DISAPPOINTMENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 23, 28 January 1937, Page 8

DISAPPOINTMENT.

COCKNEY IN LONDON.

RETURNS TO DOMINION.

NEW ZEALAND PREFERABLE.

Volleys of rude colonial laughter greeted the landing in Auckland this week of the little gentleman known as "Wally"—a cockney, and protid of it! In justice to him it must be added immediately that his laugh was as loud as any, and. when he faced the "jollying" of old friends, he grinned and confessed: "Gee! I've been looking forward to this for weeks."

All of which must sound like noii sense to those who do not know Wally and his circle of friends, unless they readthrough thin paragraph, in which his previous history will be outlined as briefly as possible. Wally is a cockney, and proud (he calls it "prahd") of being one. His father was an Army officer, his birthplace Fleet, Street, his destiny led him into the cinema business when the "movies" were still a novelty. He preserved a whole skin through four years of war, and, 11 years ago, quit his native pavements for New Zealand. Here he found disappointment! a people who called him "Pommy," and businessmen shrewder than he, who soon dissipated the capital he brought with him. Soured, bitterly soured, he dreamed of London, and his comments on New Zealanders, their manners, morals and the country they inhabited, brought him many times within an ace of "'getting hia head knocked off."'

So Wally took ship, as a passage worker, last November to "go Home."'

He has come back in the same ship, after spending just under a fortnight in the city of his birth, and candidly admits that he is glad to set foot again in Xew Zealand. Those who called him "Pommy," and. on occasions, brandished knuckly fists under his noso when he criticised too bitterly the ways of the colonials, welcomed him with laughter and he fell into their anus, declaring that henceforth he wants to be a Xew Zealander.

His impressions and opinions of the Loml'Hi of to-day have to be Howdlerised for publication. As he still speaks in the dialect of the cockney, it must be understood that most of the substantives in his speech are preceded by one or other of the adjectives "bleedin' " and "perishin. , " To save type metal we shall omit them.

"Talk about London," quoth Wally, "BHnie, of all the so-and-so sort of places, London beats them all. It's the world's worse. Stink and dirt and hungry cadgers. That's London. -,

Old Ways Change

The first blow to Wally'3 pride was dealt by his fellow Cockneys and shipmates aboard the steamer in which he went Home. Because he had picked up, in eleven years spent in New Zealand, some colonial expressions, they classed him as a so-and-so colonial. Then, at the gateway of his native city, the immigration authorities queried his right to enter, and passed him, eventually, only as an "alien," under bond. Next was the brief railway journey from Customhouse station to Fenchurch Street.

"You pass rows and rows of dirty chimney pote and filthy backyards," said Wally to-day. "When I saw those. I knew that London would be no good to me. I had spent too long in the free, clean air of New Zealand. I was feeling bad when I got aboard the train, because, at the dock gates, there was a whole crowd of fellows bailing us up and asking, 'Hay, mate, haven't you the price of a drink?' On top of that the train trip—and then London.

"It isn't the London I knew. It is the 'new Jerusalem.' The costermonger. as a type, is extinct. There is none of the old 'Hail fellow well met' sort of hospitality now. When I first came to New Zealand I thought the colonials were hard, suspicious, cold and mean compared with the Cockney. The Cockney of to-day is harder and colder than a Xew Zealander can be. He has been too hard up against it. apparently. All the good old free and easy ways are dead.

"London weather? Well, enow the first day I was there, drizzling rain iV'i second and a fog the third. The London of to-day conies to life at night, with shows that eo as close to indecency ae they dare. In thie respect London is worse than Paris."

Wally spent two days less than a fortnight in London. Had he been able to order the ship's movements she would have left there even sooner than she did.