LIFE BEGAN AT TWENTY-FIVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 671, 16 May 1952, Page 7

LIFE BEGAN AT TWENTY-FIVE

UPPOSING you went to bed at the age of fifteen and didn’t get up-couldn’t get up -to face the outside world again for ten years, so that you didn’t grow up in the world but arrived in it already adult. What would that world be like? A series of unusual broadcasts which will start from 3YC next week gives a lively picture-a picture with all the vividness of a first impression of the world as it appeared to a young Christchurch man after just such an experience as that. The World Regained isn’t the story of a sick man, even though Dennis McEldowney begins it in a sick bed, to give the contrast which makes it complete. A person bedridden is in fact the centre of his world, he says. There he is in bed, fixed, and stretching from him is his world. It’s a small world if he’s at home-floor, ceiling, and walls, a door, perhaps a window and (if he’s lucky) a view. Through the door the wotld comes to him and goes from him. What’s happening in the view is no part of his physical world if he can’t pass through the window to join in.

When he did pass through Mr. McEldowney found the world didn’t open to him-it had to be conquered. Some of the early conquests he describes with much humour. One of the first was having a bath in a bath, which, like so many other activities he had slowly, painstakingly to learn from the beginning. But if having a bath was difficult, how much more difficult was running a bath. "Running a, bath is a typical example of the problems the human brain must learn to cope with, but, of course, it’s a fairly mild one. It’s no very splendid feat to run a bath after all. You never realise the capacity of the human mind for truly intricate remembering and reasoning until you first begin to make a pot. of tea..." And from there Mr. McEldowney goes on to "that worldly horror, the formal afternoon tea." But "It isn’t all struggle. There are sudden, unexpected delights’"-like a hole in your. sock, when, for years, you haven’t worn a sock enotigh, with friction enough, to wear it through, and there’s strolling around getting to know the neighbourhood, plucking leaves and grasses and watching their growth, leaning on fences ‘talking to their owners, going out to post-your own letters. Pye" Or take his first impressions-first adult impressions-of the cinema, finding that the picture got in the way of seeing the story. "I was too aware (he says) of seeing not events but a series of pictures of events... . I found I wasn’t now living in what I was seeing as once I’d done, but watching it detached. . . I ‘was finding a difficulty in being deceived that surprised me." After that listeners will get some surprises from Mr. McEldowney’s reactions to plays, He comments, too, on some of the things he heard and saw when he went to his first National Orchestra concert; and there is an amusing impression of the Writers’ Conference. But what he can’t give, and would like*to hear from someone else, is a first impression of radio. "The most ‘important things are people," Mr.. McEldowney says’ in_ his fourth and last talk. "And when the

hermit returns to the world, though he sees objects and places from baths to ballet, it’s people who control and pervade them all, and people who control and pervade his experience of the world." There are the people of the crowd out on the streets for some big occasion, the ones he sees on a normal day, hurrying along the pavements with grim and private faces, or packed into a big restaurant "bequeathing to their thousands of digestions whole barrow-loads of beef and potato amd creamed carrot and strawberry ices, and covering the agony with talk." In more private places the mass begins to dissolve, talk begins and a new stage in the knowing of people. There’s lion-hunting (do you suppose Mr. *McEldowney was disillusioned or not?), some shopping, and through his accounts of each new .experience run the comments on people and the world of a young man who is no less contemplative because he ‘is no longer an invalid-"in these days ...

one of the few remaining exponents of the contemplative life." Dennis McEldowney was born in 1926 with "blue baby" trouble. He went to school intermittently till he was 12, then did correspondence lessons for a time, but by the time he was 15 he was completely bedridden. From the age of about seven he made a hobby of writing, though because of lack of energy his output was never very great. He had most success with letters to editors. At one time he was radio critic for a church paper. When he was: 24 he had an operation at Green Lane Hospital, Auckland, to give his lungs an alternative supply of blood through another artery. At the time he was the oldest patient to have this operation in New Zealand. He is now, he says, "gradually achieving a normal life." The World Regained will start from 3Y¥C on Tuesday, May 20, at 7.45 p.m., and will continue for the three following Tuesdays. Later these talks will be broadcast from other National stations.