A NEW ZEALAND ESSAYIST

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23281, 25 February 1939, Page 4 (Supplement)

A NEW ZEALAND ESSAYIST

Mr. Schroder Remembers

By M.F.G.

IN an ideal world Divine Providence would endow us all with something to think with, something to think about, and the time to think it in. As it is, most of us find ourselves deplorably lacking in at least one of these qualifications and therefore turn all the more gratefully to people like Mr. J. H. E. Schroder. Such people not only have all three qualifications, but possess the additional talent of thinking on paper. In a book appropriately called "Remembering Things," Mr. Schroder has assembled some 30 essays which have from time to time appeared in the columns of Southern papers. Written in light vein and leisurely style and intended chiefly to amuse, they induce a pleasantly ruminative mood in the reader, and set him chasing after his own memories and reminiscences. Gold-Rush Survivors Of the few essays of specifically local interest, the best tells of Westland's "Hut-Dwellers," veteran survivors of the gold-rush. The ingenuity of one of these deserves to be retold. "Let me describe n few huts. The first excites curiosity because it has a butterbox nailed to one end. about three feet from the ground. It is not so very much smaller than the hut itself. It is not a cupboard, or a meat-safe, or a birdcage, or a kennel. The gentleman who biult the hut contrived a bunk for himself, very solid and strong, alon<r one wall. When he first, attempted to sleep in it, he was forced to arch his knees so that thev almost touched the ceiling. "Rather than sleep diagonally across the hut —the only way it could accommodate his length—he sawed out a square from the wall, nailed on the butter-box, and in it nightly reposes his feet, to his great pleasure and eom-

fort." Essays of literary criticism, with an abundance of readable quotations, qccupy n large part of the book, but the most attractive of all are concerned with lighter topics, a combination of sense and nonsense which reveals Mr. Schroder at his best in such whimsies as "On Not Carrying a Watch." Living by Clockwork "We (the watcliless) are the happv ones," he says. "But the Puritans, the pnnctualists. the prim bigots of the watch, shall be whipped at the cart's tail. They would make life an endless computation of seconds. They eat, drink, and sleep, work and play, bv clockwork, and are puffed up by it. They .put a meter on life and scan the dial with more cruel zest than the gasman's. "They contribute nothing to the gaiety of the nations, except when two or more of them compare two or more infallible timepieces; and even then it is no hearty dog-fight, but a yapping and snarling scuffle. They are never merry. In a horrible sense, time bangs heavy on their hands—or round their necks. May it choke them." "Remembering Things," by J. H. E. Schroder. (Dent and Wliitcombe and Tombs.)