RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 48

RANDOM REMINDER

PEGGING OUT

A sense of vocation helps a good many along the road. It’s may be' much better to spend a lifetime cracking walnuts and packing them up in crumpled paper bags for distribution among the needy than sweating it out on the uncomfortably jagged top branch of some commercial tree. Perhaps an income which looks like a national debt is some sort of minor compensation: but you’re better off with the walnuts, if you are drawn to them, and find a macabre satisfaction in bashing the things to bits. Being happy in what you are doing is more than half the battle. It may mean a great loss all round

if someone with the talent of an Olivier is desperately anxious to spend his life making inefficient mousetraps, but there is seldom much sense in trying to resist such an urge. It is remarkable the extremes to which the conflict between environment and instinct will lead one. A particularly bizarre case is that of a. woman we know in Auckland. She is bright and intelligent, and can put her hand successfully to most things. But the most satisfying parttime job she has had is her present one. It starts at 8 a.m. and ends at 2 p.m. It is at a very large boys’ secondary school, and her duties consist only of pegging out washing. We do

not have all the details as to numbers of boys and articles of laundry, and it is just as well, for it seems a pretty dreadful fate even on a superficial examination. One does not need a very vivid imagination to picture the monotony of pegging up score after score of school socks, all of similar colour. She never gets into the laundry, and they won’t let her pick up an iron. Her job is to stick in the pegs, for mile after mile of washing from hordes of revolting little boys. There can be only one explanation: she must be at one with the lunatic who kept hitting his head against a wall because it was so nice when he stopped.