Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 181, 21 October 1927, Page 5

Mundane Musings

Keeping Up Appearances

I am divided in mind about this question of keeping up appearances. Sometimes I think they are not kept up half strictly enough. In the old days, when one accepted an invitation to dinner, one knew that a good meal would be provided, no matter what cheese-paring preceded and followed it. And in return one made monstrous efforts to provide a meal as good, or better, as well furnished with every available scrap of silver, as carefully though out. Nowadays, alas! I observe a regrettable spread of the habit of asking people to drop in and take pot luck. And what is worse—seeing that they get it. A share of yesterday’s cold mutton and a cup of warmed-up coffee masquerading as hospitality is a bitter affair. It is like going to the pictures to see Charlie Chaplin and being put off with a drama of real life as imagined by a Hollywood producer. COMPLEXES AND CONFESSIONS The generation which produced our fathers was addicted to appearances of the fiercest and most uncompromising order, says Storm Jameson, the English authoress. The family fare might be of the very plainest, but an unexpected guest was fed on the fat of the land. The drugget that covered the family carpet was removed before the sacred feet of visitors, and manners, no less than table linen, were savagely revised for company use. Not now. A comparative stranger, walking Into a modern household, is likely to find himself invited to take an intimate part in family disputes. He fondles the ramily skeleton and listens to a detailed description of the husband’s shortcomings or the sins of the children. Mothers no longer show off their children’s pretty tricks. They display their complexes instead. Ido not know that it is an improvement, ft may have been tiresome to listen while a five-year-old lisped: “Go, birdie, tell Winnie I’m waiting.” It is terrifying to listen while a fond mother explains that her child has an incurable complex against wearing gloves, which he always throws away, a crime for which he would once have been well smacked—in private “I'M TOO POOR" We have, generally speaking, given up pretending to have plenty of money. We no longer travel first-class to impress the family next door. We practise all sorts of minor economies and tell each other about them. We say loudly and frequently: “Oh, I can’t afford thal sort of thing, I’m too poor.” But do not let us flatter ourselves that we are much honester than our Victorian ancestors, who kept the family skeleton under lock and key at whatever cost to themselves. We have only changed the scene. It is no longer considered disreputable to have no money. The war finished that. But where our fathers and mothers strained every nerve to appear comfortable and solid, we have se J . our hearts on being smart. If it be considered the thing to shave our heads, we all do it, with —since most people have very queerly shaped heads —disastrous results. We read books we do not like, applaud plays that really shock us, and go uncomfortably to some fashionable spot for a holiday, when we would far rather go to some quiet country place. All to look smart. THAT HIRE-PURCHASE HABIT How very sad! And what is sadder is the fact that we are fast losing our hold on realities. In a very short time we shall have lost the habit of paying for anything. We shall only pay an Instalment on it. Mr. and Mrs. Everyman will eat their dinner at a table on which they have paid half the instalments, off china on which they still owe a year’s deposits, and afterwards leave their house—acquired by a Small Cash Payment Down and The Rest on Easy Terms—for a drive in the car they have just received on payment of the first deposit. For that small cash payment down we can all achieve an appearance of the comfort our mothers saved and waited to enjoy. Everything they had (and paid for) we can have to-morrow (by promising to pay for it) —everything, except the basic security. “EVERY DAY IN EVERY WAY In America, one enterprising manufacturer has started a system whereby one pays that First Deposit itself by instalments. It becomes every day easier and easier to keep up appearances. The approaching visit of an old friend need cause us no such heart-burnings and searching of ways and means as it did our mothers. Is th spare room shabby? The First Deposit takes care of that. The same Little Friend of All the World recarpets the dining-room and provides a grand piano to amuse the arriving guest. So far it has not been possible to acquire the joint by hire purchase. When that comes about, the last thread holding us to the old security will be cut and we shall be adrift on a sea of appearances, with our hands full of reminder notices and promises to pay*. DOES IT FIT? So used have we all become to the ministrations of the Small Deposit merchant that it came with the shock of new light to a young married friend when I propounded for our mutual benefit the now half-forgotten doctrine that one ought to fit one’s life to one’s income, and not first arrange one’s manner of life and then try to make the income edver it. Because that is precisely what most of us are doing. We do not now, when arranging our lives, think first of the financial cornerstone. The first thing we think of is: “What do I want? What sort of a life do I like?” And then: “How can I get it?” LIFE ON THE INSTALMENT PLAN Advertisement pages of any periodical supply* the answer. The Small Cash Payment over, all that we have to do is to balance on the tight rope stretching between one instalment and the .next, and to heave a sigh of relief when the final one is safely negotiated, and (like any other drug victim), to begin the nerve-racking process again for some other objective. Our mothers kept up appearances on solid foundations and real possessions. We keep them up on next to no foundations at all. For that is the beauty of the deposit system: there is nothing to betray to our friends that our expensive gramophone is only half paid for, or that there is still a fat sum owing on the car. Very soon we shall have reached the point where there is nothing but appearances to keep un. All the Victorian safeguards will be gone. We shall own nothing, and hire everything —even our souls.

3*o clean plaster of Paris, cover it with a thick coat of raw starch and allow to become perfectly dry. Next day rub it off with a clean cloth.