SPORT FOR CHILDREN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22070, 28 September 1933, Page 4

SPORT FOR CHILDREN

LEFT TO MUD AND NATURE .(F.bou Odb Own Cobhrspondent.). LONDON, August Ite 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, he says, “can havchothing but pity, for the child of to-daylwi|li everymtuneht filled with some :grown-rip activity, and lesions from a pVofessional in gape}' of sporty taken mor&.serilSnsly, i| that: than ordinary ' gduCataon; at . a; year old, competition riding it ;foUr, : > backing horses on the totajisator. :h’t;.a-' point-to-point at fire, attending l ; a: regular race meeting ;rat‘ .eight, winHifig - golf prizes and taking lawn... tennis lessons at nine, and ekoqfciog w'ith . a -pain -of? expensive guns and a loader at ICare all-examples which have come to my notice in the last few years. ■ In anything tO-dp with horses particularly • people seem- to lose all sense of proportion of even* sanity, and 1 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: iteelt has not altered very. much, and children still enjoy, getting dirty and pottering about with mud and animals, if .only they are left in peace and their dastes are not ruined by their. over-zealous elders. A New Zealander, signing himself op herself “The Eldest of Them All,’ approves of “Mud Pie’s" appeal, - “The child,” he says, “needs nothing hut Nature, and should -have nothing. Mud, stones,- .brier berries, sticks, grass, leaves-rturn it put with these, and leave 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 into baskets, collected pebbles, ran races, climbed trees. all our holidays. With ■what result? In that, family of. eight, after i6O years, one only is dean, rue rest are - all' keen,.- active,- virile, capable, and even: now amused by such inexpensive sports as shrimping and wanting! ■ .