Children to whom even the sight of a horse being harnessed is something new and splendid...
A
DOZEN boys, whose ages range from eloven to fourteen years, have just scen a ship for the first time in their lives,
They came upon her round a corner of a shed as thoy, trooped back from gathering shells on the first een beach they had ever known. They stood a little awe-struck, though she was only a coasting tramp of three hundred odd tons, smeared in a grey dust from topmast to loading line as she unslipped comment in a gale driven, wind.
They could not quito believe her reality. It was not as George, who walks in Irons and has to bo careful every Ume he removes a boot that he does not break his right tibia, explained as if she had been at sea.
Thoro would have been something familiar about that. White waves would "have been breaking at her bow; smoke trail- ing behind her. And any boy knows that pleture; can draw it, oven If a little lop. *sidedly,
But she was 'tled. to a quay beside the shed and houses near-by leant down towards her so that sho seemed a littlo
odd; a bedraggled toy left out in the rain with the wooden bricks of the nursery.
́George, when he saw her. abruptly used a word that he discovered a few days ago. "Gosh," 'ho said, and.walted a breath,." It's got a funnel."
A remark that had the merit of heavy underlining and carried conviction.
'The skipper's wife, on the round trip from Liverpool, heard him and took them all on board. They saw the bridge and peered down the engine room.
They pattered aft and chattered to her so that she thrilled to them and took them below where a little of their wonder and bewilderment began to leave them.
ono
The atmosphero of cramped space and off lamp swinging to n beam scerned somehow to at to their imaginings so that they asked questions, and
boy zaid solemnly: "Is this where you night?" which stumped the skip- per's wife for a bit until he ex- plained that he meant with pirates, and that he did not be- Ileve that any ship went to sea without it had to fight,
H
E had seen the China Beas and Bounty Mutiny films and that was all lic knew about the sea. Which is not invention of mine. I heard him any so,
That was in Aberdovey on Cardi- gan Bay, where the Welsh moun- taina run down to the Atlantic. The boys had come from a house four miles along the coast which the Birmingham Education Com- mittee runs as a summer school for the children from Its special slum areas.
For eight months of the year, groups of twenty-four children Trom their schools for the crippled, the deal and the mentally delayed are sent there for a fortnight's holiday, and a ship is not the only
THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH. THURSDAY,
Their Place in
the FUN
by Sanford Lock
thing that comes new to them. Most of them have nover travelled in a train before, seen cow or known what it is to wonder why a tide can run away and leave a stretch of hard, smooth Band.
I have known them ask what is inside the hills, as they have looked up at the might of Cader Idris; have known them taken into the fields at night to be shown the moon and the stars and stand in wonderment that such things are.
Stars cannot be seen from the walled depths of a slum when city glare and smoke hang above.
They refuse simple foods because anything new has to be treated with doubt and suspleton. Cocon made with milk instead of water arouses distrust:
Green vegetables are an affront to their intelligence. Only a fool would think such things ought to be_eaton,
Fortunately there is always a fool whose curiosity overcomes native caution, and where one leads, others follow.
A boy who had been before came back this year, and that was a help, though his first remark was. "Matron, may-I have a hot bath-
Novel England
T
Tod Wiley
By Bobert Darnell (Arrowsmith, 78. Git.)
NOD is a lorry-driver and odd Job man working for the Jewish owner of a fruit stali. He lives with his father, mother and sister west of London's West End. And there are hundreds of genial young glants like him on the roads, in the markets and garages, at the football matches and street corners, up and down the land.
But Tod's cheerful, though luridly expressed, acceptance of his lot was interrupted when a racing car skidded into his decrepit lorry (Lizzie the Last) and. Claire Davenant stag- gered saully out of the wreckage.
They met again in Loudon, and Claire and her equally feckless brothor lured Tod into a casual, happy-go- Jucky friendship.
Feeling at a loss in their stream of cackling but falutly cultured conver sation, Tod decided to get some educa- tion. He attended night-schools and went to concerts and leamed to sing And to speak grammatically while Claire drilled off on a world cruise, un- conscious of the pedestal to which she had been lifted-and incapable of caring, anyway.
Disillusionment was inevitable and tragic.....
There are unlikely coincidences, in the story. The Dayenant household nud hablis are taken from stock not from life, and you know, all the iimg that Tod's shy romanco is doomed to heavy disappointment. But such Occasional
creakings
of fictional machinery are unimportant compared with the vigour of Tod and his mates.
Mr. Darnell has caught the authen- tia nccent of his working_mch, at work, at home and at play. He under stands their loyalles, their humour, their rowdylam, their patience, their resource and their obstinacy. Ha can describe 'n street row, a traffic jam or a Chunday at home so that it li joy to read.
