The Peripatetic Reviewer

WHEN I was sixteen, summer meant tennis on the springy clay courts at Bay Head, and your only worry was whether a northeaster would pop the tight stringing of your Slasinger. Summer meant marshmallow roasts with sarsaparilla and root beer, instead of Cokes or the real thing. It meant dances Hops we called them — at The Bluffs, and Wednesday was our night because the older girls were then not monopolized by the college men with their club hatbands, who came down for the weekends. Summer meant crewing for Sid Brewster in the Gloucester One Designs, and on Saturday afternoons for Commodore Cattus in his champion sneak box, Miss Cat. I was the lightest member of the crew and the sandbags were my job; as we came about I would be down to leeward slinging up those heavy canvas bags from ihe cockpit. To see Charlie Cattus, big and blond as a Viking, handling the sheet in a two-reef breeze was a strong and lovely sight.

This was the time when you were being taken into the trust of older men: you’d make yourself useful to Harry Buxton on the Romp, or you’d help Mr. Metcalf with his drawings for the tournament. Sometimes you were not equal to that trust. I remember one Friday afternoon when the Commodore and I were sailing the Miss Cat down to Island Heights for the week-end regatta. Just the two of us. We were running free before a light breeze. I had the tiller and the Commodore, with his Panama over his eyes, was stretched out on the deck with a sandbag for his pillow. So we came to the Seaside Park drawbridge. It was always tricky business entering that vacuum. “You’d better take her,” I said. “No, go on,” came the grunt from Mr. Cattus. Then just as she got her nose well into the passage the Miss Cat began to jibe. “Here she COMES, Commodore!” I cried, and I swerved in as close to the piles as I dared. The Commodore was quick. He was into the cockpit, ducked the boom as it swung over, and was fast to the sheet. Our mainsail never even touched the bridge although we lost our sandbags in the lurch. He said it could have happened to anyone, but that didn’t make me feel any belter.

Summer meant the daily swim and the lazy stretch out on the beach with the sun so bright on the water that it pin-pointed your eyes; it meant that feeling of salt on your cool skin as you dressed for lunch. As I remember, there were only three motor vehicles in our whole crowd; two Indian motorcycles — I usually rode the rear saddle on Ed Bonnell’s — and the Maxwell, bright red and high-perched, which “Ribs” McAdoo occasionally borrowed from the family. They were the only people in the resort who had more than one car — I think they had three, a Stearns, a Mercer, and the Maxwell. Once as we were leaving the tennis courts, Ribs asked me to crank her up. He put it in gear as she caught, and I found myself, both palms against the little brass radiator, being pushed backwards across the parking space. But the gang came to my rescue, and live of us resisting we shoved the Maxwell right hack in its tracks until Ribs laughingly gave up.

That was the summer of 1914, and no one could have been happier or less concerned about the state of the world than we. Sure, there were headlines about some shooting in Europe, but it never fazed us. The only thing that got us down was the approach of Labor Day and the thought of returning to school.

Four years ago when I was fishing on the Northwest Miramichi, I remember chewing the rag one evening with Penny, the youngest member of our party, then aged fifteen. “Pen,” I said, “what are you going to do when you get through school?” “We’ll be lighting the Russians,” he said quietly. Well, I didn’t believe him, and still don’t. But what hit me was the fatalism with which he said it. It’s no way to come of age, with a dread possibility like that in your mind. Yet now there is an army of youngsters who live with it, including my own.

The question is what kind of summer to give them before they go into uniform. They are too restless in mind just to loaf as we did. They need something constructive to do. The Quakers and Unitariuns have each worked out the idea of a coeducational camp with rehabilitation work wwhere it most needs doing. This summer the American Friends Service Committee will operate ten camps in the United Slates and Mecico. Down in Maine they will be working with the Penobscot Indians, in the Southwest with the Navaho, Hopi, and Papago: a camp in Tennessee is building a rural clinic, pouring cement, laying bricks, seeing it go up; a camp near San Francisco is helping to renovate homes in the shipyard town of North Richmond. The same goes for the Unitarians. who are running coeducational camps for high school age, such as the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where a dozen hoys and girls arc building cabins, studying soil erosion, forestry, the TVA, and farming both good and bad. In each ease the youngsters pay their way, with for an eight-week season.

But if a hoy has been away at boarding school all winter, it isn’t just sentiment for a family to want him home for at least hall the vacation. If home is a farm or even a place with a small truck garden, he can make his contribution picking and weeding (though I must admit that working in my father’s vegetable patch was to me the hottrsi, dullest drudgery I had ever encountered up till then). A much more appealing project for Massachusetts boys is the Junior Sportsmen’s Conservation Camp, which will hold four two-week sessions this summer at Swann Lodge in the Beartown Stale Forest. This camp, which was established by A. Heaton Underhill. Field Secretary of the Massachusetts Fish and Game Association, and Robert L. Jones of the Department of Conservation. now has accommodations for fifty boys for each period; some of them will be sponsored by sporting clubs throughout the state, others will pay their own way; in each case the cost is $45 for a fortnight. Age limits, twelve to seventeen, with the community divided into an older group and a younger group.

