘tawa is, and that kahikatea." "How old?" "What's the use of telling you people? You always know best." "Who does?" "You advocates of stinking’ pines. If you want to grow those things, put them up,a gully where no one can see them or smell them." "I like the, smell of them." "You would. I suppose you like dogdaisies and stink-weed too. Poisonous bloody pines that are no use when. you do grow them." "They make shelter." "They make draughts — funnels for wind and pneumonia. Where do you find most dead sheep?" "I have no sheep." "Then what in God’s name do you want pines for?" "Shelter, I just told you." Y "Shelter! Shelter for what? For fools who think natives won’t grow? I tell you they will grow." "But not fast enough." ‘ "Not fast enough! I’m sick of hearing that. The slowest tree we have, the kauri, grows ten times as fast as a man. » What do you want?" "Big treeg*in my life-time." "That rimu is 40 years old. So is that matai, which is neacly as tall. That miro is less than 40. And what about the

quicker things -- matipo, five-finger, manuka? All those you see growing round the edge of the bush have come since I put up the fence 20 years ago. It’s rubbish to say that native trees are slow."

. "They're slower than pines." Uncle Bert laughed as |) Mr. Churchill would _ laugh if Mr. Attlee rose to defend the "cryptoCommunists"; as Mr. Fraser might laugh if Mr. Holland bought a coal-mine; as Cromwell did laugh when the Scots came down from the hills above Dunbar. Then he opened out on me with both barrels. I couldn’t help being ignorant, because all townies were ignorant. I couldn’t help talking like a parrot, because everybody did that with trees. It was not my fault that what I repeated was rot, because I had clearly never heard the | truth. But he was now going to tell me something; and show me something. "Follow me through here and I’ll show you a Timu that is putting on six feet a vear.... Climb

up this bank and I'll show you what.a tawa can do. ... Totaras are supposed to be slow, but come down here. .. ." I went down and I climbed up again. I went through and I went under and over. I asked one question and Uncle Bert answered ten. I shouted and he shouted louder. But we never stopped. His legs were as tireless as his tongue, his exuberance as unfailing as his flow of profanity. But at last I could go no further. I was bitten by sandflies, stung by nettles, torn by lawyer vines, and blinded by facts and figures. Uncle Bert established his case, and then deliberately threw it away. "Natives get as far in a hundred years as pines, further in two hundred years, But what the hell does it matter if they don’t? Put them in and forget about them. We'll both be dead before we know who’s right and who’s wrong." a By Ba "Y OU'LL like my _ brother," My ' Brother’s brother told me when he first mentioned him. "He is a great fellow, bigger than I am a long way, but with a heart of gold. I'll give you a letter to him." I could not think MY BROTHER why his size should : have affected his heart, but gladly took the letter. Three days later I delivered it, and it was not My Brother’s fault or mine that I stayed with him only one night. If I had stayed longer I should have seen more reasons for the first brother’s admiration; none, I am sure, to qualify it. He was the kind

