These Revolting Angels

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 572, 26 January 1929, Page 23

These Revolting Angels

The desire to shock is pre-eminently I an emotion of early life, and it is as ! ancient as history. I I dare to assert that even the Stone ! Age produced its gleeful rebels, and I that Miss Arrowhead delighted to kick over the traces of convention under j the immediate nose of some (as she i fondly imagined) disapproving, elder, says Chris Sewell in an amusing article. And the early Britonettes, if they did nothing else, most surely discovered a new and screaming shade of woad, and flaunted it in eye-watering patterns before discreetly-daubed aunts. A kitten expresses the wish to shock when, for the first time, it leaps over the old cat’s head. Toleration lurks in the old cat’s eye . (just as, X guess, it lurked in the eyes of Grannie Arrowhead and Aunt Britonette), though she pretends to tremble at the feat. And the kitten —innocent scrap—inflated with pride because it fancies it has set the pace as it never has been set since time began, triumphantly chases its tail. . . . » • • It is the same everywhere. youth flourishes its heels in the face of Age, and chortles because it believes it has taught Age a thing or two; while Age, blenching dutifully, just manages to stifle the yawn which signifies “The precious innocent. Why, that was vieux jeu when they planned the Sphinx.” Observe the mother-of-to-day. Mark well how she is relegated to the back- j ground and taught her place. So de- ! murely does she take it that you can- ; not see the almost-wink which affects I her left eyelid. She behaves beautifully, and comes ; in on her cues like a prima donna. She ! knows to the fraction of a second when to register amazement, and is most charmingly revoltee directly her little stage is set for the latest thing in Hair Raisers. When her daughter strews flowers of Freudian rhetoric round her path, or treats her to cut and dried plans for decreasing the census, does she disappoint her? Very rarely. “My dear child!” she murmurs, “really, you know there are limits. If this is the modern style, save me from it is all I ask. . . . What your grandmother would have said. . . . Well, it simply doesn't bear a thought.” » • • All the same she gives it several thoughts. A swift remembrance of her own early views on life and j

love darts into her mind. She recollects in IS9S how she “aired off” at “dear Mamma” under the touching conviction that such a tornado of uuortliodoxy had never before ruffled the locks on that very smooth head, j Dear Mamma, she recalls, made a little shrinking gesture, as if someone had punctured her arm with a pin. At the time the Mother-of-to-day took this as a tribute to her own gorgeous emancipation. Now she knows that Dear Mamma was simply , controlling a giggle. She knows it, because she has the same impulse herself. She sublimates it by examining with meticulous care the pattern of the jumper she is copying. And, bless her unsophisticated heart! the daughter suspects nothing. “Mum’s was magenta to the eyebrows, my dear, truly she was,” she confides to her best friend. “Aren't the Mid-Vics rather delicious?” And so it goes on. Most likely it will be the same a thousand years hence. Girls —and boys, too, will be every whit as anxious to be considered “terrible dhevils” as they are in this year of grace, and will cherish the same pellucid conviction that they are | making the old folks sit up. And the old folks, as they utter the ; 2928 equivalent for “Tut, tut,” will j admire—a little wist fully maybe—“the simple elements which constitute the happiness of the Young.”

The principal difficulty experienced by amateurs "when filing the softer metals, such as lead, copper, or aluminium, is the clogging of the space between the teeth of the file with the soft metal filings. This in time causes j scratching of the filed surface, and | makes it difficult to obtain a nice ; smooth result. To obviate this j trouble, after roughing down the part to be file-finished, with a coast-cut or j bastard file, use a medium cut, or smooth file, and rub a piece of chalk over its surface so as to fill the spaces between the teeth. You can then file soft metal without the file clogging or scratching the surface, for the presence of the chalk prevent the soft metal particles filed off from obtaining a hold between the file teeth.

WHO MAKE THE BEST PATIENTS?

The other day a hospital nurse was heard to observe that women made j “impossible” patients as compared ] with men, and that five minutes in a | nurses' common-room would elicit the J same unanimous opinion, j I must confess this is a bit of a revelation. I seem to recall repeated contentions, on the part of medical authorities, that Woman can bear pain more stoically than the sterner sex, for the reason that she is a less sensitive organism. And that, moreover, when she has to surrender to serious illness, she does so with a better grace than Man, and a more philosophical acceptance of the inevitable. Man chafes against enforced interruption ! of Life’s accustomed rhythm. Woman, who keeps on keeping on until tile crash, so to speak, is perforce more quiescent when at last she succumbj The succumbing process is a less proj traded business on the part of the I average male, who, as doctors aver, is | readier to listen in time to medical ; counsel, though disproportionately re- | bellious when he follows it. In no average household. 1 fancy, would the theory of the hospital nurse be admitted. Man's very articulate impatience of pain, even of a minor character, is a standing if affectionate jest In most of the homes 1 have known. Often enough, mother lias played the role of nurse to a fretful male patient when she herself was in need of like ministrations. It would be ridiculous to deny that (here are men stoics of the sickroom no less than women. But is it any less ridiculous, in the face of such demonstrable evidence as hundreds of doctors must be able to produce, to assert that women in the mass are bad patients and men in the mass arc patient angels? Anyhow, to revert to the main point that Woman —according to that same medical evidence—is less sensitive to pain than Man, and therefore more heroic in suffering, it would seem that in face of such a theory a pretty good case could be made of Woman s claim to the hospital nurse’s laurels. She has laid them on masculine brows. It would be interesting to know if doctors are prepared to reassert our right to the victor's bays on the battlefield of pain, nurses’ partisanship no’1 withstanding. | K.V.