ORDEAL IN ARCTIC WATERS

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 28002, 23 June 1956, Page 5

ORDEAL IN ARCTIC WATERS

Adventure Glorious. By Ronald Healiss. Frederick Muller. Through Oswald-Sealy (New Zealand). 144 PP. Of the few survivors when the air-craft-carrier, H.M.S. Glorious, was sunk by the Scharnhorst off Norway in June, 1940, Marine Ronald Healiss was one. He gives first an illuminating account of war-time life on the lower deck, tells how he spent a brief leave, and then the Glorious was sent back to the Norwegian theatre. It is a simple narrative, a good deal of, it in the first person, and moves along smoothly and powerfully. After the Glorious sank Healiss was adrift for four days and nights in Arctic waters before being picked up by a Norwegian trawler. This was a very terrible ordeal. Healiss was at first with others in a boat. Also in it was a New Zealander, Surgeon-Commander T. A. M. Maunsell. of Nelson. Healiss i ecords their conversation as one by one their companions die, some having first lost their reason. Finally he was alone in the boat. Then he saw a Carley float with some men still alive in it. and by a supreme effort swam nearly a mile to join them. Once again he had the awful experience of watching his companions go mad and die. This is a grim and unvarnished account of how men behave as they die of thirst, hunger, and exposure.

INTENSIVE GARDENING, by Dalziel O'Brien (Faber and Faber. 180 pp.) is an exposition of methods and techniques, worked out over twelve years, which have successfully produced large crons at below normal costs, and which have developed soil and controlled weed growth. The methods break with orthodox gardening; they include surface cultivation, composting, and the use of Dutch lights. The methods are fully explained and the working routine of techniques, involving lights, ventilation blocks, tools, is simplified by motion studies. Though primarily intended for commercial growers, intensive gardening as explained by Mr O'Brien is applicable to small gardens. A special chapter is devoted to semicommercial and amateur gardeners.