THE STRENUOUS ARCADIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 666, 10 April 1952, Page 12

THE STRENUOUS ARCADIA

GROWING UP IN THE FORTY MILE BUSH, by Harry Combs; 8/6. CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS, by O. T. J, Alpers; 16/6. (Both published by Paul's Book Arcade, Hamilton.) "HE hard upbringing last century in inland Hawke’s Bay of the son of a bush farmer, who afterwards followed other callings, is described with gusto, energy and humour in this short book. Here are the pleasures and penalties of farming in the half-burned bush, backcountry schools and teachers, fun, games and social habits, employment prospects or lack of them, recreated with the de-tail-from the four-year-old going to school carrying a cow bell through the maze of stumps and derelict trees till the safety of the road is reached, to the mature youth heating pennies to discomfort the open-air evangelistswhich make them come to life in the round. Like life, the book does not pause to. be elegant. Every now and then the writer, to be more graphic, breaks into the present tense; this does not, to my mind, come off. But what matter? The book’s quality outweighs its defects. And, unlike most studies of childhood, it has no self-pity. While Harry Combs grew up in the country, young Alpers was a townsman, at first also in Hawke’s Bay. This reprint of the late Mr. Justice Alpers’s reminiscences, with new illustrations, is welcome, Other men eminent in their professions must have trod just as difficult a road to success; the remarkable thing about Alpers was that he was a Danish

immigrant without roots or resources. (Should we not be = bringing in more Danes today?) It is always edifying to see the penniless outdistancing the comfortable, and the keen mind and wit that made the career have also given sparkle and panache to the book. ;

David

Hall