Coming Round the (Country) Bend

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 811, 11 February 1955, Page 14

Coming Round the (Country)

Bend

with

DENIS

GLOVER

NAY friend Mamble is back from a holiday in the country. There are gorse prickles under his nails, and biddy-bids still in his hair. He walks with a slight limp, due to fighting across a hill with no properly marked pedestrian crossing. Thé skin is burnt off his sun-searching nose, and a Thing stung him on the back of the neck. Says Mamble: The country vegetates with too much useless vegetation. The country is too accommodating: it offers, with bland fecundity, a choice of Scotch thistles to sit on in one paddock, and Californian in the next. The country works too fast. When you put down a city pavement you expect it to stay down (except for odd drain-layers) for quite some years; scrubcutting in the country is more hazardous than fast traffic, because you cut your way in and have to cut your way out almost immediately. The country is too noisy. Most of the night there is the throbbing racket of the generator plant, succeeded by owls that hoot or screech with echoing despair. The falsest of false dawns is cracked by cockcrow, and this sets off a

multitude of so-called singing birds badly in need of elementary harmony. The country is too populous. There come zooming in either blowflies anxious to deposit left luggage or bees curious about your bright blue shirt. Cows moo lustily for their early morning milk, and the disgusted baa of sheep to sheep bespeaks a great weariness with life. Next, the sharp, endless din of crickets (or locusts, or cicadas, or all three million per sq. m.), which they apparently achieve by scratching their backs with their feet. The country has too much traffic A tractor hotly claws its way up every hillside, and dogs bark themselves to a frenzy in the bursting broom. No farmer ever walks anywhere. The country is short of fresh air. If it isn’t a procession of passing cers, a top-dressing plane spreading a fine choking dust over everything. Let the welkin ring, says Mamble--he prefers the office phone. The only way to see the country, says Mamble, is through a powerful pair, of binoculars, from a long way off. He intends, says Mamble, to spend his next holidays in the city, as nature intended.