Aʼfralų, lively and most promising first novel in which the author has done what so few young Engilaht writers (oven - attempt-looked at the world about him and set down whist he has heard and soen.
Without trying to put in everything or to slate and solve any great prob lem, he describes what "anyone with eyes and ears knows to be true. And the result la crispacsa, conviction and a pace seldom found in tales this side ...of the Atlantic.
F
Paradise
By Esther Forbes (Challo and Windus, 83. Gd.) ROM the settlements of the States to-day is a far cry. Yet, Pilgrim Fathers to the United
In this long, attractive story of pioneer colonists, you can catch overtones which have persiated through the changes and chances of three hundred years.
on
forbidding louise," with its back turned contemptuously the village of Canaan, twenty miles inland from Bos- ton. Quick-tempered, bearded Jude Parre lived in it with his sons, Fenton and Christopher, his daughter, Jazan, and the rest, Within a walk of kay the Indians and the wilderness,
Christopher followed his father's scholarly bent. Fenton followed the Indian trails, trading with braves who respected blin Jazan skipped about and watched the birds-and followed Fenton with sharp, affectionate eyes,
overy night?" Memory promoted the question, and out of the tálk that followed a thought kept re- curring.
That the chlidren took back with them something with which to educate their parents even if it was only lesson in hygiene and that toothbrushes have an exist~. ence.
B
But mostly they discover and remember that grass is green; which alone is suficiently surpris- ing to start the thought that there are things in life worth striving after.
A child came once when s parents were unemployed and took back a memory. It came again five years later, and lodged near the school with its parents to show them a little timidly this and that which had not qulle been believed.
The father had a job then where he had a holiday with pay, and there was only one place to spend it when he remembered what his boy had felt,
NE August week, five dent and dumb boys, beyond school age and earning their first wages, remem- bored their summer school and arrived one morning to say they bad come to camp in a nearby field and did Matron remember. them? The gesture was more eloquent than the speech of their hands.
A child against whom it is re- corded she has never spoken a Bingle word in school, though she converses happily with her mother at home, talked with her teacher
before the two weeks onücd.
And
it was not shock that unloosed her tongue,
She did not exclaim, as I heard another at the sight of a water- fall," turn off the tap." She made a remark, unaware that she had spoken until she had been an- swered
and heard herself in reply.
It does not matter what broke down her obstinacy, Force of eircumstance, environment, what you will. It collapsed, and uncon- sclously,
A sced was sown, and if it bears frult even only in a spark of the desire to know, perhaps something has been achieved. Or would you argue that something should not be born where the lists are heavily weighted against the chance of its Batisfaction?
SUGGEST you are
The wrong.
summer Echool is needed, The crippled, the lame and the men- tally halt from the cramped air of the slums have their own perspec- tive, a perspective which needs no sympathy.
They wish to be normal, to see themselves RS they see others.
They want their share of natural fun to remember; to sea the salmon leap and curlew dip and learn to wonder why.
And maybe you have never seen a boy who walks on crutches keep- ing wicket behind stumps pitched where cows graze and a tennis ball bounces at him at all angles.
The one I know slis on his haunches and throws his whole body for the ball with a courago that will not admit the need for courage. He faces all life like that, doing things in the spirit if not in the body..
When he saw a ship for the first time he would have said "Gosh," If he knew the word, or "Crumbs" or "Strowth,"
Net in aurprise at seeing a ship; but with satisfaction at seeing what he knows other boys have
seen.
MAKING MINING SAFER
•
Prizes
OCTOBER 28, 1997.
A Degree I Cannot Use
I
Was it Worth Three Years
of Sacrifice?
AM entitled to write the letters B.A. (Cantab.) after my name. Each of those two letters cost me £400. It took me three years work to obtain them, and four extra years at school to qualify for them. It is how five years since I left Cam- bridge, and Dover once have they been of any practical use to me in carning my living. Was it worth 147. Ever since I passed the Matric, at the age of 15 my chief ambition la life was to become a good enough scholar to earn a University scholar- ship. My parents kept me on nt school at a big sacrifice to them- selves, to satisfy what they thought was a very wise ambition.
To-day I know that 3 had left school straight away after that examination I should have been earning money for all the seven years which I prased in spending it at the University, I should now be in a far better job than I hold after those long years of training. Instead of spending money I should have carned it, and I could now write down in my accounts a comfortabic profit in the place of a heavy loss profit in the place of a heavy loss.
Il cost my parents £200 a year upart from the cost of holidays. It cost them more than that figure to pay my University expenses, in spite of the fact that I was a scholar of my college and carned a share of what I cost. In addition there were the costs of living in vacations, which cover more than half the year.
