Miss Hargreaves Comes to Life

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 798, 5 November 1954, Page 15

Miss Hargreaves Comes to Life

AVE you even invented anyone- | made them up on the spur of the. moment, and then gone on talking about | them, as confidently as you like, as if | they really existed? That was what Nor- | man Huntley did when he found himself talking to. the verger in a ghastly, | gloomy old church in Ireland. Norman | and his friend Henry Beddow were on) holiday, and they’d gone into’ the church to shelter from the rain: The ‘verger stuck to them like a leech. and it was when Norman mentioned the late rector and the verger asked if he’d known him |

that Norman "got rather foxy" and said no, but he’d known the rector’s dear | friend Miss Hargreaves-a pure invention. But -that wasn’t the end: of it. For | Norman and Henry wrote to their imaginary Miss Hargreaves at an imaginary address and invited her to stay with the Huntleys. And after they got back home she turned up, and with her the hip bath she always traveiled with, the parrot, the neurotic little dog, the harp -all of which Norman had _ also imagined. Did Norman create her, then, or was she always there, somewhere, and, as Norman’s father said. merely "needed reassembling’? That’s a question to which listeners may find different answers even when they’ve heard the NZBS production of Miss Hargreaves, but there will be no | two opinions about the turmoil: she | caused, especially in the mind of Norman Huntley, when she turned up in the little town of Cornford. Miss Hargreaves, by Frank Baker-who wrote the novel of the same .name-was produced by Bernard Beeby. with Davina Whitehouse as Miss Hargreaves and William Austin (above) ,as' Norman Huntley. The music by Alex and Wendy Lindsay is played by Winifred Carter on the harp, and by Lindsay Macdonald on the organ. Miss Hargreaves, which is described as "a fantastic comedy," will be broadcast first on Sunday, November 14-from 1YA at 3.0 p.m. and from 4YZ at 9.31 p.m.