SLOW WHEELS TO BROAD BAY AND MR WEBLIN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21266, 21 February 1931, Page 19

SLOW WHEELS TO BROAD BAY AND MR WEBLIN.

Written for the Otago Daily Times. By D. R. W. Macaulay’s every schoolboy would today answer the query, “ What is a garage?” with the easy promptitude born of an instinctive knowledge. His apprehension of what constitutes a “ livery and bait stables ” would be of a vaguer and less exact kind. Yet forty years ago there were a score, at least, of these primitive institutions scattered about the streets of Dunedin. Horses at livery are horses kept for the owner and fed and groomed for a fixed charge—a kind of indoor agistment—while baiting ” a horse was merely giving the animal something to go on with, or refreshing him before he steps forth on a new of his journey. There was a livery and bait stable known to the children of the old Normal School in Moray place—just opposite to the school entrance —and it was large enough to have accommodated in its time a whole itinerant circus (with attendant ,zoo) and the numerous concentric circles of the auditors. Here, amid the cognate emanations of looseboxes and straw litter, the knights of the sawdust, with their prancing steeds, and the tumbling clowns edified a long-past generation of school boys and girls. From this fastness or caravanserai issued thrice weekly the triple-teamed horse hue that wended its deliberate way down the long winding lower road to Broad Bay and Portobello. We children, due to spend a few weeks’ holiday at the Bay, would swarm across from the school, and there arid then engage our seats within its ample capacity, in those primitive times when the Peninsula resorts were so many portions of a delightful Arcady, remote and untarnished by urban contacts, the family provisions would have to be shepherded within' expansive string bags, and small boys painfully conscious of the burdens of these reticules, would labour beneath their weight. They bulged with assorted contents whosp 1 homely contours gave a ready clue to their nature. I remember well one autumn holiday when we, as usual, joined up at the fons et origo of the scheduled manoeuvres of this bus. It had a long black tilt, and one gained access to its two opposing seats by a pendant series of steps that proliferated from out the mouth of the vehicle like some strange sort of ’tongue. The harnessing up of the three horses, dragged reluctant victims from their binns of corn, was an entrancing business, especially the cunning interlacing of-the long leather reins, so that our rustic Phaeton with a slightest pressure on,-this side or that could control the destinies of his team. Our all too numerous parcels lay under modest occultation beneath the seats amid the straw that covered the floor of the conveyance. . We were soon on our way, in mid-afternoon,' to the corner of Manse and Princes streets, where it was usual for the coachman to pick up the main body of his patrons. There, true enough, a knot_ of illassorted characters stood awaiting our arrival, and, with their infinite bundles and parcels, scrambled on board, some being very content with a coveted seat beside the driver, Jehu reserving such posts of honour for his intimates. _ The newcomers came from- every conceivable angle of the Peninsula; they all seemed to know each other; in fact, they seemed to be a small part, of a very large family, and chattered away, chaffing, each other in a very animated way, their enthusiasm and gifts for conversation being considerable. One rather well-dressed woman, obviously not of the country, made up to us and confided her name: she was a Mrs Weblin, and .was going to spend a' holiday with her husband and Joe at a large boarding house at. Broad Bay, kept by 'a Mrs G-, and on the morrow we must come round and make her further acquaintance and be introduced /to Joe. Who was Joe? That remained an interesting problem. Meantime our bus was making a jogtrot progress towards our destination. The first feature that awoke our interest was the powder hulk on our left, resplendent in its coat of grey paint, and on its immediate right, those intriguing iron doors let into the face of the cliffs. If ever AH Baba and his forty thieves opened up their depredations in this part of the world, then surely they would select these caverns as their strongholds. A little way further on, a bespectacled roadmender sat on his mound of stones “knapping” the larger shards of metal to a size suitable for the small appetite roads had in those days for the absorption of blue stone. Our horses, sensing the approach of seasonable nourishment, draw up at the stone cistern or trough presented to the Road Board by Mr George Gray Russell; they leisurely drink their fill. Russell was an English gentleman and merchant of Dunedin, a public-spirited man who presided for many years on the local council; his beautiful home at Macandrew still exists. He was a lover of the Peninsula and its scenic beauties; he was a lover also of horses, and, his gift in their behalf still stands, enfaced' with his name, at the roadside, a neglected relic of a traffic that is well nigh obsolete. And so, with our steeds refreshed, we bowl along to the turnpike, and a woman emerges from the neat cottage beside the gate and swings open the white barrier to let us pass. Our driver throws her the toll, a threepenny piece, which by some mischance rolls away, and bur lady of the tollgate is left groping' for her levy, vowing an audible vengeance on the retreating bus. ■ '■ ' " ■.! ' ■ . After this incident, the company lapses into a state of somnolence, to be rudely awakened by an active clash of two badtempered curs, whose previous, menacings and growlings had been stifled by their respective owners. They break, out afresa and before we realise what has happened an exciting duel is being fought out on the floor before us. The ladies shriek and shrink from the savage contestants, hut’order is soon restored. Again- some rustic has imported a case of ferrets, and unless this receptacle be very_ jealously guarded these prowling, reptilian carnivores generally managed to escape. The female portion of our company would become excited to the point of febrility, and, one blushed to relate, the stockings of the gentler sex would be discovered—a clear 40 years before their time. _ All these were only incidents in that long two-hour journey to the distant charms of rural Broad Bay., On the morrow we met Mr Weblin for the first time. , The characters of Charles Dickens react to life with an unfailing uniformity of behaviour, and in this respect Mr Weblin might truly be called a Dickens character.

