DON'T FORWARD MY MAIL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 656, 1 February 1952, Page 8

DON'T FORWARD MY MAIL

by

AUGUSTUS

with my grandfather and that’s how I came to know him. Before my grandfather died they had shared a fishing hut on the bank of a dispirited and eelinfested river twenty-five miles from the city. I sometimes used to visit them there. There were about half a dozen shacks altogether, thrown together from iron and wood and scattered into a vague settlement whose communication lines were marked only by single tracks worn erratically through the gorse and grass. If a gorse bush or kerosine tin or heap of ashes lay in the line of advance, the track wound round it so often that there were unaccountable curves, the original obstacle having rotted away. A visitor picking his way into this settlement would observe a pair of bare feet propped out of every window, the inhabitants having established beyond dispute that the feet are the chief suppliers of oxygen to the brain. You can fill a hut with tobacco or woud smoke and still remain sweet-headed if your feet are out the window Breathing. Well, a couple of yeais ago, being in the vicinity, I decided to call in and see how old Simmy was managing the hut after all these years without my grandfather. Astonished, I found the huts had been enlarged into holiday baches. There were scures of them, The baches had been put into straight streets. The streets were named. The baches were named. In front of each was a little patch cf shaven lawn. In front of the lawn were flower beds. In front of the flower beds were little picket fences. In front of the fences were more lawn and flowers. Curtains prinked in the windows. The Andrews Sistets climbed up one anhad been at school

other’s throats in all the living rooms. The men captured the holiday spirit with extra bed-making, dish-washing, dusting, vacuuming and ironing. Roughing it they sat outside on camp stools peeling potatoes for six, calling with desperate abandon» to the potato-peelers next door, and exchanging rueful badinage about one another’s aprons. The women planned new flower beds and whittled back into the lawn, They wore grey slacks and bought food from cruising vans, fetching the milk in a can with ecstatic emancipation from city bottles. One committee organised sports days and square dancing, another judged gardens and gave prizes for the best street. Wherever I asked I could get no news of Simmy or of Doc Saunders or of Perce Enticott, until I chanced upon a dejected old codger listlessly weeding a border of lobelia. To my enquiries about the old firm he showed a sudden confusion of guilt and regret and pointed agitatedly upstream. Long after I left -him I could see him wistfully watching me and wiping a fat moustache with thie back of his hand. It took me an hour to find Simmy’s new home, but there was no mistaking it. Breasting through grass, blackberry and broom: I suddenly came upon half a dozen shacks. nearly ready for Eric LeeJohnson. On each window-sill was propped- a pair of ancient bald feet. | Simmy was as good as new, being still only eighty-five. I was entranced to see that he still picked up matchboxes in his toes and, passing his pipe down to the window by way of one foot, knocked the ashes out on the sill without stirring from his bunk.

2 S So our friendship was ~ renewed, and I §frequently found time after that to visit the old boy and gather up some of | the wisdom which had filtered into that aerated and undistracted skull. Sitting crosswise on his bunk (which, like all the hut, was rich with \ his personality) he | talked or kept silence as he chose. The leamy air — that hung, above the water and the mud, nourishing Simmy at his roots, had produced many a rare theory concerning such things as hermaphroditism among blowflies and the con-

scious intractability of matter. But it was his theory abcut population shifts that seemed to me of the greatest significance. "You see that bedlam of baches further downstream?" he enquired once. Me and your grand-dad .founded’ that place. We had it lovely, screened from the road by a belt of willows, a friendly old cow that used to wander down to the fence and stand purring while Doc Saunders milked her, notices at all approaches saying Beware of the Bull. "But look at it now. A man ean’t breave for petrol fumes and face powder, can’t hear hisself thinking for them ruddy wireless boxes, can’t move in his own house for antimacassars and whatnots. And that’s all on account of they women moving in and a-cluttering of the place up with gee-gaws." Savage poops of smoke spurted to the ceiling like Indians sending morse

