The Pitcher And The Well Paul's Book Arcade, 15/-

Te Ao Hou, September 1962, Page 53

The Pitcher And The Well Paul's Book Arcade, 15/- ‘In the beginning there was a very small boy and a very big river. A poverty-stricken home in a small, drab New Zealand town. It rained endlessly … of course I knew no other place, so at the time it seemed a pleasant enough home town. It was home, you see.’ This is the anonymous autobiography of a New Zealand airman. He wrote it during the last war while he was lying in a German prison hospital suffering from injuries from which he eventually died. It is written in the form of letters to a friend in New Zealand, but this is really only a way of giving his book a convenient framework; perhaps all autobiographies are best written either as letters or in the form of a diary. The slightly pompous introductory blurb says that ‘the author found in his job as navigator of a British bomber a life more satisfactory than he managed to find in peace-time. He hadn't done very well either as a careerist or as a man. In war he found a more creditable sense of achievement …’ He was a brilliant navigator, and his accounts of his war experiences are very vivid and exciting. ‘The Pitcher And The Well’ is certainly, as has been said, one the best of all war books. In my opinion, though, the most notable thing about this book is that it is the first really mature autobiography written by a New Zealander. The self-portrait that he presents is a very frank one, and in many respects it is far from flattering. But this is clearly due more to a most unusual self-knowledge and honesty, to a tough intelligence and to adult emotions, than to any very remarkable iniquity on his part. Any good autobiography tells us something new about ourselves; a good autobiography by a New Zealander tells us more than most. If you once start this book, I'm fairly sure you'll be hypnotised into reading every word of it.