Chaos With Peggy In Laos

The possession of a famous foreign correspondent as a husband must be style-cramping for any girl with literary inclinations—particularly when she invades the territory on which her spouse is an acknowledged expert.

PERHAPS this is why Peggy Warner, wife of syndicated Asian expert Denis Warner, presents herself as the occasional butterflybrained traveller in her very readable book Asia is People.

She may be the perennial unfortunate funny woman who gets bitten by the wrong things, eats the wrong things and does the wrong things— but her observations on the people who are Australia’s near neighbours to north and Far East are down-toearth, commonsense and even, as

book-reviewers are fond of saying these days, penetrating.

The journey described was probably a routine inspection of his territory by Denis but turned out to be busi ness for Peggy also when at the end of the piece they ended up at the world’s (then) newest war, in Laos, At Vientiane, on the banks of the Meklong River, she became for a spell (brief) correspondent of the London Daily Mail.

If, as she says, a foreign corres pondent is a “reporter with dysentery”

>he had that in common with the rest 3ut there all resemblance stopped, as he Daily Mail soon found out. They >ent a relief—a veteran of many wars, Noel Barber, who arrived with the Chronicles of Aristotle in his brief -ase and thenceforth churned out many words for his unclassical readers back in the United Kingdom.

But the dozens of big-name cor respondents who came from all quar ters of the newspaper world, descended on the unhappy Laotian capital and tried to locate the very luke-warm hot war, provided copy for Peggy, in their turn.

Laos is perhaps one of the most backward countries in the world and the facilities of Vientiane were not sufficient to accommodate the flood of correspondents, newsreel men, tele vision and radio commentators. The Warners thus found themselves in a double room in a hotel of what might be described as the second category, which was used also as a house of assignation by some of the girls of the city.

Between bouts of dysentry and sending despatches to the Daily Mail, Peggy was able to lie in the bed and read Lady Chatterley's Lover which she found tame in comparison with the antics of the overworked girls next door, and their customers, whom she could hear through the thin par titions of the room.

But if Vientiane was oddly educa tional, up country was chaos —in all, a country, as she says, least calculated to appeal to the foreign visitor.

So far as this book is concerned, Laos offers a tail-piece to a journey that first took in Manila, Japan, Hongkong, Taiwan, Thailand and South Vietnam and gave great scope for the talent Peggy has in abun dance —that of comment, sympathy and seeing the ridiculous in most (ASIA IS PEOPLE. Published by F. W.

Cheshire Ltd., Melbourne. Aust. price, 27/6.)