of man no one gets wrong-chiefly because he doesn't himself go wrong. But that is not why I am writing this note about him. I am writing it to put on record this simple fact-that such a man in such a place is worth 20 of the rest of us in such places as we usually occupy: doing jobs that we don’t like, in localities that we have not chosen, and carrying responsibilities that we are going to drop at the first convenient cpportunity. For us nothing much can be done. We shall go through life neither hot nor cold, in general neither happy nor unhappy, and if no crisis comes, neither useless nor outstandingly useful. But here was a man perfectly adjusted to his environmenthonest, competent, and contented, and so unselfconscious that his life was completely harmonious. If his crops fail or his cows don’t calve it is bad luck. Floods are bad luck, and droughts. But they don’t mean that farming is finished, or that the rest of the community owes him something. He has probably not thought that once in 50 years, nor felt it a virtue to live 100 miles: from a town, 8r a hardship that his children have all had to be born away from home, educated away from home, and have now settled away from home. He stays where he started when he first left his father’s home, soberly happy, quietly efficient, helping some thousands of acres of grass every year to become beef or hides or wool, and dreaming no foolish dreams. I don’t know how many men we have like that, or whether the number is rising or falling. I can’t think what would make it rise, and I can imagine much that would work the other way. But it might help us to retain those we have if we give them the thanks we owe them; and we may even, if we are lucky, win them a recruit’ or two. * % WHEN I first saw Paul he was wearing a purple dressing gown over purple pyjamas, and looked like a mediaeval monk. His tall figure stooped a little at the shoulders, and with his gtave and gentle melancholy made me think that Dante could have looked like that about 15 years PAUL after he first gazed at Beatrice. Later I wondered why anyone so full of humour could have given me that fantastic impression. Then one day we went into the sea together and he began to talk of the past-of Vienna and the Danube, of bus journeys from Baden to the theatre, of music, snow and mountain sports, of cafés, even of his university and school. It was the close of one of those perfect days that the East Coast experiences in ‘February, and I asked if such weather made him homesick, "Not the weather. No. This weather makes me happy. But I have memories." "Longings, too, I suppose," "No, no longings. No homesickness, I don’t want to go back." "But it is ndtural to think of the past." "To think, yes. I often think of it. But I think of it as something dead. The Europe I belonged to is dead." "It will not come to life again?" ‘"Never. There is no life there any more. My Vienna is’a corpse." "Is happiness possible without a country?" "Peace is, There is something here that I have never felt before-this sea, those hills, and life without politics," "Is that enough?" "It is enough after the last ten years, I am tired. Sometimes I want nothing

but to sleep and forget. And sometimes I think that the only, New Zealanders who understand have brown skins. But that is weariness too. x % * | FIRST saw Mr. B. in Church, taking up the collection with that completely abstracted look the plate gives you if you are good enough to carry it round and delicate enough not to wish to see what anyone puts into it. It was a surprise to discover next morning that he was the local police officer, MR. B. and to learn further when I got to know him that he had designed the pulpit and a memorial plate in silver that was the Church’s only adornment. But our police force is full of surprises. In Wellington alone I know one man who is a poet and another who is a naturalist, and there are also, I believe, lawyers among them now as well as one or two chemists. However it is not the marks Mr, B, has left in silver that I am_ thinking about, but the marks he has made on dozens of young lives. He would be astonished if I preserited him as an uplift man, and I am not going to do that, but there are many men and women on the East Coast who remember with gratitude his long life of service among them, and especially his horse-sense in short-circuiting the law’s delays. To the Maoris almost without -exception he is "a big fellow," not because he is soft with them, but because his justice is tempered with humour and mercy. It is no use trying to bluff him, one Maori told me. "He always knows what’s doing, but will shut his eyes if you don’t try to pull wool over them." Mr. B’s own comment on this was that a police officer who can’t shut his eyes now and again will make trouble where none should exist. "It is better to keep the community as a whole lawabiding and quiet than to try to punish every breach without exception and drive all the real offenders underground." Twenty years ago the Coast was a tough place, he told me, and the police had to be tough. "I was young and active then and afraid of nobody. If they looked for trouble they got it, and in the end they got more than they liked. Now the Maoris know that if they play the game with me I will play it with them, and there is very little trouble." "You warn a man before you lock him up?" "Always if his offence is trivial. And I don’t often have to warn him twice." "They are no longer hostile to you?" "No, we are all good friends. I can take. a joke as well as they can, but they knéw when to stop. It is a great mistake to go out of your way to be Rally with Maoris; but it can also be a istake to go snooping round trying to involve them in petty offences." "Does imprisonment worry them?" "Perhaps not imprisonment in itself. But it worries them to be taken away from their mates." "You like them?" "Very much, and I think they like me. But they are drifting." "What do you mean exactly?" "Chiefly that they lack leaders. They are gregarious and need leaders. We can’t do more from the outside than keep them orderly and quiet. Real authority must come from the inside." "Is there any sign that it is coming?" -"T don’t see any. I was hopeful that their war leaders would be peace leaders too, but it is not happening."