PEAS CONFERENCE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3134, 11 September 1922, Page 8

PEAS CONFERENCE.

(tty Kathleen O'Brien). Has it over occurred to you that bonds oi' brotherhood may be sealed, what links of friendship forged, through the homely act of shelling peas? ° There is something ahout a pea; 1 don't know whether it is its spherical shape, the basic- form in the buildingup oi matter, that stimulates in some Wil.V one's sulK-ouscious. sense of the ultima to Oneness of life; or whether it is its green color, green representing, 1 believe,- in some mythologies, the. color of love; but anyway, there is something about a pea that tends to bring about this mutual rapprochement in a most remarkable way. 1 once had a repulsive cook. 1 don't mean just that her cooking was repulsive It was. Cook's cooking frequently is. lint one doesn't, if one is fair gauge the heart and mind of a cook (alter all. it is the motive that counts) by these mere surface indications. This cook was repulsive in toto. From the first moment I loathed her. I hated her brusque manners, her back hauler boiled puddings, her boots. Equally she detested me. It was a. clear ease<'l incompatibility. J prepared to sivc notice. °

And then, one day of (laming .June, we shelled peas together. GraduaJJy, to my intense astonishment, I found something in me reaching out to that repulsive cook. In some dim fashion. I leli | Understood. She told me stones, wild tales of her old mother and ol a perfidious milkman ; I replied with the more pathetic incidents of mv hist childhood. When we had finished she gave me a pincushion like a badi tomato, and I gave her the evening out to go and see her.old mother (though I have reason to suspect she squandered it alter all on the perfidious milkman).

I don't believe the world's stalesmen have quite taken into account the. promise' ol fraternity held out in the simple shelling of peas. Perhaps it has escaped their notice; I venture,' ever so humbly, to draw their attention to it. Instead of spending Peace Conferences in hot. angry talk, why not an International Peas Conference where the more fractious delegates could shell peas together:-' Who can say what new understandings might not lie promoted? I am positive you could never want to fight a man with whom you had once shelled peas. It would be like robbing him whose salt you had eaten. F beg the world's statesmen, if they really desire the millennium, to consider it.