He was a dapper, dandified appearance, with neatly cropped whiskers and unobtrusive but elegantly turned moustache, .fraying a little with the effect of time. His dress was always strictly a la mode and, in season, he ■ affected white waistcoats, or their winter sartorial equivalent, a knitted vest where blues and reds intertwined in a chromatic tapestry. But what chiefly struck me was his extraordinary flow of good humour. From breakfast till supper time he radiated a genial, unchecked optimism, a tempered spirit of hilarity that seemed to well up from some source within his breast. If our elders liked him, we children loved him and ever coveted his favours. We had our trials and temptations, our futures were uncharted and unplumbed, the rigours of school were ours, and the discipline of our .daily tasks;-we drifted 1 along stream at the mercy of every eddy and current, yet here was a miraculous being whose ship, guided by some exalted compass, rode the waves with a steady buoyancy. Mr Weblin fitted in well with our holiday mood; indeed, was he not himself the very personification of a perennial vacation; the metabolism of his person-' ality absorbing all the good and ill of life and transmuting it to the purest substance of happiness? And what,' you may ask, was Mr Weblin’s vocation—what enabled him to maintain this admired equipoise?- It 'transpired that v he was a superior shopwalker in one of our -larger drapery emporiums. One fateful Monday morning he had to fare forth to the call of business and take his place once again amid the gloomy routine of his calling. How could this prospect overcloud for one moment his serenity of soul? We might have saved ourselves the question.

He promised lie would return pf an evening by the 6 o’clock train to Port Chalmers and be able thus to spend the long evenings in a .revival of our junketings. This, in itself, was a revelation to" us. This comingling of habits, the fettered thraldom with the chartered license, the alloy of work. and holiday moods seemed to us to be inconceivable; but there it was, an accepted fact.

Mr Weblin walked hand in hand through life with an agreeable helpmeet, who was an active aider and abettor m all her spouse’s benignities. _ She appeared to us to be in a chronic state of hardly suppressed vivacity;, she shone not as a pale reflecting luminary of her husband’s effulgence, but as a star of equal magnitude in the firmament. _ _ . They had. no children; the addition of such pledges of mutual affection would have gone far to subtract from their spirit of perpetual youngness, A third being, nevertheless, stalked in their train, Joe. Now Joe had all the semblance of a rough, brown-haired Scottish terrier. Yet Joe was no dog, he was of no “base, spaniel fawning.” A creature of superior intelligence, just as his master and mistress were preterhuman, Joe was preter canine. His knowledgeable tricks were legion; his genteel salutation with tendered right forepaw, his clever imitation of the ways of mendicancy, his partiality for toothsome lumps of sugar. We could never have enough of this delightful quadruped. Our experience of the triumvirate was but a cursory one; they were soon swept beyond our ken. Joe, we heard, met an untimely fate beneath one of our funicular cars, and, the final departure of Mr and Mrs Weblin beyond the seas mercifully eliminated the possibility of seeing their brillance fade into the dim colours of longevity. Thus no “ cold gradation of decay” affects for_ us, in retrospect, their unexampled relish for life, their spontaneous unfurling of the bright standards of optimism.