Hesling Still

Cartoonist Hesling Still In A Stew

Most people, it is said, have at least one good book in them, but writer-cartoonist-playwright {to name his most recent pursuits) Bernard Resting has accomplished far more than this by managing to remain both fresh and remarkably funny in his third autobiography, “Stir Up This Stew”.

HESLING tells how he left his native Yorkshire to become an actor and got as far as becoming the caretaker at a London theatre, where he maintained an illicit, rent free existence, boiling his eggs in the glue pot and sleeping in a stage bed after the cast had gone home.

This lasted until he was discovered by the city’s down-and-outs, with the result that patrons leaving the theatre were confronted each night by a homeless horde waiting to get inside.

Bailiffs, pineapples and a penchant for spelling Lenin “Lennon” made him quit both London and Com munism and move to Australia, where he settled eventually at Castlecrag, the Sydney suburb planned by Burley Griffin, the designer of Canberra, of whom he says: “All architects have weak spots in their armour, and Griffin’s weak spot was ceilings; he could never get them to stay up.”

His story of the family whose children were imprisoned by a falling Griffin ceiling and the architect’s unperturbed reaction would alone make the book worth reading, but there is much more in this delightful account of Hesling’s bohemian circle of friends and his remarkable experiences.

Its only shortcomings is that it

lacks examples of his cartoons.-

Rob

W.

(Stir Up This Stew. Ure Smith.

$2.50).