ENCLOSING WALLS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 988, 25 July 1958, Page 20

ENCLOSING WALLS

bY

SUNDOWNER

JULY 1

SUPPOSE there was a time when sleeping under a roof was a dangerous adventure; especially a roof that gave off sound. Now it is an adventure to sleep under the stars. Except as space cranks. we have lost interest in the stars, and all the pleasures that in good weather go with them. We have forgotten what night is like. But my cows are primitives. Until three weeks ago they had never been in a bail, and two of them have not been there yet. Betty however is now milked

under cover, and this was the first morning when she relaxed sufficiently to chew

her cud. At first I had to drag her inand clean up afterwards. She was afraid of the roof, and she hated the enclosing walls. Though my voice and presence braced her to some extent, she stood uneasily in the very middle of the earthen floor and strongly resisted my efforts to push her over. This resistance remains after 21 days. Walls that she can’t see through terrify her. A roof that makes a noise when birds land on it, and drums in heavy rain, is outside her experience, and well beyond her powers of comprehension It is something I had never thought. of before, but there must have been a time when human beings behaved as Betty is behaving now. There were never enough caves in the world to shelter all its human.inhabitants, and the first man to build a shelter above ground no doubt covered it with leaves or bark or skins. But he must have felt uneasy the first time he slept there, and perhaps made his wife mount guard. It was a long time ago, and historical reconstructions are about as near the facts as religious and political propaganda. My mind will not go back to Adam and it utterly Tejects Eve. But I think Betty is telling me something. I think her restlessness and resistance and bad cow-bail manners reproduce in a dim bovine way, or perhaps I should say repeat, the human fears and hesitations of a period lost forever in the distance. I am not going to sleep tonight under the apple trees. When summer comes I will not sleep in the tussocks with Betty. But I will remember, I hope, some of the lessons’ and suggestions of the last three weeks, and at least now and again go back to the days and nights I lost when civilisation gathered me indoors. * * *

JULY 3

FOR ten minutes or more small groups of gulls have been flying past my window-a hundrd yards out and perhaps five hundred feet up. At first they

were almost continuous-ten or 12 or 20 in a bunch, then a few stragglers, then another bunch. Now the last follower seems to have passed, in the wake of groups that dwindled gradually to three or four, though the full flight must have run into many hundreds, They were all flying from south-west to north-east, and once near the end of the procession

there was a dense mass like a flight of starlings. I can’t think where they are

going at this time of day (7.20 a.m.), where they have come from, or how. the last followers knew where the leaders had gone. If they had been moving from east to west I could have'supposed that they had come from Lyttelton Harbour and the Coast and were orm their way to the ploughed paddocks inland on which, no doubt, they had been feeding all week. But they were moving away from the land to the sea, away from their daylight haunts to what I have always supposed to be their resting place by night; there was no storm in sight or foretold; and they were a good half hour ahead of the sun. The movements of birds of course call for closer observation than most of us usually give them. It was Jim who first pointed out to me that gulls in this valley climb high or drop low according to the wind currents on which they depend for relief from the muscular effort of flying. Now I always see them as gliders rather than as flyers. But there is no wind at the present time-just the stillness of a hard white frost. There is not a cloud in the sky to the north, the direction in which I look from my window, and the two or three small wisps I can see from the back of the house are hanging motionless. It is possible, of course, that gulls are not feeding from the land at present but from the sea, that those I have been watching spend the night on the ‘shingle banks of rivers and not by the sea, and that all I have seen is one of daily flights to their feeding grounds. I do not* sit at my window every morning in the week, and not every morning is so still and ‘clear as this has been, end so revealing.

JULY 6

A LAWYER whose friendship I value and have somehow managed to retain for 30 or 40 years told me today that I often make him mad, It is a trick most of us‘acquire sooner or later, and up to a point it is a good one. Better be a thorn in your frfiend’s side, Thoreau said, than his shadow. But why do we feel that thorn? In nine cases out of ten. because we wish to dominate someone else-make his speaking or his thinking or his acting 4 pleasant experience for ourselves rather

than for him. The men and women who annoy us most -until reason and humour

come to our rescue and we pull ourselves up-are those who go fishing when we want to go shooting; who whistle when we want to sing; who vote Right when we vote Left; who eat meat when we are vegetarians; who say Mondeh when we say Mondee; who believe when we doubt. One of the best women I ever knew turned her back on one of the best men I ever knew because he made one syllable of Moa in Moa Flat. All her life my mother accented the last syllable of committee. All of his life that he spent with her my father corrected her. I get mad when N. bites a thread instead of using scissors. She gets mad when I throw water over a cat that is desecrating the garden. We are born to madness, in other words to intolerance and bad temper, as the sparks fly upward, and I don’t know which ranks highest in the scale of folly — making others mad or getting mad ourselves without a good reason and with no hope at all of removing the cause. But the worst form of this madness is the one to which I am most pronegetting mad at animals when they do something they are bound to do as long as they remain animals: at Betty when she stops two hundred yards up the hill instead of coming all the way down when I call; at Scamp when the temptation to go courting is too strong for him and he slips away behind my back to see Jim’s Fluff; at the rooster who never learns on which side of the garden gate his free hours must be spent; at the sheep which run to the top of the hill if I pass close to them when they are feeding at the bottom of the hill; and at the cats which do not, and can not, learn that the garden is a bird sanctuary. For that form of lunacy even piety makes no provision, and it is in any case fifty years or more since I was capable of the divine madness that might have brought me relief. (To be continued)

MELODY FAIR

y HE New Light Sextet, which takes the air for the first time from YA stations, 3YZ and 4YZ at 9.15 p.m. on Wednesday, July 30, is a band of musicians normally dedicated to more serious

artistic pursuits. They are (from left, above) the leader Ritchie Hanna (violin), Loretto Cunninghame (piano),

Russell. Bond (cello), Jean McCartney (viola), Alex Lindsay (violin) and Geoffrey Newson (bass). In the course of a series of six programmes entitled Melody Fair they will be joined by guest singers Peter Baillie (tenor), Tom Hanna (baritone) and Margaret Hunt (mezzo-

soprano). According to Ritchie Hanna the aoa ee to performance "rather in the Palm Court style" is a relief from straight music but no less difficult to bring off. "You’ve got to play it carefully, and rehearse as carefully as with classical music. And of course there are more people informed enough to know if you don’t." The first programme includes three arrangements by Hamilton Harty, "The Irish Washerwoman," "These Foolish Things," and "The Spanish Troubadour," as well as Bixio’s "Love’s Last Word," "Schoen Rosmarin," by Fritz Kreisler, "We'll Gather Lilacs" from Perchance to Dream and a selection

from The Dancing Years, both by Ivor Novello. The compére of the programme, which will be heard at the same time each Wednesday, is Colin Paul.