Cover Girl Grows Up

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 522, 24 June 1949, Page 24

Cover Girl Grows Up

EN years ago the cover of Vol. 1, No. 1, of The Listener carried a photograph of a 14-year-old girl and a microphone. This was Ngaire McKenzie, a pupil of Wellington Technical College and a stalwart of Aunt Mollie’s Children’s Session, She had been selected to give on behalf of the children of New Zealand an Empire Day message to children overseas, and the gay smile, devoid of mike-fright, suggests that she made,a very good job of it. The ten years of uneasy peace, war, and uneasy peace again have brought many sweeping changes to The Listener and to the New Zealand it has mirrored, Ngaire has grown up in times as difficult perhaps as they could be for one destined to play an ordinary woman’s © role, since, young ~as--she was, she could not escape the heart-ache involved in having a sweetheart on active service overseas. But her story has had to date a happy ending, and the smile that characterises to-day’s Mrs. T. I. Darby is essentially the same as that which beamed from the early Listener cover. Ngaire Darby niay well pose for the portrait of a successful young woman. That it is the unspectacular kind of success that many women are fortunate enough to achieve does not invalidate it. There is perhaps nothing spectacular about being happily married and. nothing meteoric about a career of homemaking- and home-keeping, but the woman who has both a happy marriage and a knack and enthusiasm for the domestic arts should be one of the bestadjusted and most valuable members of the social group. Negaire’s life as a whole seems to be a record of quiet happiness and ‘quiet satisfactions. She stayed at Technical College till 1941. Since she was good at games and good at schoolwork she enjoyed herself very much. She took & commercial course and’ passed her University Entrance in 1940. She played in the basketball and tennis team and became a school prefect and a house captain. Mixed schools, Ngaire thinks, are a good thing, if only because in her case it meant the school was able to stage operettas and Gilbert and Sullivan productions almost every year. Ngaire has happy memories of singing in the chorus of Caprice Viennois, an a

operetta based on the music of Fritz Kreisler, and she still likes listening to opera on the radio better than to instrumental music, After she left school Ngaire worked for six years in an insurance office, first doing general clerical work and then in a more specialised capacity. She liked office work, partly because its orderliness appealed to her. And she also liked the social give-and-take of office life, the girls she worked with, and the people she worked for. Ngaire was married on November 2, 1946. Her fiancé, now demobilised, was training as a radiographer at ton Hospital, and for the first few months or so after they were married Ngaire and her husband boarded. She was at rather a loose end in the daytime, so like many young women in the same position she went back to office work for a while. ; Like thousands of other young New Zealanders, the Darbys have first-hand experience of the housing problem, They think themselves lucky to have a flat at present, but it is a tiny one and will probably seem tinier after August next when they expect to have their first baby. However, they realise they are no worse off than many others, and. feel that whatever happens they wilt manage somehow. In spite of this major worry . Ngaire gives one the impression of being very conscious of the good things of life. It’s a climb-to the flat,’ but well worth it when you get there, because of the lovely view, not only of the hills, the city and the sea, but of the life that goes on in the valley below, the men going off to work, the children coming home from school. She goes out quite a lot-there’s the daily shopping, and frequent visits to her mother who lives on the top of a neighbouring ridge, and perhaps a weekly visit to the Y.W.C.A, Young Marrieds’ Club, on Tuesdays. But that still leaves: plenty of time for sitting sewing in the pleasant window seat and watching what now seems quite a pleasant world go by. Ngaire likes housework and loves cooking. She has no ambitions for working outside her home, since she thinks looking after children (she would like to have three or four) should be a fulltime job. Ultimately, she hopes, they will build a house with big windows and lots of sun, on a large section where she will garden and children will play. But even in a small flat life can be very satisfactory.