Of Europe

A Cook's Tour Of Europe

After reading Kenneth Cook’s account of European travel

(Blood Red Roses), some

readers might be left in doubt as to whether or not it’s a spoof and they’ve been got at; few however, will persist to the end without being amused.

KENNETH COOK is an Aus tralian writer—newspaper re porter, creator of radio plays and features, TV commentator, novelist, you name it, he’s been it. He is also the father of four small children, aged from two to nine, and thereon hangs the adventures—or the folly— that led to his present piece of descriptive literature.

In 1961 he and his wife Patricia decided to see the world even though they were financially embarrassed (although embarrassed is the last word that ever should be used in connection with the Cooks), and encumbered by offspring.

Cook’s bank manager connived, by lending them £800; they let their house in Chatswood, Sydney, and took passage on a foreign ship to Genoa because its agents quoted the lowest fares. The adventure began.

Even with the self-inflicted troubles the Cooks carried with them, nothing, just nothing, could have been as con tinually disastrous as this story makes out subsequent events to be.

In the ordinary course of an ordinary life there must have been some smooth patches, a little sun shine; but Kenneth and his brood were not just ordinary. Even accom modating bank-managers, generous magazine editors and movie-makers are made to appear as minor catastrophes.

It says something for the exuberant style of the writer and his somewhat

perverted sense of fun that you are not tempted to give the book away early in the piece as pure tripe but, to the contrary, are enticed from page to page to see what slapstick situation the menagerie will get itself into next.

On the voyage from Australia, the Cooks contracted every disease known to man and a few known only to the owners and operators of the foreign-registered vessel they sailed on. Patricia reached London suspected of being in the terminal stages of TB; they bought a boat, on another overdraft, expecting to sail it down through the canals of Europe to the Mediterranean and Greece but wrecked it, uninsured, before they had left the approaches to Maidstone. They bought a car, travelled to Spain, where Kenneth took up smuggling, and were chased out by the Guardia Civil, carrying a Frenchman, without papers, across the border in the boot of the car.

The car finally expired in Nothern France, they expended their last sous on tickets to London where they arrived “dishevelled, weary, penniless and wondering what on earth the bank manager would say this time”.

“You’d better start to write some thing,” said Patricia, Blood Red

Roses is the result. (The title comes from a sea shanty and doesn’t make any sense, either). —JT. (BLOOD RED ROSES. Published by Michael Joseph. 26/-.) SINCE Australia has inflicted travel writer Frank Clune on New Zealand readers it is probably only fair that the Kiwis should send us Susan Graham, author of The Tender Traveller. To be sure, Mrs. Graham doesn’t follow the Up-Boys-And-At- Em prose approach of Frank, but the two writers have in common a propensity for name dropping and an assumption that their readers want to know all their personal arrange ments. And as Frank is aggressively Australian during his travels, so Susan is aggressively Kiwi. She reminds us frequently that Katherine Mansfield is a New Zealander and is always on the lookout abroad for some tiny recogni tion of the existence of New Zealand.

When Mrs. Graham manages to forget she is a New Zealander, and leaves the orbit of the various New Zealand Government offices abroad, with their luncheons and cocktail parties, she drops her stuffiness and treats us to an interesting travelogue, shot through with practical hints that only an experienced traveller could pass on.

Mrs. Graham’s travels take her to Bangkok and Istanbul, to Europe and London, to the US, South America and then home. It is her South American travels that save her book from being dull to all but her New Zealand fans (back home she is a newspaper columnist, and daughter of Guy Morris, Resident Commis sioner of Niue and Treasurer in the Cooks after World War I).

It is in the southern continent that she allows us to share a little of the fun on being a tourist in the Andes, at La Paz, Buenos Aires and Brasilia, and the pity of it is that she doesn’t give us more of this and less of the other. r fHIS Land I Love, by the same L author, is what you might expect; It’s about New Zealand, a land in which she finds a few faults, but not often.

However, if the would-be traveller from other countries is willing to overlook this, Mrs. Graham provides good background against which something different in NZ holidays might be planned. In the case of expatriate Kiwis, of course, we can imagine this book reducing them to floods of nostalgic tears. —SI.

(The Tender Traveller And This

LAND I LOVE. Both published by A.

H. and A. W. Reed. Each, 24/6.)