A Handicap, Not a Help
I went up to Cambridge full of confidence that the money and the time I had spent on making my way there would prove the best invest-
career. The years
ment of Bambridge did nothing to
speat at rob me of that youthful optimism. When the Chancellor's hastily mum- bled Latin invested me with my de- gree, and the Examiner's lists with honours in my subjects, I went down convinced that the world lay at my teet, or at least would do as soon as I had had a few years in which to *prove myself.
For a whole year after I came down I tried entirely in vain to get qualifications. I some job on my tried four or five different sources, and four or five different types of job. answered more advertisements than I care to remember- nit at added cost. And as I looked down the list of advertisements in my paper
I realised one in every fifty mentioned my degree as a qualification by it-
Everywhere
I heard the samo story. Without either influence or experience of specialised training my B.A. was useless-more a positive handicap than help It I went
back to Cambridge or to some other school of training for another year or two, then, and only then, I could hope to make capital out of my aca- demic distinctions, plus my added training.
Left Behind
But I could not and would not Incur the expense of another year. So I went on trying to get some job on which to support myself.
an
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23 124
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ACROSS
3. As a reference scarcely en- thusiastic, yet pot without dis- tinction.
The Coral aspect of the war. 9 States in which Movie stars
moy be found.
10 Down in the mouth? 11 Toples for a king. 12 Sit out.
13 Biv.
In the end in desperation, I ac- cepted a small teaching position in interior gchool with poor pro- spects. There my B.A. degree hos earned mo £60 a year and my keep -less than 6 per cent. on my in- vestment, and I have to work for it! Paradise was a house. A watchful, ONE hundred and twenty years ago of protecting the knees consisted of But to what I can now see was my the Davy safety lamp was first the wearing of hard feather pads, youthful over-confidence it has been Introduced into the dangers and strapped round each leg, but these
0 tremendous blow. My parents' darkness of a coal mine. After a often inconvenienced the wearer.
hapes, though they do not often men- series of colllery disasters due to At many collieries safety com- tion it, have fire-damp, that eminent chemist, Sir paigns have been launched.
been grievously dis- oppointed. Humphrey Davy, commcused ex- are given to the workmen who send Nor did it help me to bear the tperimenting in devising a lamp in the best practical suggestions for
which could be carried about under- increasing the safety of the workers. tered men whom I knew at school, sense of frustration when I encoun-
14 These are not plucked before. ground with complete safety.
Bonuses аге
cooking. given to the firemen
prosperous and 17 Needing no appetiser. In January 1816 the first success- who work their districts for a certain and found them
to stand ful trial of his invention was made period without an accident, Safety openly scornful of the advantages of
a University career, while I my- drought? by the rector of Jarrow. In order magazines and circulars, which give self was keeping up appearances with that the use of his invention might particulars of probable sources of dimeulty. not suffer restriction, Sir Humphrey dangers and how to deal with them, One man, who was a contemporary forfeited a fortune by refusing to are periodically issued to under of mine at school, passed his final patent it. The number of lives ground workers. which have been saved through the
exams. In accountancy the year after recent contribution to I came down from Cambridge. To- The most introduction of his lamp cannot be safety in the mines was the introduc-day he is corning enough to keep computed.
tion in Fiteshire of safely instruc-himself and his wife, and his pros- Since 1816, and particularly in re- tional, classes for boys before enter-
pects are boundless, cent years, many other safety men- ing the mining industry. mures have been introduced into British collieries, the majority of them being mainly due to the un- companies.
So Paradiso flourished in a quiet, seemly way until the day that Fenton went on board a friend's ship in Dos ton Harbour and met lazy, wanton, copper-haired Bathsheba. Helen of Troy," the captain called her. And the Arst half of the book is largely a record of the havoc she wrought in Candan'a community.
1
It is a story in the romantle veln. with a whooping account of an
with heavy losses on both sides. And
Marshall Jackson
.
Theon
10 Best vegetable
23 Like a hatler,
27 Re bone (anag). 29 You mustn't put the cart before
in the horse: it's front as usual.
30 Possibly it's the Irish in it that
nukes i so contrary.
31 Suffocate. 32 Solo call.
33 Goes away, lost, in winter, by
the great majority of 24 these.
DOWN
1 A dying complaini. 2 Tank adjunet.
3 Darken the room, and rest thus if you feel so inclined, though you'll find you're happy 'If not to much in bed.
6 Discover by means of noise.
6 Over fifty and close, and that's taking if correct' measure,
7 Give,
15
#16
120
13 Man, bird, or wheelbarrow. 10 Cheat the girl on her ascent,' 16 Just a matter of perception. 19.In Minnesota,
20 Want a bit of money? Here
are pois!
21 A
A party adherent in Sparta,
22 Agin everything.
24 It's thoroughly sickening.
25 Endive (nag.).
26 Tower,
20 William partcok of food, ap-
parently, in
temporary
quarters.
