Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 923, 18 April 1957, Page 20

Open Microphone

od NEWS OF BROADCASTERS ON AND OFF THE RECORD

| SOLDIER-SAILOR

"T DON’T think living on the sea as a child, as we did on D’Urville Island, gave a love of the sea-it simply made me realise I did love it,’ Adrian Hayter (above) told us recently. We had asked him about the more distant backeround to the lone voyage in the

Sheila II from England to New Zealand which he has

been describing in. recent broadcast talks. "On D’Urville Island al] boats were interesting, from visiting scows to take our wool and cattle, to fishermen’s launches," he said. "The horror of returning to school at the end of the holidays was always off-set by the launch trip to Nelson." School for young Acrian Hayter was Nelson College, where his "passion" was gymnastics-he won the Senior Cup in his last year, 1931--and he was also keen on boxing and swimming. "I played football, too," he said, "but I have never been any good at team games." How did he become a professional soldier? "When a kind relative offered to put me through Sandhurst, I accepted, not because I wanted to be a soldier, but as a chance to see the world. From the first I was determined to go to a Gurkha Regiment, and 15 years’ service with them taught me they are the finest people a man can know, and some of my most trusted and deepest friends are still among them. Leaving them was the biggest sacrifice demanded by this voyage." Major Hayter saw prewar service in India and on the NorthWest Frontier, and during the war was an instructor, then at Arakan, and in Malaya, where he also saw four years of the anti-bandit war. Major Hayter learned the rudiments of sailing from his elder brother, who built his first boat on D’Urville Island as a boy. "Later it was only a matter of re-applying the principles of flightI had my A Licence flying." Before he planned the long voyage there were also odd outings in sharpies and dinghies in. India and Malaya, but he had never sailed in a yacht. Now busy on a book about his voyage, Major Hayter has no other interest at present. "Being a travel book it is mainly about people met, which automatically embraces every possible subject mentionable-and a few not. My indoor recreation is reading. Aldous

Huxley’s Ends and Means is a favourite of mine; for beauty I like such books as Gallico’s Love of Seven Dolls, and I enjoy novels on the lines of Moulin Rouge and Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge." His outdoor recreation is his work-cutting scrub, mowing lawns, and so on. The book is about half done, "going slowly but well-who knows? I'd hoped to sell Sheila so the proceeds could keep me while I wrote full time. There’s no other boat in New Zealand with her beauty of line or record-why hasn’t she sold?" But she hasn’t, so Major Hayter has taken a job as caretaker on a beautiful place in Marlborough Sounds, writing. half each day, working the other. "A cook-cum-typist would more than double the time I could spend actually writing, but it wouldn’t work-this place is so, heavenly we’d fall madly in love and wreck the whole enterprise! It is strange how the attainment of something good can be the biggest menace to the attainment of something better." What he will do when the book is finished Major Hayter hasn’t yet decided. "I believe," he told us, "that if you wait the right answer comes, and then is the time to go flat out after ity What it will be, and where it will take me I haven’t the faintest idea."

POET

¥* ESIDES being a poet of great distinction, Dame Edith Sitwell has engaged in all kinds of literary activity, not even disdaining a script-writing visit to Hollywood, where she had a striking

personal success. Her poetry, with its brilliant use of verbal imagery, is particularly suit-

able for reading aloud, and she herself has always been interested in this aspect of the poet’s art. The brittleness of much of her early work was changed to a more sombre mood in her poetry of the Second World War, which incluced the famous "Still Falls the Rain." This poem and another, "We Are the Darkness," set to music by Benjamin Britten, are part of The Heart of the Matter, to be heard from 1YC and 2YC on Easter Day and 3YC and 4YC the day after. In this programme Dame Edith reacs some of her own poems.