RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31142, 19 August 1966, Page 20

RANDOM REMINDER

SIDE STEPPING

The collection for the blind, made at the end of last month, was an outstanding success, except for some of the collectors. From this cornucopia of confidences could come some strange tales, for a door to door collection gives the door to door collector a clear insight into human nature. Most of the findings are encouraging. The unwilling householders, however rare, get up to some strange tricks. One woman collector went round the side of a house puzzled about which door to use, and where it was. As she stood there, she glanced at a window and there inside was a man, staring at her. Their gazes became fixed, each on the

other, for an appreciable period. Then she saw the door, a yard or so away, and rang the bell. It sounded loudly inside. Nothing happened. She rang again. And after a long pause she discovered that the man inside simply had no intention of answering It. The community spirit of another collector has not been nurtured and encouraged by the sequence of events. He has been a collector for this appeal for three years now. The first year he took part, he was the victim of a savage assault—by a swarm of angry, accurate and sharpbeaked magpies. A year later, it was a verbal attack, with the language even more profane and obscene than the modern

novel. This year, things went reasonably well for a time, but on leaving one house, he slipped on the steps beneath the door and was spread-eagled, face down, on the muddy path. He was covered with the slosh, he twisted an ankle, and the money flew from his bag and scattered itself over a wide area, and had to be recovered from beneath wet bushes and from the soggy ground. He recovered himself and the money, got everything organised, and limped away as quickly as he was able. But the gate was anything but easy to open, and in wrestling with it he tore his plastic raincoat. He has since become a house to house collector (retired).