"DARKEST PONDELAYO."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

"DARKEST PONDELAYO."

THEY ATE THEIR SPINACH. Through Darkest Pondelayo" (Chatto and Windus) reads like the title of a travel book until the roving eye lights on the name of the author —Serena Livingstone Stanley. Then it dawns on the reader that he is being spoofed, and an excellent bit of spoofing it is. The author is Beckett Lindsay, wife of Daryl Lindsay, youngest of the three author artist brothers of Australia, and the daughter of the late Judge Weigall, and her book of travel is a clever bit of fooling from foreword to epilogue. The Island of Pondelayo is not on any map, but it ought to be; it would certainly add to the gaiety of Tiations if shiploads could follow the trail blazed by Serena, her sister Frances, their maid Flacket, their gentlemen friends, the learned judge and Mr. Garble, their guide, philosopher and friend. They first heard of Pondelayo at a lecture in Little Waghornct, and coming into »n opportune legacy, Serena decides to finance an expedition to the island, a weird laud where the natives live on spinach, but take to a missionary diet when the crop fails. Serena tells the story of the expedition in letters and in extracts from her diary. And a funny story it is, too. Serena drops malapropisms, and sandwiches them in between the quaintest freaks of mis-spelling and "unpnnctuation." A sample perhaps gives the best idea of how it is done. In this one the writer tells of the party's reception by the King of Pondelayo:—"A hideous little pi'jrmy calling himself a Minister has arrived in a magnificent torso of peacock feathers, to escort.us all down to the palace on twenty jet black mules. The Minister (whose name is Togo, which sounds more like a dog than a Minister) says the king saw us coming last night from the palace window, and stayed up all night, hoping we would pay him an informal call. The Minister is now picking his teeth in the shade, waiting for us to get dressed. Well, I must say, I little thought I should be entering royal circles for the first time in my life on a Monday morning in last year's coat and skirt, and very little of that after all these weeks in the jungle. However, riaeket has found a few orchids to pin over the worst holes, so we must hope for the/best. . . . My first sight of a Pondelayan palace was a great disappointment —no marble staircases or anything of that sort; not even a flag or a ladies' cloakroom. F. and I had hoped for a few minutes to fix our hair, hut we were not even asked inside, the whole thing taking place outside a iniserable collection of palm-leaf huts built round a sort of courtyard. On hearing us coming his majesty came running out of one of the huts very simply dressed in a grass kilt and waving a tin mug with a quite informal coronet of tiger's teeth worn slightlv over the riiht eye. but as Fiances said. everv inch a king, in spite of the kilt."