HOMELY THINGS THAT MATTER

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 301, 16 September 1936, Page 10

HOMELY THINGS THAT MATTER

—• Gleanings of Much-Travelled Journalist AN IKON AND LENIN IN RUSSIAN HOUSE Stating that it was hie purpose to tell his audience a little' of how a traveller felt in coming to a new country, Mr. John Morgan, agricultural editor of the “Daily Herald,” London, the leading Labour newspaper in Great Britain, entertained the Wellington Travel Club at a morning tea it ten- • dered him at the Hotel St George yesterday with a series of homely impressions gleaned from travels in many parts of the world. Mr. Morgan, who was welcomed by the Minister in Charge of the Tourist Department, Hon. F. Langstpne, ex- . plained that once before, when he wanted a breather from, England, he had come to New Zealand. That was 10 years ago, and he dug in on a farm at Waikanae for a year. Wellington had what he then believed was the only municipal milk supply in the world, so he joined it for a few months in the Winter and in the summer supplied a butter factory. “I have travelled a lot since I was last in New Zealand,” Mr. Morgan said. “I was for three months in Russia, went with a trade mission throughout South Africa and Rhodesia, dug into Germany, and now have come across Canada and touched the United States of America. “One feels that it is not so much the tourist department that one would look for; it is the ordinary men and women of the country. The thing I have looked for as much as Waitomo was meeting Rua, the Maori chief, and seeing that proud old Maori just outside Rotorua.” Blustrating some of the other points which struck him, Mr. Morgan said he stayed a night with a friend in the country, and found one of the girls of the house secretary of one of the women’s unions which arranged the housekeeper system for that area. That gave him an Insight into the-life of the people. Mr. Morgan is a strong believer in visitors to a country getting outside the capital city. Many visitors to Russia, for instance, simply went to Moscow. “The thing to do in any country is to, get away from its capital —no matter how nice Wellington or other places may be,” he said. Illustrating the joys of this, he recalled taking green tea when going down the Volga in a boat Tea-drinking Habit.

On another occasion he was going along a street in a city in Russia thousands of miles from Moscow, and he suggested to his guide that they might knock at a door and ask if they could have a cup of tea. He learned the tea-drinking habit from his stay in New Zealand. A middle-aged woman Came to the door, and invited him to come in, and she took him through the house. It was just an ordinary house, but to his eyes it was full of interest. Similarly, anyone coming from England to New Zealand liked to know how New Zealand’s houses were run. He saw an Ikon on the, wall of that Russian home. “Yes, I still worship the Ikon,” the woman told him. Beside the children’s bedside there was a great big picture of Lenin. “I still worship the Ikon, but my boy and girl worship Lenin,” the woman said. “In a flash,” Mr. Morgan added, “I saw the great Impulse of Russia in that contrast. It gave me an insight into the. real life of Russia.” Mr. Morgan said at present he had a German girl living at his home in England, and he could understand Nazism better frbm that girl than all the books he could get hold of. Throughout the homes of England they would find hundreds of German girls. In his case the German girl had come that his children might learn to speak German and she English. “It is the ordinary things when you are away from home that, matter,” the speaker said, recalling having eaten home-made brawn and home-made cakes at a home in Cambridge, Waikato. He noticed that there was a discussion running through the papers on “Can New. Zealand women cook?” He could vouch that there was one woman near Cambridge who cooked really well. Back again on the subject'of capitals, Mr. Morgan urged those of his hearers who went to Great Britain to get out of London. “The England that we are sentimental about is the England that is not London,” he said.