ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 739, 11 September 1953, Page 20

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL

AUGUST 16

HILE I was waiting for the cricket last night I reread a collection of anecdotes from the place where I was born» In general they have worn well, though they are all echoes of echoes of things said on the goldfields 70-90 years ago... ‘particularly like this one about an» illiterate. whose wife had’ been a weelisaway from home. To get

her back he asked a "mate to write a letter for. him, and when

asked what*he wished the scribe to say he answered, "Never mind. the darlings and the dears. Just tell the old bto come home," There is a classic simplicity here that. gives it rank beside the best story I can remember from the Fitst World War. A Royal Navy ship based on Sydney had received orders to go home-to the delight of most of those on board. But some thought Australia had not been so bad, and gave their reasons. There was a discussion, almost an argument, in which one old sailor took no part. But when the breeze passed, and someone said it was time to go below, the old boy made his contribution: "The best

bloody thing I know about Australia "is that it is 12,000 miles away from my bloody old woman." I don’t know why the three "b’s" give such a tang to an anecdote in English, but I think it is reverberation of Puritanism. My own profanity. is like the riding of a man who was 30 or 40 before he mounted a horse. He never becomes a part of the horse, and my oaths, if I tried to use them, would be the most obvious of foolish affectations, In general I dislike swearing and avoid the conversation of those who can’t express themselves without it. But I have had friends, two of them friends who were as close as brothers, whose conversation was not only unprintable but sometimes unrepeatable, but who were themselves 6f a childlike simplicity and goodness. The profanity of one of them was simply inspired-a flash in the dark that dazzled and delighted me, but alarmed me, too, if there was anyone else within a chain or two. I was always expecting a policeman’s hand to rest on his shoulder, or a scene with a hysterical woman; but if either of those things had happenéd he would not have known why. .I would die happy if I believed in the Judgment Seat and

thought that I would be counted worthy to stand on his side. ™

AUGUST 20

HERE are moments when it would give me no pain at all to see Elsie go through. the mincer. They are the moments when .I ‘stagger up the hill with a-bag ‘of mangolds‘and see, the second I arrive, that’ she is not going to eat them; when I take her hay and she sniffs round for roots; when I leave both mangolds and. hay- and she

stands suljeniy at the gate looking for more of the potatoes I was

weak enough to give her yesterday. In moments like those I could bash her face in with the bucket, knock out her teeth, kick her in the stomach, shoot her with rocksalt. I actually do nothing and say nothing, but go away a frustrated worm. Against her impregnable stupidity I am helpless-as every man has been who has wrestled with cows since it first occurred to; man to steal their milk. From whatever angle we attack they are armed and we are impotent. We can feed them or starve them, batter them, bully them, alter their shape and their size, change their colour, breed out their horns, lengthen or shorten their legs. To get the last ounce of milk out of them we have to

agree to their terms; and the first clause in ’the treaty "is "that we must always give way to them. Laisdally call it eating mud; but ee more tha. that, and worse than that It is eatimgeryud with a smile on «@ faces. our hands." ~ MB ct I knew I. gave" the potatoes that she would reject mangolds for two or three days; it had happened oefore, and the thought passed through my mind that it would happen again. But the potatoes were wasting, and it seemed like carrying weakness to the point of silliness. to let caution destroy them altdgether. I gambled. om~ somemoment ‘of "reasona as gamblers. never admitting their a stupidity, I took a further plunge this mofning by bringing her into the garden for a bellyful of grass. If I had braved it out, let her sulk till hunger brought the sugar into the mangolds, she would have been eating them tomorrow or the day after. Now it will be the day after that. As often as the door opens in the next 24 hours an expectant look will come into her eyés, and then a dull sulkiness when no one goes to the gate. It is not patience,.and not persistence, but the unblinking doggedness of a creature who can’t change her mind because there is no mind to change. If I say-and it is a shock to realise how often I do, even aloud-"Then go hungry if you won’t eat what I give you," she will not answer me. But if she does go hyngry I will

AUGUST 23

find her answer in the bucket. Against bucket logic I have no technique. * ba * NOTHING has surprised me more in these notes than the resentment of. readers of my own age when I confess to my years, It may be bad taste to turn myself outside in, and inside out, in public, and if it is, all personal diaries are vulgar. But it is not my taste of which my contemporaries complain. It is what they call ‘my age-com-

plex, by which they, of course, mean my failure to keep: sec-

rets even to myself. They know that life ends, but no one must say so. They know that 70 is well on the way to the end, but that must never be admitted. They don’t deny that a prudent man looks about him as he travels, but they are horrified if he looks ahead. It is a\strange attitude to me, and a kind of false pretence. When one of my children was three he was afraid of cows. If I had to take him past a cow he would hold his hand over that side of his face on which the cow was and turn his head the other way. That is what I am asked to do with the calendar. But I am a day or two past three now and that. childish pretence no longer steadies my feet. I think of Socrates on his last day, waiting for the cup, and explaining to his friends as he waited why be believed that the soul survived the body. The case, as he presented it. seemed to himself unanswerable. But Cebes and Simmias talked for a little by themselves. They would have liked to put further. questions to him, but ‘shrank from asking him to prolong such a painful discussion as they thought he must be finding it, In the end they said so, and Socrates was both surprised and amused. "Dear me, Simmias," he replied. "I shall. find it hard to convince other people that I do not consider my fate a misfortune when I can’t convince even you. You seem to think me inferior in prophetic power to the swans, which, when they find that they have to die, sing more loudly than they ever sang before for joy that they are about to .depart into the presence of God, whose servants they are." . Socrates died nearly 400 years before the birth of Christ. He was then about my age. If his last day had come to him this year, and his last words by some strange chance had found their way into these notes, some of my readers would have called him a silly old man who did not know when ‘to close his mouth. (To be continued)