SHADOWS IN APRIL
by
SUNDOWNER
APRIL 25
Anzac missing this morning more than of the Anzac dead. The missing are, of course, dead, too, but we refuse, even after 38, years, to accept that fact. The imagination keeps returning to impossible possibilities and the heart sighing for miracles which the mind immediately ] FOUND myself thinking of the
sweeps away. I am not one of the parents condemned to these recur-
‘ring tortures, but I know that if I were I would be clinging still to that hopeless hope. I would, not believe, but I would never close the door on belief absolutely and forever. I would not be strong enough. Week after week, month after month, year after. year, I would find myself surrendering to mocking deceptions which my will would never be ruthless enough to destroy. And if the miracle did happen who would be strong enough to accept it? What would the mother do, or the father, if a man of 60 walked in after 38 years and said, "I am your son"? What would the boy himself do when he saw his narents? Could emotion or reason bridge such a gap? One of the men not seen after the Gallipoli landing went to school with me. We were not only boys together; we grew up only a few miles apart, and only a few weeks separated us when we went into camp. I came out of camp without going overseas. He went and disappeared without ‘trace; vanished during the landing and was never seen again or reported or clearly, accounted for. What would I do if he walked in on me today-not the generous, open smiling boy I knew, and have so often seen since, but the ageing, anxious, stooped man with white hair, the sparkle gone from his eyes and the spring from his step, worried about his food or his family or his bronchitis or his bank balance, and .remembering me only as a shadow from his vanished
youth? That Gordon would disturb and frighten me. I think he would disturb his surviving brothers and sisters. The Gordon we knew has not grown old as we have grown old, or been slowed down by folly or care. He is forever young, and until we are born again, remains forever lost. It is vexing his ghost to go on calling him back. x Mt * ¥:
MAY 1
"] HE difference between a Halfbred and a Romney is the difference between a donkey and a mule: both can tear your character to shreds; but one is twice as heavy as the other, and twice as strong, and defies your efforts to end the argument violentiyv. If a
Halfbred will not go through a race or into a dip she can be dragged or
thrown; but when I try those methods with Romneys I am exhausted after the third. sheep and a lunatic after the fourth. But I tried them again today. I was determined that every ewe I hed would go through a foot-rot bath both ways; the alternative being to let them run out of the yards, bring them back, and then let them think they were escaping again. I knew better than to try to make them enter the yard through a trough, especially a new trough in an improvised race that they had not been through before. But the devil was in me; a dozen devils. Things had to be done my way, not the Romney way; in my time and not Romney time; for my reasons and not for theirs. I circled them round the entrance, I rushed them at it, I dragged them through it one by one, I twisted and cracked their heads till they all faced it-if it is facing a thing to have your nose pointing to it and. your mind half a chain behind you. I up-ended one gir! through, and holding her at the outlet,
called frantically on Tip to bring the others on. But the louder I yelled at him the less pressure Tip applied, and at last he thought it too dangerous to be within a chain of me. If I had given in then I would still have been a fool, but I would not have been so many brands of fcol, such a wreck physically or such a tattered rag: morally, as I was when I gave in an hour later with a third of the flock through the bath and the others breaking back up the hill with Tip toe sour to stop them. Doing the job the right way took me less than 20 minutes, Arranging my yards the right way would take an hour or two and the expenditure of five or six pounds. But I am not sure that I would be happy in a world governed wholly by reason. I was born into, grew up in, and .would not now abandon the world of vanity, stubbornness, and unreason in which the difference between a child of seven and a child of 70 is that the second usually has white hair. Py Ba Bs
MAY 3
THOUGHT it what the Americans call a mouthful when the North, Canterbury Catchment Board told a landowner on Banks Peninsula last week that he could burn 200 acres of gorse if he would undertake to treat the regrowth with hormones within two years.
First there was the landowner with all those acres of gorse, and room still in
his heart for hépe- There was the confidence of. the Board in gcience., There was its faith inhuman. nature-its belief that the farmer could, and when the time’ came would, spray 200 acres with an expensive chemical. I hope. I will live long enough to see those 200 acres free of gorse, the farmer using them profitably, the Board acknowledged as the pioneers of reform. But if my own experience tells me’ anything, it is a hope that will not be realised. The Banks Peninsula patch of gorse is nearly 200 times as big as my own, and I have not quite succeeded in ten years in ahaa my patch from spreading. Ithave certainly not spent much money on it, and.I have made no attempt at all, to conquer it chemically. (continued on next page)
(continued from previous page) But I have burnt and I have grubbed; I have planted it with pines, and seen all the pines die; I have dug bushes out by the roots, turned them upside down to rot and smother the seedlings, and seen fringes of seedlings emerging every year since. Where the roots are only in soil or clay I think I (still have a chance; but where they are buried under boulders I can’t even slash the top growth away without wrecking my tools and my temper. I believe that hormone sprays are being used with some success by farmers and public bodies rich enough to do the spraying effectively; though I have not heard even in those cases of anything like rapid and complete extermination. The story is rather that growth has been checked, and areas of infestation reduced, at a lower cost than by manual or mechanical labour. That is something; a hint; perhaps a hope. But it is not such a hopeful hope as the Catchment Board will have started in some minds by announcing that "we are entering a stage where chemical means will deal with the destruction of gorse." The hope most of us have in hormones is 90 per cent. wishful. We have lost all other hopes. (To be continued)
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 723, 22 May 1953, Page 18
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1,266SHADOWS IN APRIL New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 723, 22 May 1953, Page 18
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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