THE ROAD TO TOWN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20496, 22 February 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE ROAD TO TOWN.

.WAYSIDE PICTURES,

BY ELSIE K. SIOBTON.

A friend who was visiting Auckland for the first time came home to dinner with me one evening lately. Unfortunately, we were caught in the five o'clock tram rush, with its strap-hangers and tedious wait at every safety-zone, so that the run out to the Great South Road took over half-an-hour, with people's elbows and sharp-edged parcels grinding into our shoulder blades and knocking our hats sideways. " How deadly tired you must be ot going into town every day! That awful trip twice a day!" said my friend as we emerged at last from the crowded train, and I suddenly felt myself to be a very hardlv-used person, deserving of great sympathy and commiseration. Twice a day for over sis years, nearly four thousand trips to and from town since the trams started running down the South Road, up and down the same hills, along the same roads, past the same trees and fields and houses! Ancf what had I seen ? Anything at all but straight footpaths, fences, front doors and shop-windows' Had the deadly monotony killed every tiny spark of interest that the first few trips might have roused I have been turning the matter over in my mind, and have come to an astonishing conclusion—there has been no monotony about the trips at all, and 1 have discovered more interesting and amusing things in that daily trip to town than I could set clown in an hour's wilting. Roadside Perils. Many changes have I seen since the first electric tram went speeding down the Great South Road. 1 have seen the city marching steadily out into the country, hawthorn hedges and fOpen fields giving place to tr;m gardens, bungalows, and rows of shops. I can remember, away back in childhood days, when there were not more than half-a-dozen houses on the South Road between Market Road and Green Lane, when the footpath was a narrow track running beside hawthorn hedges and open fields with stout posts driven in the middle of the path as a protection against wild bulls on sale days over at the Remucra Station cattle yards. It has always been a mystery to me how one was supposed to shelter between or behind those posts—a really ambitious bull would have had me on its horns in two snorts and a flick of its tail, I am certain!

I At first I regretted the loss of the open fields, but now I find beauty and interest in the double row of pretty, suburban home* down which runs the road to town. There is one house whose entrance porch, for a brief period every vear. is massed with pink rose bloom. When Dorothy Perkins comes to town, that- particular porch holds the gaze of scores of tram-car passengers every dav. A little farther on is the Dilworth Institute, with its splendid old avenue of trees. Here the pohutukawa, a few weeks ajo. blazed crimson against tiie blue sky, and sent showers of red rain down on to the footpath, so that for davs the passer-by walked over :i carpet of crimson. Piiriri berries, pink and crimson and black, shine ar>">n!r flossy, dark leaves, a stately magnolia is heavy with bloom, and to-dav there came through the windows of my car a waft of the warm, nuttv scent of rine kanika berries, hanging in tfold bunches from a tree in the corner of the hedge. The Toll Gate at the Junction.

Then come houses with orchards, and from my tram window I see apples turning red and gold beneath the summer sun, ripening tigs ami lemons, nectarines and peaches—oh. the miraculous honesty of the little bovs of this generation! The flowers, too, are a joy to the eve. Season by season I watch for the coming of my favourites in wayside gardens, a great clump of blue hydrangea, a splendid pink rhododendron, a flowering cherry massed with bloom, blue solanum climbing up brick chimneys and over front porches, a crimson poinsettia—l know and love them all!

Here anil there along the road are very old houses and shops that were erected over half a century ago. when there was a toll gate at the Junction, and most of the residential suburb of Epsom consisted of paddocks and wheatfields. .Many a time, as our car has swung round the corner from the Great I South Road into Manuknu Road, have f recalled a divertimr little storv of the old days, related to me with many chuckles by an old Scottish pioneer. "I mind the time when Sandy McLeod went to Uiwn, sold his sum and bought a hor«e. and only had a. saxpence, left. He couldna/ make un his mind what to do wi' it. hae a drink or buy some buns. In the end. he bought the buns an 'et .'em, and set out at sundown on his twenrv-mih* ride home. But he forgot the toll gate at the .Junction! It was kept by an auTd sojer with or;e leg —crust.v chap he was. and h<? wouldna' let Sandy through because he had nae saxpence. Told him he'd have to ride round by Remuera and Pakuranga, a good eleven mile out o' his way. So Sandy made him an offer: he'd put his horse at the gate, and if lie made a clean jump, he would go through free. But the toll-keeper, he took a look at the horse and said. ' No.' he'd have t<> pay. and in the end. because Sandy wouldna' go round t'other way, he had to '.jive t'auld rascal his pipe and pouch rind knife, and it was three months before puir auhi Sandy could go back and get 'em again !" Stone Angels. There are several things to be looked for as we come up Khvber Pass. One is a sprightly young fern that has lately unfurled its green fronds over the doorway of a well-known brewery, built of solid blocks of stone. What vitality, what an amazing triumph of the will to live, that tender little fern somehow drawing sustenance from a scrap of dust, lodged | in a crevice of that grim, flinty stone! j

! In a yard nearby arc tin*, little storm I angels. They stand innocently amonp tho j Mocks of gruniia ami gravestones, their j little wings poised for llight., their cold, ' white hands meekly folded, a, look of quite inhuman sanctity on their little stone faces. Tiiev always remitul ni« of a little giri friend who lived in a remote part of the King Country. I asked her one day where she would like to go for a walk, and she said shyly, "To Jack's grave." Her mother said if, was her favourite walk, but she would never tell anyone why she wanted to go there. She led me to a little graveyard, all overgrown and uucared for: in one eorper there was a tiny plot with a child-angel winging it above the stone, inscribed: "To the Memory of Little Jack." And then I understood. The little girl had neither sister nor brother, no friends of her own age: the tiny white angel was to her alive and real, the lit.tlo silent friend with whom she. could commune in childhood's strange, voiceless intimacy . . . And now we are rushing down into Ansae Avenue, and out beyond is the blue sparkle of the harbour, the distant outline of the islands of the gulf, pitiful remnant of one of the fairest seascapes any city on earth has ever owned —and ruthlessly destroyed. Near at hand, down on the foreshore, the March of Progress is swinging onward, full blast, shunting engines dump-heaps, corrugated iron, yellow clay, black mountains of coal ... A great square building, architecturally beautiful as an up-ended benzine box, shuts out the view, another and .another . . . Here in the city, and the end of our road.