“LIKE MOTHER MAKES IT”

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 62, 4 June 1927, Page 26 (Supplement)

“LIKE MOTHER MAKES IT”

HALLOWED BY TIME. The above phrase, besides being grammatically defective, always seems to me deficient in commonsense. It is usually applied, prefaced by a wistful negative, to the perfectly good Dundee cake you got at the little shop round the corner, or the apple pudding you made with such care. “That’s not like mother used to make it. I remember at home—” There is a reminiscent pause, filled with visions of those heavy, dripping cakes, those exemplary steak pies, those marvellous .Yorkshire puddings of an unhappily vanished day. Now I don’t suggest for a moment that mother was not an admirable woman, with a light hand for pastry, says an English writer, but I do think that the possession of what the psycho-an-alysts call “a mother fixation,” is likely lo cause a lot of trouble in the home. There are heaps of people about who seem unable to tear themselves from the ideas of a past century, and foi whom time hallows everything, from a horsehair bustle to incandescent gas. “There aren't any musical comedies like the good old ones—‘The Country Girl’ and ‘Floradora.’ You never heat a really good tune now. ‘Punch’ isn’t nearly as amusing as it used to he. 1 think the new hats are hideous. It’s impossible to get really reliable maids, crepe de chine, penny buns, or silk stockings nowadays.” Their affection for the superior past amounts to a species of ancestor worship. “The house hasn’t been touched since my grandfather’s day,** says Conservative Charles with pride. “More’s the pity,” you murmur bitterly beneath your breath, having bumped your head one one of the quaint old cross beams, tripped up the picturesque but corkscrew stairs, and arrived down to dinner blue with cold (there being no gas-stove in your room), with too much powder on your face and with your parting like forked lightning, owing to the fact that a couple of candles are the only means you have for illuminating your room. This passion for clinging to past discomforts and making unfavourable comparisons between this century and the infinitely better ones that preceded it, is not confined to the old and middleaged. There are plenty of quite young men and women who seem to think that because Rembrandt painted in the 17th century, and Verdi composed music in the 19th, there has been no painting or music since. “I hate all his new-fangled stuff. It’s not my idea of painting. I like something with a tune you can hum. I don’t understand what they’re driving at.” The trouble is that, in most cases, they haven’t tried. The moment you fina yourself becoming the least bit “set in your ways,” unwilling to admit that there is much that is good in the 20th century and that, on the whole, the expectation of human happiness is higher than it was “when mother was a girl,” nip it in the bud. Make a change in your life, however small. If you have always come home from work by Tube, try a bus for a change. If you usually buy your hats at Rosette’s, try Laurette’s instead. Lunch at “The Coffee Pot” instead of “The Kettle”, change your daily paper and do remember, in spite of mother’s lardy cake", thal every other century not heft - A ha: vouj ’