As I Hear... TO BEGIN WITH, SPUDS

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30901, 6 November 1965, Page 5

As I Hear.. . TO BEGIN WITH, SPUDS

IBy

J.H.E.S.]

I don’t know if it has occurred to anybody else, as it has to me, that the exchange across the Tasman about the quality of the New Zealand potatoes shipped to Australia left something in doubt We were told, day by day, that the potatoes were unwelcomed by wholesalers and retailers, were being left on the floors, were in poor condition, and were rotting. Here we were bold that the spuds were jolly good spuds and were finding their market at a fair price. Of course tMs is history repeating itself. I can very well remember, many years ago, the fierce opposition of Australian growers and market interests to the import of New Zealand potatoes, however great the scarcity there, and the immense to-do about the diseases that our potatoes were going to introduce to the pure Australian fields. . . . But have we been told plainly enough, authoritatively enough, that our recent exports were of first-class quality? Of such quality as to ensure us, in periods of Australian scarcity, a ready market? * • * I admit, though, that I have personal reasons for being uneasy about the spuds. For some time, now, I have been buying so-called “new” potatoes. As usual, I have been disappointed; for they have been green-skinned and toughskinned, difficult to scrape, when, of course, first-early potatoes ought to be rubbable. As the season has advanced these importers—grown under a thin layer of soil?—have been superseded by better ones, much easier to scrape but still necessary to scrape. Now, when I farmed in Opawa, I had new potatoes from Show Week on; and they rubbed clean. So through to autumn. And if I lifted—which is the word to be preferred to “dug”—more than the house presently required, as when I wanted the ground for a row of peas, then the surplus, stored in brownpaper bags, would still, days later, rub off easily. Why cannot we buy such rubbable potatoes? The best I can buy, from a first-class greengrocer, can be scraped, yes; but I have to watch for bruises and punctures and burns. Why do we pay millions of pounds for our highways, if not to bring our farm and garden produce swiftly to the markets and the ships and in first-class condition? A few days ago I read somebody’s plaintive inquiry why we could not buy washed and waxed potatoes, such as came on the New Zealand market a few years ago from (I suppose) Vermont Well, of course, the answer is that some New Zealand growers installed the plant to wash and wax potatoes, wMch ran at a correspondingly higher price, but not much higher. But our economical housewives disliked the higher price, and

preferred to save a few pence on the stone, and to foul and rough their fingers in cleaning the standard product.

This, of course, takes me to my pet theme: why housewives buy lettuces at half-a-crown, now down to Is 3d to make a bad salad, when they could buy oranges at a much better rate. There is no special virtue in a lettuce, usually of one leafy, tasteless kind. It consists of nothing but cellulose and water; and much good may it do you. You may spend your money to much greater advantage upon oranges and lemons. It seems that this is the season for corrections. A wise correspondent, “Lowick,” tells me that the word I wrote about, on October 23, was not “intarissible,” as my interlocutor spelt it out for me on the telephone, but “intarissable”: a French word meaning “not to be dried up,” a word said to be known to some members of the staff of “The Press” and to many sixth-form students of French. Yes, that is as may be; but I was concerned only to say, in my con-

Across s—Samuel’s leading graduate a dance! (5) 8— Songbird makes a colourful beginning. (8) 9 Read letter by letter the magic formula. (5) 10 — Important person in a certain group. (8) 11— Many have a bit of fish-ing-tackle in this basket! (5) 14—Dined and to some extent stuffed. (3) 16— Painter takes climbing plant from narrow gorge. (6) 17— Get boat refitted on inside. (6) 18— Urge flip after one? (3) 20 —Cited in decree. (5) 24 — Wheat meal is heavy at first but you’ll thrive on it (8) 25 Get language of the French in one month? (5) 26 Go forward per 1 down as ordered. (8) 27 For this girl the end is the middle. (5)

versation with my lady of Paraparaumu, that I didn’t know her word as she spelled it for me, and could not trace it in the Shorter Oxford. I might have added that I snatched a look for the spelling “-able”; and that is not there either. But I cut it short. As for the sixth-form pupils who will know “intarissable” and hoot at my ignorance, God bless them.

In this context, I see that my old friend R. A. Cuthbert has picked up my old master, Professor Wall, on a confusion of Laurence Housman and the great A. E. Housman. This starts me upon a double coincidence. I happened to be reading my great uncle Samuel Johnson's preface to his Dictionary of the English language and came, as often before, on these words: A writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task, which Scaliger compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; . . . what is obvious is not always known, and what is

Down 1— Rank or number. (5) 2 A. mother’s made President of America. (5) 3 Uses knife with point after clubs taken up. (5) 4 Captain’s place is over 16, perhaps. (6) 6 Irate spy being harsh. (8) 7 Missile at home making news. (8) 12— Her award was for ironmongery. (8) 13— Cut up firm fish. (8) 14— What one is paid for a good meal (Not a penny!) (3) 15— Follow a deity upwards. (3) 19—Girl finds mineral in abundance. (6) 21— Gig infested with insects. (5) 22 Hailing communist taken on. (5) 23 Rift in the Church as marked now? (5) (Solution Page 12)

known is not always present; . . . sudden fits of Inadvertency will surprise vigilance, slight avocations will surprise vigilance, and casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and .. . the writer shall often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need, for that which yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come uncalled into his thoughts tomorrow.

And that is the memorial apology for such forgetfulness as Professor Wall’s and such ignorance as mine. At the same time —to complete the coincidences—l was reading John Carter’s book of A. E. Housman’s Selected Prose, as I do every two or three years. I realised once more that, if you are a scholar, you do not excuse faulty scholarship, whether in your friends or in your rivals. When Housman, having failed in his Greats finals, became a Patents Office public servant and became known as a classical scholar by his contributions to learned journals, he was recommended for the chair of I.atin at London University by Arthur Palmer: “Mr Housman’s position is in the very first rank of scholars and critics,” said Palmer. This was in 1892. Seven years later Housman reviewed Palmer’s edition of the Heroides of Ovid. He gave Palmer a very high place among Ovid’s editors, but with inexorable justice and regardless of Palmer’s helping hand, he ended: His was a nimble but not a steady wit: it could ill sustain the labour of severe and continuous thinking; so he habitually shunned that labour. He had no ungovernable passion for knowing the truth about things: he kept a very blind eye for unwelcome facts and a very deaf ear for unwelcome argument, and often mistook a wish for a reason . . . He had much natural elegance of taste, but it was often nullified by caprice and wilfulness, so that hardly Merkel himself has proposed uncouther emendations. Moreover, Palmer was not, even for his own age and country, a learned man. He read too little, and he attended too little to what he read; and with all his genius he remained to the end of his days an amateur. And these defects he crowned with an amazing and calamitous propensity to reckless assertion.

The was A. E. H., at his mildest. What did he do with those he scorned!