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MY FREDDIE’S CAKE

BANKNOTE IN THE ICING A MISCHIEVOUS TALE ALL A PACK OF RUMOURS The “Don’t Talk!” campaign has, to some extent, served a useful purpose, but some who have not yet learned to ‘keep it under the hat,’ as the posters advise, are spreading a ridiculous story which the Auckland Star has sought to trace to its origin. Everyone approached has heard it from someone else, and at. the last its beginning its lost in the cigarette mist of a lounge filled witn bridge-playing women. (This story, it will ibe quickly realised, has also been heard in one form or another in Paeroa. —Ed.) A woman, the story goes, sent her soldier son in the Middle East an iced cake. She placed a banknote on the top, covered the note with a strip of greaseproof paper, and then applied the icing.

At Patriotic Fair

A few weeks later she went to a patriotic fair —in Auckland. (In Paeroa the story was that it was a Ngatea resident.) On a stall she discovered her cake. *lt was priced at Bs, an obvious bargain. Said she to the smiling patriotic worker behind the counter: “That is my cake.- I made it. I iced it. I posted it to my Freddie in the Middle East!” “Nonsence!” snapped the attendant. “Cut the cake, then, and you will find a banknote under the icing!” commanded the mother, trembling in the agitation of her indignation. The cake was cut, after some fuss, and there, of course, was the banknote !

How Could It?

But how did the cake get out of His Majesty’s mails to a conspicuous place on a patriotic stall? How indeed! “I only know that Mrs So and So told me, and it was her sister who found the cake and the banknote.” Interviewed, Mrs So- and So says, “Oh, no, it wasn’t my sister! She got it from Mrs Thingmejig.” Mrs Thingmejig got it from Mrs Watshername, who got it from Mrs Oddfacts, who heard it from Mr Passiton, and he from Mrs O’Tellus, who heard itdistinctly from the lips of the weiidressed woman at the bridge table alongside, and that last Thursday, or maybe the Thursday before.

It resembles the horrible story of the leprous finger of a Chinese, found in a bag of bananas, in Christchurch, in the midst of the depression. A whole staff of reporters investigated that one for days. Women reddened, blustered,, giggled or nearly cried, but no one had so much as seen the bag, let alone the bananas. As for the’ finger . . . don’t mention . such dreadful things! Another Old One Zealandia, the Auckland Catholic weekly, exposes another of these baseless rumours. It concerns the well-dressed young Auckland woman who remarked to her girl friend in a restaurant, “Personally, I don’t mind how long this war lasts. I’ve never had such good wages as I have at present.” Thereupon a middleaged woman arose, smacked her smartly on the cheek, saying, “This is for the boy I lost in Greece!” arid then slapped her on the other “That for the other boy lost in Egypt!”

U.S. Versions

The paper goes on to show how variants of this story are being printed all over the United States. “That is for my' boy who was killed in Pearl Harbour! And that is for my boy who was killed in the Philiupines!” It happened in Rochester, N.Y.; in Wichita, Kansas; in Harrisburg, Pa.; in Texas, Indianapolis, and in Toronto, Canada. The Harrisburg Telegraph printed the yarn, but retracted when the society editor recalled that a similar story went the rounds in World War L even dug up the story from Harrisburg newspaper files in 1898.. On man had heard it as a story in the Civil War!

The stupid yarn with which this article began should not be repeated, because it is so mischievious. It might lead some credulous women to stop posting parcels to soldiers overseas, in distrust of the mails. It might furnish o'hers with an excuse for not subscribing to patriotic fund appeals.

In any case it is untrue —a dangerous scrap of Fifth Column tissue, calculated to dismay and divide, which is the objective of every Fifth Columnist.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/HPGAZ19430331.2.25

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3246, 31 March 1943, Page 5

Word count
Tapeke kupu
703

MY FREDDIE’S CAKE Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3246, 31 March 1943, Page 5

MY FREDDIE’S CAKE Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3246, 31 March 1943, Page 5

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