as Simmy’s pipe vented his tadeaaaibe ment. "Now you might be asking yourself how it comes about that they women get in in the first place." I had certainly been wondering It was difficult to picture these ladies arriving for the first week-end with no sink to wash their stockings in, no refrigerettes for the pressed tongues and lettuces brought in a‘ damp cloth, no linen-closet, no cupboards for bottled fruit, soap-powder and _ suit-cases, no electricity, no blinds, no mirrors. "Nature soon got round that," Simmy was saying, always cfossly grateful to feel that there were patterns of existefice outside his arranging. "I been thinking and remembering things I read at school and I reckon it’s always been the same. First of all a bunch of the boys get together and cook up a yarn

about going aiter walrus teetn or aliuvial gold or an island full of breadfruit. And then before the girls can stop them they’ ve lit out for the hills or the open sea.’ He spat out the doorway on to a patch of grass grown taller and lusher than any around it. "Well, then, they settle down in a nice fishing sort of way and everything is going dandy until one day along comes.a sort of she-maler She can run like a stag, a motor-car tyres. drink straight whisky and is ruthlessly chaste. She just kind of moves in, pinches the best fishing holes, puts up a line for her undies, plants a hedge, does oil paintings of the settlement and plays Parly-moi d’Amour on the gramophone. "Then she slips back to town for some more Turkish cigarettes, shows her paintings to the other girls and How Chawming they all sey, and before you can say Gladstdne out they all come wiv their hollyhocks and tea-pots. "It’s that wench wiv her long legs and cigarette holder that starts the rot every time. I reckon it’s one of they Spenglerian cycles. You remember all them Greek buckos who thought up the one about a golden fleece? Jason it was who thought of it. Well, they just get round the first cape and ate fetching out the keg for a bit of a jubilation when ‘who do they see a-sitting in the bulwarks adjusting her shoulder straps but that there Atalanta dressed like a man. So then the game’s up and they have to go looking for the golden fleece after all." (continued on next page) ‘

(continued from previous page) I was able to contribute a couple of examples from the Norse voyages. Somebody had given Olaf Tryggvason a woman who, could run like a stag and wield a mean dagger. Olaf discreetly passed the lady on to Leif Erikson, who in his turn shipped her away with Karlsefni, an explorer. As soon as the latter hit America he put her ashore telling her to, run about inland for a bit while the rest of the crew sat waiting with fingers crossed. However, she turned up again three days later untouched by the prudent natives. : Then there was Leif Erikson’s own sister who, when beset by a horde of American natives, merely slapped her bared breast with ‘a sword, and the formidable combination of symbols was enough to send the savages howling away in dismay. Men don’t make passes at girls who wield cutlasses. I wish that were all I had to tell abott the theory. But one Saturday recently my feet were alongside Simmy’s while I made notes on theory for the sex-determination of chickens. Suddenly his old head slapped back against the wall ‘and I heard his heart keel over. His eyes were protruding towards the open doorway. Following the line of their horror I saw, swinging along to-

wards poor Jack Fraser’s abandoned hut a girl in purple lacks. She carried a rifle, was long in the legs and narrow in the hips. "Majuba!" Simmy’s breath broke free at last. His pipe had fallen out on to his open neck, singeing the grey hairs. His feet were panting distractedly. "No. | no, no," he began to wail, "not already not again, four times in a man’s life. | oh, please, I’m just an old man, Simpson ain’t got long to be here." Gently I fanned him with a felt hat stuck full of fishing flies, and loosened the trousers around his ankles, while his voice went lachrymosing along, "Give me just.a handful of years in the twilight of me age, for I couldn’t abide to die wiv hydrangeas at me door. . He took ten days to hardy old man. Meantime. a lot of quiet | activity went on around us. Waders, rods, biscuit tins, demijotins, stoves sand | rolled bedding appea.ed in forlorn little" heaps outside all the huts except | Fraser’s. Like lights going out one pair of feet after another disappeared from | the windows. The evening sun would | sometimes pick out darkly a hump of) belongings surmovat.ng a man as be | rounded the river bend going westward, | slowly. Westward they went every one of | them. I must drop a line to Roger Duff.