YOUR CLUB AND MINE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 296, 6 March 1928, Page 5

YOUR CLUB AND MINE

AN OPEN PAGE

! Each Tuesday afternoon a corner will be reserved for original contribu- , tion;3 of general interest to womenfolk. The subject matter is for you to choose —whatever topic Interests you may also be of interest or amusement to others, whether it be about your hobbies, experiences, or merely amusing musings about the ordinary round of the day. A book prize is offered weekly for the best effort, which should be brief, plainly written, and sent to “Your Club and Mine,” The Sun, Auckland. This week the prize has been given to Miss Kathleen Knight for her article. POOR FATHER AGAIN The old belief that father can do no wrong has died out. Perhaps l|e has deserved this change of mind, and perhaps he has not. In either case, poor modern daddy can do nothing right. When Mr. 1928 roars down the garden to little Jackie to come inside and get on with his work he is greeted with something like this: “Aw . . . gher want me? Wait on. ; I’m just talking to Tom. I can’t come • yet.” And to Tom Jackie says: 1 “I wish the old boy’d dry up.” 4 In about twenty minutes, if father ] is lucky, Jackie comes nonchalantaly ] inside. With an air of “Catch-me-now- i while-I’m-in-for-I-may-be - off - again-in-a-minute,” he says. 1 “Now, Dad. What was it you ] wan ted ?”

ai.iu yuur Lixtiiei ctuiims, numuiy, lucu he called Jackie to do a little work. “Oh. That?” and he is out again to join the all-important Tom. Poor father I You can imagine what the conversation would have been a hundred years ago, when fathers were in the ascendency. “John, come here immediately. You have work to do. Yes, you will get on with that at once. No delay, please. When you have finished you will come to me in my study. What? A cricket match? Tut, tut, young sir. Work first and pleasure afterwards.” Truly a glorious day for fathers! But things have sadly changed. Even the little girls nowadays know that father is not what he should be. He is a handy person, of course, and always seems to have more ice-creams in his pocket than mother has in her purse, and he is more generous in the matter of p-'.ctures and such joys, but there his goocl qualities end. He is the perfect ass. A blundering person, going through life with his eyes shut, and only landing on the good things either by a pure stroke of fortune or by the foresight of mother. A little girl in the Kaipai'a train the other day illustrated this truth. She and mother were sitting quietly in the train and father could not be prevailed upon to come off the platform.

He stood talking to some other men. “Gossiping,” the little girl said. Then the wind sprang up, or the train suddenly realised its privileges as an express, and father’s brand new Panama hat went sailing across a field of burnt grass. The little girl was looking through the window, and she reported father’s loss to mother. “Father’s lost his hat,” she said. Then she chuckled, “That is just like father,” she added. And father, quite innocently running his fingers through his hair and chatting to his friends,' remarked pleasantly. “That was neat; I don’t suppose Gordon’s puff-puff will stop for me to get out and chase my forty-nine-and-six, so I shall have to remain hatless.” And they all laughed. But that, the little girl would say, was just the kind of joke that father would laugh at. This little girl was not the only child along the Kaipara line who knew the weaknesses of the race of fathers. When a certain mother in Swanson sent father down to the station with the two eldest boys, and arrived herself with the youngest boy and his four-year-old sister just about ten minutes before the train was due to start, they saw their father leaning absently up against the window of the ticket office. The clerk was absent and the poor man had to wait till he came back, but Miss Four Years could not see this. She was heard to say to mother in bitingly scornful tones, “I s’pose he’s Forgotted what to say. . . .” Which is just another proof that fathers are eternally off their pedestals, for otherwise would the little lady have not sympathised with a poor man who had bo get “Two and four halves return to Mount Eden?” K. M. KNIGHT.