Keeping the Peace

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 918, 15 March 1957, Page 17

Keeping the Peace

by

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 19

SYMPATHISE with the correspondent ("Just Joe") who sent this suggestion the other day to the editor of a daily newspaper: Why all the trouble of making a road into Lake Sumner? .. . I suggest closing the existi track with a few well-placed shots. By mg this we would preserve one of the most peaceful spots in Canterbury from teddy boys, bodgies, milk-bar cowboys, boats, trigger-happy shooters, and the big-time business men who can afford to desecrate the. area with their elaborate week-end joints. It is, of course, selfish sympathy, and useless. The bodgies and big business men have the same rights to mountains

ang iakes @&@S 4° have, and far better means of asserting

them. They will surrender neither their right to go nor their right to gape, their right to open their throats nor their pleasure in opening their throttles, in blaring their radios and parading their bellies and backs, in splashing, shouting, rocking and rolling, and doing all the other strange things expression of their selves makes necessary. We want a free country and must not complain if freedom has a price. I suspect, too, that it is better to have the bodgies with the business men than the big-time business men by themselves. But if I were a sheep-farmer near Lake Sumner; if I were a shepherd or an angler; if I owned a hut there, or lived by killing opossums or deer; if I went there regularly to watch birds, . or listen to them; if I had a hunter’s, a butcher’s, or a naturalist’s interest in the wild pigs; if I were young enough to enjoy following the greenstone trail to Westland and generous enough to share my blood with the sandflies, I might approach "Just Joe" through his editor and offer to help with the "wellplaced shots."

FEBRUARY 22

oat ee and "EANCY seeing you at a cricket match," she said, turning on me her bright smile and prodding me where my ribs used to be before they sank beyond reach of the friendliest hand. But it was not my first cricket match,

or my twenty-tirst. I watch cricket because it is the only

game I can follow without asking Silly questions: the only game whose rules I know in general and whose terms I used, to know when they were English, geographical, and terrestrial. I can’t identify the Chinaman they have lately dragged in, and I refuse to be initiated into the atmospheric mysteries. But until last week thought I knew when a ball was not a ball. I imagined that bowlers who release the ball as often from before as from behind the wicket would be no-balled and disciplined. But | I forgot that time marches on; that games are play, not politics, or morality, or law; and that play should be freefreer than it usually is, and in any case as free as the players choose to make it. But I have another reason for going to cricket matches. More than any other game they awake the dying and the dead. To sit a few tows up and watch the spectators streaming past is to see more old men and more ageing women, more halt and maimed and decrepit enthusiasts of both sexes than will be seen in any other gathering of the same size anywhere. I never know whether to

weep or laugh when I see them, to be depressed when I realise what the years are doing to us or to rejoice that they can’t do anything to us to keep us at home in summer unless they cut off our powers of locomotion altogether. Some of us grow garrulous with age, and when that happens we can be a mild nuisance with our interjections and comments. But most of us in age are what we were in youth-the same piece of mechanism slowed down and losing its smooth rhythm. These it is a delight to watch at a cricket match-they are so happy, so interested, so unselfconscious, and in most‘ cases as oblivious of the passing minutes’ as they are of the years that have passed since they played themselves. But if I had said all that while she held my hand some young fellow of 60 would have shouted to me-as one later in the day did: "Keep going, Pop, you’re blocking the gangway." a *

FEBRUARY 23

HEN I met a horse recently on the highway pulling a dray I thought it would have been very little more surprising to meet an elephant. It occurred to me, too, that in a few more years such an encounter will be quite

impossible, and that when dray horses finally disappear it

will be difficult for young farmers to believe that they ever existed. Then I came home again and found this in a letter in my mail: Some months or years ago you said something about horses being driven or directed by word of mouth. In May-or thereabouts-of 1915 I was stationed in a French mining village called Marles-les-Mines. There was a rough form of central square. Into it about four times a week came a man leading on a single rein a horse drawing a loaded farm wepece. He had to persuade it to turn a_ half-circle and back the waggon into the mouth of an open shed. This he accomplished by means of some guiding by the rein, but mainly

by either two or three--I forget which--words of command, The only command I can recall with certainty might have been written Gito: it sounded ‘Ghee-taw," the second part being long drawn out, That was to back, The operation was efficiently carried out, Now I hardly know which to place first: the timeliness of the letter, the cleverness of the horse, or the fact that an animal intelligent enough to effect such a difficult manoeuvre was not too intelligent to work at all. But if horses had been twice as intelligent and ten times as useful they would still be on the way out-unless they were delayed a little here, as they have been in Britain, by the Continental habit of eating them. I have not seen any recent figures, but it is only a year or two since I read that 40,000 horses had been killed in England and sent to Belgium for human consumption. If a horse has ever been eaten in New Zealand I have not heard of ‘it, But the Marles-les-Mines incident raises the question of a horse’s intelligence, which has been controversial since Alexander the Great. It was probably a cynical joke, an expression of his contempt for human _ intelligence, when Caligula made his horse a consul. So when Mohomet rode Alborak in one night from Mecca to Jerusalem only Gabriel was allowed to see the horse, which the Prophet apparently took with him to Heaven. We might as well turn to Swift for information about horses as take it from the Koran. But every age has its equine legends, and if most of them are too legendary to be really interesting, the arithmetical horses of Elberfeld in Germany were at least real horses, and near enough to us in time to be accepted without a bucketful of salt. The best account of those, I have been told, is Maurice Maeterlinck’s, which I have not seen. But Maeterlinck was a mystic, and the claims made for these horses are wholly mathematical: that they could not merely count, but reckon or calculate, and that their adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing was of early grammar school standard. It depresses me to think that there is no better use in the world at present for these potential Einsteins than keeping down the price of beef. (To be continued)

DISTANT ASSIGNMENT

HE only reporter to accompany the '" main party of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition when it

went south in . the Magga Dan a few months ago, Donald Milner had the distinc-

tion of carrying out the most distant assignment ever undertaken by a BBC

correspondent. Listeners who have heard his re ports will be interested in this picture of him in Antarctic kit and with the waterproof midget recorder which he used on the trip. Thirty-four years old, Donald Milner is the son of an Anglican minister. When he. was 19 he joined the Navy as an able seaman and by the end of the war held the rank of lieutenant. He served in India, Ceylon, and the Mediterranean. After the war he took a B.A. in modern history at Keble College, Oxford, and in 1950 joined the staff of the Times Literary . Supplement. Later he transferred to The Times itself. His first job for the BBC was as a reporter in the News Division. In the midst of preparations for

his departure for Shackleton Base, "inoculation and vaccination, extending my insurance, renewing my passport, making my will, stopping the milk," and so on, he went off and. got married to a London. girl-‘"just to complicate matters at the eleventh hour,’ as he put. it.