TAB
his
Yesterday's Solution
TOBACCONIST A RUSADEZSZ A ZME U KTLLING PIT APAT LEBALUGUMIBLOa 6 POTENIPPY BAY S OUD PANOISIACHE 11 SLING LALEHAM
EXACTLY POSEBNI RATE SHEMAMONEN T SITE ODIUM ARBE EMA-BODALAFOLAB
||P TCCOLO ITALIAN [0]-[##ONEN NACH A ||F ́REE DOOTERS. ALL
Another of my school friends-a ne'er-do-well at school, who did not even trouble to pass the Matricula- Lion-vested the little capital he Indian rald, wasich in Anally benten en cousing research efforts of the coal INDIGESTION hod in a business of his own, and to-day is his own master and his then, each after his or her fashion, the Helmets cone
constructed of specially settlers resume their toll
prepared fibre have been the means Stopped in 5 minutes! own paymaster.
My own case is not unique. One Paradise is one of those novels that of reducing head necidents by '80 per teach you incidentally more than most cent. among underground workers.
Amaring evidence of the remarkable of my college acquaintances came to speed with which indigestion and stomach Cambridge from a Scottish Univer- of the history books. I found its detall | Boota with reinfgreed toe-caps to pains can be slopped has been revealed Bity with very high honours and the fascinating.
by mediCAL the toes from injury, and
experiments And X-ray protect
photographs of netual cases.
degree of M.A. He had spent two The nul speech of Fenland emi- made of specially treated leather to
prove the Ingredients af Disurated years as an assistant iccturer there, grants which may have set the pre- counteract the effect of weld in the Magnesia to be the quickest-acting and and had saved up enough money to dominant Yanken note. The villagers' water, have also been introduced. | most effective known lo medical science, pay his expenses. He gave up this] - first sight of a hearse (they looked on The miners in several coilleries have Within 8 minutas A teaspoonful of it as a
pleasure vehicle," never before been supplied with strong, leather Dinated Magocala in little water Job In order to increase his qualidea-
tions at Cambridge. In his time at ferred to amongst them, not as the ful optimism. But, in spite of it all, having seen anything on wheels that gloves to protect their hands from
produced complate relief la cases where
Committed" but as my answer to the question whether was not devoted to the work of farm cuts and bruises.
numberīces other remedies had falled Cambridge he obtained the highest "Appointments.
It was worth it, is simply-—it was. entirely.
honours possible, although he took the Disappointments Committee." ing). The poetry which sometimes
*Blaurated Magnesia
I have learnt now that though a The next innovation was safety
F A complete a three-year course in two. danced impishly behind that dour
Hope Deferred
University training is of little prac- Puritan front, Tho slovens and the trouers. As most of the coal miners, treatment for the relief of stomach
He went back to Scotland, hopeful troublest noutratises, the harmful arida
of obtaining a better position.
Of the men For drones who helped to leaven the in- especially those werking in pan-runs, that cause the trouble and it spreads a
of my year whose tical use and to expect it to be a sort dustrious ones. The crimes that hava do all their work in a kneeling posi-soothing, protective aim ovor se stomach ten monil he could get nothing. subsequent careers I have been able of Open Sesame to a good job is to It gives 'been committed in "Virtuo's name. ́... Lion, consideration was given to uning."
Then, by a lucky chance, his old. Job to trace, only 40 per cent. succeeded court disappointment, yet Got 'Blaurated“-- Blagnesia; powder, or fell vacant. He was offered it and
in obtaining the jobs which I know you something that no other train- A book, which makes the old, crudely common allment, "beat-knee." The
per cent. ing in the world' can give. coloured seventeenth century map of safety trousers are made of light-and your clement thankfully accepted. To-day he still they wanted. Only 65
to-day, but be sure to look for the oval New Englaid live and traces some of weight, durable material, with DISMAO sign If you want the quickest bolds -with two years to the debit succeeded in obtaining any sort of That "something" is almost Im the outlines of the alick charts of
Job at all without a long delay. And possible to define. But the best if inrge oblong-shaped rubber sponge acting stomach remedy doctors know, of his account. to-day.
of the not the only argument I can produce inserted in a pocket to protect the
My own personal experience covers that experience is typical COUNT THE
nearly half a dozen similar cases of fale of the thousands of graduates for its existence is the simple fact
who high hopes and complete frustration, “TELEGRAPHS"
leave the Universities every that after all the disappointmeita, I, So common an experience is it. that
year.
personally, if I could choose again, woll-known one
"employment It sounds a sorry tale, and it fi a would make the same choice.
Cambridge Graduate 0000|"agency" for undergraduates is re- bitter experlonco for untried youfli-
R. P.
knees.
To prevent small pieces of coal and "redd" from getting into the boots, the trousers are also belled 'round the ankles, The old" method
EVERYWHERE