BEST FOR THE CHILD

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 71, 21 September 1933, Page 15

BEST FOR THE CHILD

MUD AND NATURE

SIMPLICITY IN SPORT

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

LONDON, August 10.

A correspondent, signing himself "Mud Pie" in a letter to "The Times," appeals for greater simplicity in sport. He lays special stress on the training of the young people in. families accustomed to- riding And hunting. ■

"Those of us .who can look "back to a happy childhood spent in • playing with mud, animals, or each other,'Vhc says, "can have nothing but pity for the child of today with every moment filled with some grown-up activity, and lessons from, a professional.in game or sport taken more seriously, if that were possible, than ordinary education. Blooded at a year old, competition riding at four, backing horses on the 'tote' at a point-to;point at five, attending a regular'race meeting at eight, winning golf prize's and taking lawn tennis lessons at nine, and shooting with a pair of expensive guns and a loader at 16 are all examples which have come to my notice in the last few years. In anything to do with horses, particularly, people ■■ seem to lose all sense of proportion or even sanity, and' I have even known a case of a nursery governess who was engaged because she expressed herself willing to learn to groom a horse.

"Thank Heaven;* child-nature itself has not altered very much, and children still enjoy getting dirty arid pottering about with mud and animals, if only they are left in peace and their tastes are not ruined by their over-zealo"us elders."v . ' '■'„.*•' r ■ ' '.. :

A New Zealander, signing himself or herself "The Eldest of Them All," approves of "Mud Pie's" appeal. "The child," he says, "needs notking but Nature, and should have-, nothing. Mud, stones, brier berries, sticks, grass, leaves —turn it out with, these, and leave it alone.

"Brought 'up between 1870-80 in New Zealand, as children we had'nothing given us for sport. We dammed brooks,* roamed the hills -looking for knuckle bones in dead sheep (as knuckle bones were 'a favourite' game in those days), plaited rushes'1, into baskets, collected pebbles, ran . ra'cds, climbed trees all* our holidays. With what result? In that family of eight, after 60 years, one only is deadj the' rest are all keen, active, virile, capable, and even now amused by such inexpensive sports 'as shrimping and walking!" . ■ \