Those Secret Pleasures

Evening Star, Issue 23373, 16 September 1939, Page 3

Those Secret Pleasures

At a moment when there is not much | external joj T in the world, it is well for 'us to count our blessings—and not least among these remain our secret. pleasures. I am sure that you have j yours as I hare mine, and, because this . is no moment to stand upon ceremony, I I am going to confess to several of my | own in the hope that you will lay yours to heart and find consolation therefrom. • ' A few of mine owe their existence. 1 | imagine, to some experiences of early childhood. It must, i think, have been the joy of rare holidays taken by train and at night that has remained with me. Why otherwise should there be such delight in those fugitive glimpses of lighted railway stations, glimpsed as one rushes through and out once more into the darkness? There is a keen pleasure in those few moments of intimacy, those glimpses of unknown faces, other lives, that brief, sharp contact with other persons and strange surroundings. Then the picture, fades, the curtain drops, the stage is empty again—we pass on, but the vision remains our possession for ever. Attributable to some similar and this time illicit pleasure is the wild gaiety that meat pies immediately suggest to my mind. Speak of a spree and I see a small child delightedly hearing home a bag of meat pies in one hand, and some slightly crumpled cream horns in the other. These remain to me the height of dissipation. But that contact is traoeabe to a gay, but unorthodox, week when two small girls were left in charge of an old and beloved servant Sarah said that the dear lambs must have a treat on Saturday night—hence that memory of strange, unusual dainties.

But other secret pleasures have grown upon me with the year's. There -is the delight of 'a wrongfully prolonged hot bath at midnight at the end of a long and strenuous day. _ No one has the right to bath at midnight and nsk disturbing the household—and if they do they should slip quietly in and out as rapidly as possible. To lie up to one’s neck in hot water reviewing at leisure the events of the day, to remain _ until a tiny premonitory chill creeping down one’s backbone warns one to depart in hasted—this is a sharp and very secret joy. That I have so far retained inviolate this secret is witness to the furtive stealth of my movements. Another secret self-indulgence is hidden even more carefully from the • family circle;—the existence of two hot water bags instead of one in mother’s -bed. “Surely you don’t want a hot water bag to-night? Why, it’s_ spring , now.” You know those bracing re--1 marks of the younger generation, I . brush such queries aside—and hug to my heart the knowledge that, when all the family is safe a-bed, I shall fill not one, bp t two hot water bags and bear them triumphantly to my own bed. “ Why, you’ll be getting absolutely soft!’,’ Incontestably I should then reply that I have reached an age when there is no longer any need to harden oneself for a long and valuable lifetime to be spent in the service of ethers.

Written by MARY SCOTT, for the ‘ Evening Star.’

So many of these secret vices could not be my delight if 1 rose and went to bed at more conventional hours. But, if one is willing to sacrifice sleep to solitude, one caja get a great deal more fun out of life. If you are a solitary person by nature and find yourself compelled to live your life out in a crowsl —even if it be only a beloved and family crowd—let me advise you to rise half an hour before the rest of the world and go to bed an hour after. Then you will have the world to yourself for a glorious period every day—time to collect your wits, regain your sense of perspective and banish all inferiority complexes. Perhaps one of my least amiable private pleasures lies in the almost breathless delight of solitude regained after the departure of visitors. Inhospitable though this may sound, I dare wager that you also, kind reader, feel exactly the same. Every normal person speeds the parting guest at least as warmly as he welcomes the coming—occasionally, I am afraid, even more warmly, although that depends upon the guest. But, however delightful the company you have entertained, there is yet that feeling of unspeakable relief when the last good-byes are exchanged, the last valedictory hand waved.

It is not that you have not enjoyed their visit. It is not that you will not miss them and look forward as you desire—can snap at the family when they irritate you to madness, can put your feet up on the side of your own mantel, can sit alone by your own fire at the end of the day—and not have very seriously to consider what you are going to cook for breakfast to-morrow. This also is a quality that we carry on from our childhood; can't you remember skipping about delightedly ns you came back from the gate with mother, having seen Aunt Agatha finally away P Can’t you recall the delightful freedom of the next few hours, the consciousness of paradise regained? All children, I am sure, share this perfectly natural pleasure at speeding the departing guest. Unfortunately at times they are apt to : betray it in an obvious revival of drooping spirits, a sudden ecstasy when the visitor rises to go. I am aware that my own family holds its united breath as the guest’s foot is pressed upon his accelerator: is the car going to rise to the occasion or will it turn us down and compel us to urge him to remain for one more night? I have never noticed that my children ’ enjoy pushing the paternal car; there are loud complaints if they are asiked to give any assistance of this kind; but one and all set their shoulder to the wheel of a visitor’s car without one word of protest—rather with a positively shameless eagerness for which I always feel a secret urge to apologise. “ How kind your children were pushing the car up that first hill,” the visitors write later—and I blush for the perfidy of the young hosts.

Small pleasures these, you will say, reader, but small things are comfortable in this day of cataclysms; count your secret pleasures—not even Hitler can rob you of them!