The purpose of the camp is to teach all phases of conservation, and with it good sportsmanship. The mornings are devoted to talks on soil conservation, fire fighting, use of the axe, visits to fish hatcheries, and demonstrations of rifle firing, fly casting, proper methods of skinning, camp cooking, and so forth. The boys bring with them a love of the woods and a curiosity to know more about how to keep them alive. In the afternoon there may be skeet shooting or canoeing (with instruction in rescue work) or a field trip to the beaver houses. So u goes until 4.30, when everyone knocks off for a swim, and then after supper 1 here are nature films Rird Dogs, Wild Wings. Striped Bass.

I rees lor tomorrow, The River, were a few titles that caught my eye until — it is time for bed. The sponsoring clubs have worked up enthusiasm from Nantucket to the Berkshires, and the boys are now competing for the scholarships which will take them to the camp next summer: such projects as winter feeding, wood duck boxes, tree and shrub planting, the creation of pond fish shelters and spawrung areas, bring out the ynungst ers who ought to go there. Interested parents should write to Wildlife Conservation, Inc., 20 Spruce Street, Boston.

Round the Bend (Morrow, $3.50), which is in many res peels the best novel Nevil Shute has written, is a study in temperaments and a very human coni rust of man’s dedication in the West and in the East. Tom Cutter, the Englishman who tells the slory, is a self-made mechanic, a fearless and remarkably precise operator of air transport. At the age of fourteen he ran aw ay from his job in a garage to become the handy boy in Sir Alan Cobham’s Hying circus. He did every tiling, including a comedy stunt, an elopement in an old model T which was chased all over the airdrome by a little Moth, bombing 1 he car w it h bags of Hour and toilet paper. Tom’s part ner in the comedy is a boy of his own age, Connie Shaklin, who looked Asiatic and was. His mother was Russian, his father Chinese. Connie had the gift of tongues as well as the gift of hands: he is a mystic as well as a genius with the wrench. When, after the war. Tom flies his little Fox-Moth down to Bahrein to start a transport and freight service for the oil companies in the Middle East, it is fate which reunites him with Connie, who becomes the head man of his Asiatic crews.

Connie’s dedication to the maintenance of aircraft is every bit as intense as Tom’s flying and planning. He attracts to the airdrome a large following, mostly Moslems who pray with him at sunsel and who worship him as a prophet. The word spreads to whatever airport Connie is assigned, and soon in the vying to be with him there are nearriots which the British Resident tries with infinite stupidity to suppress. At this moment Nadezna, Connie’s sister, arrives to be Tom’s secretary, and her presence is one more spark.

The book draws its power from the fine portraits of the two men. both ascetics, both committed to a belief and to a way of work even if it carries them “round the bend of sanity.”"When a good man employs ot Iters,” says Connie to Tom, “ he becomes a slave to the job, for the job is the guarantee for the security of many men. So when a man speaks candidly in the hangar of the things, the ethics of the work, that he believes in, he may bring others to believe in those ihings too, and to depend upon Iris words. Then he, too. is a slave to his own job. because il he relaxes his endeavours to leach men proper ways of work and life, he may destroy the faith he has created in them, and so throw them back into an aby ss of doubt and fear and degradation, lost indeed. . . .”This faith in work is the crux of the book.

Forty years ago it was the immigrant like Mary Antin, valiant and impressionable, who made the spilled, complacent Amerietin realize what the incoming American had to contend with. Today when we are NO much more keenly aware of racial tension, it takes a powerful woman and a great artist like Ethel Waters to bring home to us the injustice and brufalitv which have beset even the most talented Negroes in this country and in our time. Her autobiography. His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Doubleday, $3.00), which she wrote with Charles Samuels, defies a simple label: it is violent. generous, shocking, candid, compassionate, and, because she has the memory of an clephant, full of graphic detail in all, a powerful, illuminating document.

As a girl, Ethel Waters had every reason to be a hell-raiser. She was illegitimate, the result of a rape when her mother was twelve. She was brought up mostly bv her grandmother in the Bloody Eighth Ward of Philadelphia. She was taught to steal and she was the best child thief in that slum. “I stole because I was always hungry. ... I was never caught. She had a probing mind, was tall lor her age, and could outcurse any sailor: alcohol had no lure for her she had seen what it did to her aunts. She knew the pickpockets, the pimps, and the ladies of the sporting houses. “There was,”she says, “one emotional outlet my people always had when thev had the blues. That was singing.”and some of the songs she was to make famous later, she remembered from her girlhood. “No performer,”she adds, “was ever pulled out of a childhood so dark and cold. “Stormv Weat her,”which was written for her, might have been the theme song of her life.

This storv is as honest as Kthel W aters can make it. She tells it with no illusions about herself and no regard for the reader’s sensibilities. Here, particularly in theearly chapters, are the brute force of poverty and the branding iron ol racial hatred: here also are the songs and the rivalries of the theater: and, most of all. here is the big heart of a woman who has had to be hard as pails and ruthless to men, but who as she mellows in experience and success S proud to show you her scars and tell you how she got them. I think of Sweet Mama Stringbean as she was called when she played the Rinkydinks for $25 a week; I think of the automobile accident in which she almost lost her leg; I think of the limes she revenged herself on the show girls who stole her men: I think of her adoption of little Allegra: I think of her singing “Stormy Weather" and “ Tropical Heat Wave" when she was the highest-paid star on Broadway. I think of her tributes to Sam Harris and to her accompanist, Pearl White; I think of her as a big person with a big faith. And I am glad that she found Charles Samuels, a collaborator who preserved her language and her spirit, who has been so skillful in alternating what was brutal and what was funny, and who has kept himself so scrupulously out of the picture.