THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 159, 8 July 1935, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

Lawrence of Arabia, the- compelling personage who was killed while motoring, had a passion for speed of all kinds, although he was so dreamy in his SPEED. nature. „ Some time before his death he wrote to a friend: "It's usually my satisfaction to purr along gently about 60 m.p.h., drinking in the air and the general view. I lose detail even at such moderate speeds, but gain comprehension. When I open out a little more, as, for instance, across Salisbury Plain, at 80 or so, I feel the earth moulding herself under me. ... I could write you pages on the lustfulness of moving swiftly." When father swipes at Junior during the eggs and bacon or mother helps pussy out of the kitchen with a guiding toe no one connects these semi-humorous IMPULSES.! ebullitions of irritation with tragedy. How very like they are to some of the tragedies of savage life is brought out by Sir Hubert Murray, Lieutenant-Governor of Papua, and. a brother of Professor Gilbert Murray, in his annual report. »A Papuan, he writes, "annoyed by the crying of a baby, killed his own mother, and another, unable to find his knife, split open the head of a friend who was sitting next to him. The friend had never seen the knife, but that made no difference." A man was asked to fetch water when he was tired, and set fire to the communal house. A man whose child had died, finding another native up a breadfruit tree, proceeded to cut down the tree and to kill the native with his axe. "But after all," Sir Hubert goes on in comment on this type of crime, "we act sometimes in very much the same way ourselves. I have read that in Australia a man whose wife had eloped gave vent to his feelings by trying to wreck a train. The wife was not on the train, •but the act of violence relieved him. The same principle is illustrated by the story of the Anglo-Indian colonel, who, coming from the War Office after an unsatisfactory interview, relieved his feelings by administering a violent kick to a perfect stranger who was tying his bootlace in the street."—C.W.T.

An Auckland lady who is Englanding for the first time writes to say that she doesn't know how the trains themselves know which one of the hundreds of A BREATH ' lines to travel on to get OF HOME, to the place marked on the noticeboards. This was, of course, before the Welwyn railway disaster, in which seventeen died and forty were injured. She talks of her first glimpse of Surrey. "Lovely fields of buttercups and (Jaisies (which are not noxious weeds in Surrey), park "lands with" glorious old trees —they never burn them down—lovely spring foliage, stately" homes among the immemorial elms", nestling old cottages (complete with thatch)." She heard cuckoos for the first time, sawswallows darting hither and thither with mud in their mouths for their reinforced concrete houses of twig and dirt, and heard the larks singing triumphantly, and not a colonial with a gun anywhere. The air showed a constant procession of aeroplanes on their lawful occasions. The larks take no notice of these bigger birds without the same musical technique. She has seen long vistas of English bluebells in Surrey and at Cambridge—the place where they teach people—and in the woods of St. Albans—and so on. She met a typical English person who is a State official. He has "the same calm, leisurely way of letting the world go by that is so distinctively 'Old Country. , Something will always turn up, and it will always be right." Scotland and Germany, too—lucky girl! By the way, she does not see modern Germany as we see it in the Hitleresque. literary paporama with which we are favoured. Indeed, nobody verbotened her at any point of her journey through the Vaterland', and not a soul was shot at dawn within her hearing.

The reopening in Wellington of a police training depot may remind old blues of Sergeant Dart, a Christ's Hospital (Bluecoat) b&y who ran* the training BOYS IN fi'HIE. depots and later became a lawyer. It was round about the Dartian days when on oecalsions outside influence was occasionally called in to give the young constable an extra polish. For instance, a very large and powerful military person, who was a born showman and who, indeed, became a movie actor like his brothers, used to stage ju jitsu stunts with constables as his meat, and would go round throwing policemen about in a heartless manner—until a policeman learned enough to throw him. There were immensely good wrestling matches between constables in those days, talks of a police band, training in rifle shooting and revolver practice, and all sorts of joy, including the coming of Sandow, the German strong man. Sandow was permitted to teach squads of police '"'muscle control," which largely consisted in bracing the muscles of the abdomen into a sort of quilted pattern and protruding the chest like the breast of a pouter pigeon. Sandow paraded a squad of very fine young constables in the yard of the Wellington Central Fire Brigade station. He took with him a strong young professional helper who braced his turn and whose braced turn Sandow struck" hard with his fist without apparent effect on the subject. He called for police volunteers who wished to be thumped on the turn—and a constable took two paces to the front and braced his abdomen. Sandow gave him a hard back-handed smack—and laid him out, and seemed to be rather sorry. The constable hadn't learned enough muscle control.

Browsing on Sunday pasture in English country papers, in which the squire and Hodge each has his place, one noted an innovation. One paper gives a FAITHFUL diploma to any man or HEARTS, woman who has faithfully served a master or missus for a, long series of years. Thus a hardylooking bucolic, complete in jquilted smockfrock, as the photograph shows, has been diplomaed for having served forty years on a sewage farm. Hβ is shown in the letterpress not only to be very proud of being a sewage helper but in having enjoyed complete health all that time, barring, of course, the four years in which he served with the Army in France and got peppered a bit. All that is left out is whether Garge has been paid— and how much—for all these years, why he didn't become a lawyer or a doctor while he was young, and so forth. Perhaps the proudest diploma-tist is a cattleman who has tended the home cattle of a family celebrated throughout the Empire, and much further, for its stupendous deals in cattle, and to whom millions are as naught and millions of acres in overseas lands a mere cipher. Willum has been fifty years on the job—has risen without a single miss at four-thirty in the morning and has done his work without intermission up to evening. But it is proudly, stated that Willum has lived in a hut in the bleak cleft of a valley all those years, and that invariably when there is snow the Willum household is flooded. Willum the Uncomplaining cheerfully observes to the interviewer and giver of diplomas that 'im and 'is missus do build a wall of rocks all round the. hut to keep out the floods. There is no explanation as to why the kind millionaire who has permitted Willum to live in a flooded cleft in the eai'th for fifty years didn't dig Bill out of his hole forty-five years ago and give him a thousand a year. Still, Bill gets a diploma,, bless 'is faithful 'art.