THOSE WERE THE DAYS

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 267, 10 November 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

THOSE WERE THE DAYS

RETURN OF THE NATIVE. BURIED TROYS. (By H.F.C.) "Philemon and his wife turned towards the valley where, >t sunset, only the day before, they had scpji the meadows, the houses, the gardens, the clumps of trees, the wide green-margined street, with children playing in it, and all the tokens of business, enjoyinent, and , prosperity. But what was their astonishment! There whs no longer an}' appearance of a village. Even the fertile vale, in the hollow of which it lay, had ceased to have existence. In its stead they beheld the broad blue surface of a lake, which filled the great basin of the valley from brim to brim, and rellected the surrounding hills in its bosom with as tranquil an image as if it had been there ever since the creation of the world." So we used to read in our battered copy of Hawthorne's Wonder Book. But such wonders are not confined to the days of myth and legend. Give a colonial town ten years or so and its achievements in the way of burying the past will leave the Elder Stranger gasping in astonished envy. The indefatigable Schlicmann, when he went α-diggiug in Asia Minor, unearthed —was it live Troys? Why, any New Zealand city in half the time would have doubled the number.

The Bungaloid Epidemic. The other day I chanced to pass through the suburb in which I spent a happy childhood, and which I have avoided for many years, dreading to revive memories of a family that was in days now incredibly remote. I need not have feared. The difficulty, after some iiftcen years' absence, was to find any familiar landmark on the whole eight acres or the surrounding country. Some time ago, the old house went up in red flames that, rejoicing in the sound and seasoned timber, lit the sky for miles around. I was glad not to see it standing tall, 'shabby, and aloof, above the aggressive newness of the clustered villadom beneath. For the whole countryside is smoothed into a smug uniformity of concrete paths, wireless masts, and hot little rock gardens. The bright vacuity of. suburbia has replaced the spacious untidiness of an ampler era. Gone is the old pump in the poplar-shaded hollow, with its grim legend of darker deeds upon a dark night. Eaiher morbid, it may be euggested, the sentimentality that bewails the obliteration of the scene of a murder but at least the place had character then. Local Celebrities. Character, and character, too. I often wonder, to adapt the llubaiyat, what mass education givee one half so precious as the individuality it destroys. Rourke, for instance, had not that smattering of astronomy which enables primary school children nowadays to eolve the riddle of the universe. He didn't like comets. "Be sure," said he, of one particularly fine specimen, "it's there for no good." . _

Ked-haired and red-bearded, lineal descendant of the "rough, rug-headed kerne" of Richard ll.'s day, Bourke was the dour liunioui'lcss Irishman more conynon in real life than tradition allows. O'Kyan, his neighbour and ours, ran truer to type. Always charmingly deferential to his betters and never to be trusted a yard, he reminded one of the Irishman in the old "Punch" story who, as he lies behind a hedge waiting to let off 1113 gun at his landlord, becomes anxious at the delay and hopes "notliin's happened to the masther." Yet O'Kyan, tilling his fields with his old wife trotting after him, the stable manure carried in a fold of her skirt, looked the very picture of the honest simple peasant. Still, he would never ''break your heart with a bad answer." Cockney Prejudice. But there were pleasanter examples of the blessings of ignorance. Dear old Carnaby, our stout-hearted Cockney coachman, was a bundle of immovable prejudices. He loved horses and disliked clergymen, and when he found the vicar riding a horse with a sore back, he was angry, but not surprised. The Chinese race stood even lower in his regard than the clergy. Driving my mother one day in our old-fashioned landau he overtook a Chinaman on a bicycle. Carnaby, from the box-seat, with a characteristic half-turn of his head, remarked grimly, "Well, mum, when them things starts ridin' bicycles, its about time 'innan bein's left off." This idea, carried to its logical conclusion, would have placed the human race in a rather difficult position, but Carnaby was above logic. Then there w.as Crichton, amia.ble if not admirable, who was reported to have seen better days. The only evidence of his high birth was Ms all-round incompetence. When he should have been working he was often composing what we children, in common with the author, Grmly believed to be poetry. Only one line, from an elegy on the fate of a local steeplechase rider, remains with me: — In the zenith of Ms glory a noble jockey fell. 'My father, I remember, completed the couplet with a ribald rhyme, which we felt to be lacking in reverence—for Crichton. A Warning. So one might go on maundering without end, for the literature of reminiscence is often a literature of escape, the cowardly closing of a door upon the problems "of the present, the hiding of our ostrich-like heads in the sands'of the past in the hope that when we at length open a timid eye we may find that this strange and disturbing new world was only a passing shadow that had obscured for a moment the comfortable solidity and permanence of a, changeless reality. When life becomes a wistful retrospect, a lament for vanished joys—in that hour and not till then old age descends upon us. But occasionally to take a backward glance; to dwell lightly on scenes that havo the exquisite precision and unreality of a landscape viewed from the wrong end of a telescope; even to maintain, without rancour, that those were indeed the days—dhe may do all these and still enjoy the cukes and ale pf modernity.