RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31085, 14 June 1966, Page 30

RANDOM REMINDER

FIELDS OF LABOUR

The average city dweller sees his country cousin as ' a healthy, wealthy unhappy sort of chap, exercising a brooding rule over vast productive acres. The town wife looks on the country woman as a reminder of the old American south. But in the last couple of days two letters have reached us from country readers in which bitter complaints about the rural way of life are made. Well, one of them actually deals with an incident in the city, but basically the complaints are the same. A peninsula farmer sold up and came to live in Christchurch, buying a very expensive house in a very exclusive suburb. His wife, city-born and-bred, was clearly happy to be home, and particularly to be in so handsome a neighbourhood. One day she mentioned in passing that she was out of sugar and would ring the grocer for a bag. Her husband, thinking here was something he

could do other than study his rate demand and count the stream of traffic hurtling and hooting by, went outside and found his wheelbarrow—a very old one, brought in from the farm. Thus armed, he went down to the shop, brought the sugar and wheeled it home again. She was horrified and ashamed: nearly as much as the other correspondent, a young woman who shares with her husband the pride and the problems of a small dairy farm. She was married, starry-eyed, little more than a year ago. Now she reckons she should be included in the annual inventory of farm stock. What has upset her is the calm belief of the farm animals that they should share their problems with her. It’s a sort of here we are all together attitude. Or so she felt last month. She was about to produce her first-born, but the wonder of motherhood was not hers alone. She discovered that just about every animal on the farm for whom the miracle is

possible was also producing. It seems to take the gloss off it for her. One of the most clearly pregnant was a large sow whose time was almost on her, and who was clearly dissatisfied with the arrangements made for her confinement. Inspired no doubt by the sight through a window of a newly-pre-pared bassinette, she took over. The young lady was out of the house for a while, and the sow came in through an open back door, took up residence, and settled down to a large meal of apples. She was evicted. But she knew her rights. She made a valiant attempt to force an entry —noisily, at 5 a.m. next day. Again she was thrown out: but later in the morning she had her litter. The man of the house came in to tell his wife that the sow had had 12. And, remembering the appreciable lowering of her status in the last year, she doesn't think he will regard one, or even two, from her as a reasonable contribution.