DOMINION VISITED

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 80, 5 April 1938, Page 16

DOMINION VISITED

TRAVELLER'S COMMENTS

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, March 9.

It seems that life in New Zealand has one great advantage over life in the Old World after all, according to a New Zealander who has seen a good deal of both in the course of her lifetime. In New Zealand, the date of the next war seems to be 2000 A.D. As the traveller nears Europe, the date of the war gets nearer and nearer, until, when one lands in England, it seems to be only a couple of weeks ahead. That, at any rate, was the experience of Mrs. Grenfell, wife of Mr. T. H. Grenfell, formerly of Auckland, and! now a resident of Leeds, Yorkshire. Mrs. Grenfell, who before her marriage was Miss Ethne Jackmanj, returned last week from her native country, and though both she and her husband are New Zealanders, she believes that she was able to look at her own land through the eyes of a "foreigner," for she. has been away from it for five years.

Looking at her country impersonally, she, found it was. "not the polished article" because it had had to accomplish in a century what England had done in thousands of years; that New Zealanders find their chief pleasure in their friends, because they have not the ready-made amusements that English people have; that New Zealand is the most-heavily-taxed country in the world and may be taxed even more heavily; that the 40-hour week had been adopted out there; that the New Zealand- educational system was particularly good. Mrs. Grenfell used to be a teacher. She also was struck by the fact that the films she saw in New Zealand this summer are only just being shown in Leeds; that the New Zealand people were solid, fine, and sincere; that the air was as clear us crystal.

Originally Mr. and Mrs. Grenfell came to England for six months because "every New Zealander wants to come to England sooner or later," but they eventually decided to make the change a permanent one. They spent five months in London, then moved 1o Liverpool, Manchester, and finally Leeds. ■ • ■