RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31199, 25 October 1966, Page 24

RANDOM REMINDER

CHARACTER

Perhaps it is because middle age brings with it a full realisation of incompetence that we were delighted to receive, from a country district, a reminder that New Zealand still throws up its courageous characters, men who can fight their own battles, men who know how to work, men of spirit and bold resolve. Men, in fact, who really are men, and not middle-aged incompetents. This one was in his prime during the depression, when work was hard to get. When he was about 65, he discovered that people wanted workers, and he was off after it, on an ancient bicycle, with the eagerness of a youth.

He threw fleeces, dug gardens, sewed grain bags on headers, talked about the threshing mills of earlier times, criticised the government of the day, whatever its colour, vigorously. His wife used to see him off at the gate every morning, saying he shouldn’t be doing it; but he always replied that times were never better. He fell victim, ultimately, to a stroke. But he never complained, nor did a handicap in his speech prevent him from being an enegetic critic of the government of the day. And it was the matter of his teeth, really, that showed the character of the man. They were rather discoloured, they were long, and they were

further apart than is usual. He was persuaded, finally, that he should part with them. Someone gave him a lift to Christchurch and off he went, with a packed lunch, as if off to work. He ate it, sitting on the steps of the Scott statue: his first visit to the city for 20 or 30 years. And while he ate, he came to the conclusion that he was not giving any dentist a fiver to take his teeth out So he went home, and pulled them out himself, on? every now and then. It is worth mentioning that If his teeth were discoloured, it is very probable that they were affected by his tearing into bully beef tins at the Somme, and a dase of gas on the “Sunken Road.”