HE LIKES NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 557, 24 February 1950, Page 16

HE LIKES NEW ZEALAND

O see ourselves. as others see us may not always be a flattering experience, but when a man who has been a trained observer all his life so falls in love .with a country that he finds himself irresistibly drawn to it _and is unhappy anywhere else, there must be a sound reason why. It was with this thought in mind that The Listener interviewed Peter Llewellyn, an Englishman who came here before the war, served six years with the 2nd N.Z.E.F. overseas, wrote a brilliant account of his unit (Journey Towards Christmas) for the War Histories Branch of the Internal Affairs Department, and after going back to England ‘for a year, has just returned to New Zealand again, this time to stay. "There's a type of living going on here that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world," he ‘said, "and I like it. I like the tempo of New Zealand life, where. people are not falling all over each other and breaking their necks to get something all the time. And I like the New Zealander as a person-and there is a definite New Zealand type emerging who’s absolutely unlike anyone else in the world. He seems to me to be an extraordinarily humane chap, helpful, easy to get on with, encouraging to'a newcomer, not hypercritical. Some people say it’s dull here, but your towns are no duller than most English provincial towns. You get your films earlier here, and the cinemas are better and cheaper. English towns may have their Little Theatres, but most of them are collapsing now through lack of support," EE

Llewellyn was _ not speaking without due consideration, for he is a trained journalist and observer of human affairs. A tall, rugge looking individual, but shy, he was born in Somerset, in the village of Limpley-Stoke in the Avon Valley. (It once won a prize, he says, as the most beautiful village in England.) He was educated at an English public school-Fel-sted-and worked for three and a-half years on the Bath Chronicle and Herald, which was established before the time of Beau Nash, and is one of England’s oldest provincial papers. After that he was for ,a year a journalist on the London Daily Express, where he was a crime reporter, dealing with "minor events like post office hold-ups." | He first came to New ‘Zealand in 1938. and

during the years when he was not in the army he worked most of the time at outdoor jobs-house-pzinting in Rotorua, in a sawmill in the King Country, on a public: works project near the Southern Alps. Whrrever. he went, he says, the country fascinated him, in much the same way as he imagined some people are fascinated by America. -_-_--

/ He found he liked everything about us -the scenery, the climate, the people. He liked the softness of our women’s voices which seemed to him warm, charming, and unaffected after the "blah-blah and pseudo-Mayfair accents" of most of the Englishwomen he had known. And because he wagked, generally speaking, in the out-of-doors, at tradesmen’s jobs, he obtained afresh and un- | biased insight into the lot of the New Zealand working man, whom he considers "better educated, better mannered, and more cultured" than the working people he has encountered elsewhere in the world. He thinks the New Zealand worker has all the characteristics of what people would call the _ middle classes in England. He thinks he has middle class ideals, for instance, like wanting to settle down with his family in some pleasant suburb, which in a surprising number of cases he does. He feels, too, that New Zealand is a country where one’s children would be assured of a decent future and a good education, no matter what their background was. . One of these days Llewellyn’s views on New Zealand may be incorporated in a novel that he says he is writing about us. That long-imagined work is one of the reasons why he has been wandering about the country at different jobs. He is trying to get down to the fundamentals of our existence, to discover things like "how the houses are run, and how the people talk." And already some of the discoveries he has made have been incorporated in short stories and verse (some of them published in The Listener). Some people think he has already captured what critics call "the New Zealand atmosphere," partly, in his own opinion, because he sees us with (continued on next ‘page)

(continued from previous page) a fresh @ye, and partly "because I am so fond of the coufitry." Now that he is back here again, he hopes to dé some more work for the War Histories people, to do odd jobs in journalism, and to work at his great opus about New Zéaland working class-cum-middle class life.