On the Beach at Stresa, in 'The Wheatsheaf' in Soho

Frank Sargeson and Dan Davin met in August 1948, when a friend of one, who was also an old army mate of the other, took the visiting expatriate to Esmonde Road. The two men were a touch wary of each other, Sargeson a little more so than Davin. They had read enough of what the other wrote to think of each other with respect, although again, Sargeson more mutedly so than his guest. They also thought they shared a certain provincialism in common, although one by background was a Waikato Methodist, the other a Southland Catholic, and as Davin felt it incumbent to point out, his particular variety of inherited narrowness had never encompassed fear of alcohol. You could be a bigot without being a wowser. Also, you might say, Sargeson to some extent exulted in his Puritanism; Davin more straightforwardly discarded his. For that, after all, was what most defined the society the North Islander wanted to depict, and was so committed to finding the exact literary register in which to do so. Davin too shared his reservations about the kind of people we were, supposing 'New Zealanders' was invoked as a hold-all noun. Yet even Sargeson, at his most severe in judging the community that so shaped him, did not arrive at the pitch of Davin's noting in his diary, when coming back to Dunedin for the first time since his student days: 'In spite of the pubs, the town is in its spirit unchanged - jealous, strong, narrow, small, censorious, ignorant, intolerant, prosperous, conceited, generous and hospitable, mean and complacent. It is a town which strangles the heart and yet gives it intimations of a world beyond, escape and freedom'.