RUSTIC QUIPS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 November 1939, Page 6

RUSTIC QUIPS

YOKEL HUMOUR OF ENGLAND EFFECTS OF MODERN LIFE. An anthology of English country humour would undoubtedly prove a best-seller, though the steady process of sophistication by cinema and wireless will probably soon render any such compilation out of date, writes F. S. Burnell in the Sydney “Morning Herald." When the last war broke out in 1914, and there was talk of the possibility of a German invasion, an old labourer said', trustfully: "They 'out come 'ere. Squire wouldn't allow it.” Where would one find such child-like confidence today?

It is only about 30 years ago that a Devon farmer, talking to a visitor from London, remarked: “Well, I've a-thought sometimes I'd like to see this yurr London, but mother and me, us have talked it over, and us be eoom to the conclusion that old England be good enough for we." Nowadays such a speech would be almost inconceivable; the car and the motor bus have almost entirely abolished the countryman’s immemorial thraldom to his native acres. Yet even now one still hears of an occasional die-hard, such as the aged rustic who recently insisted on walking on foot to the nearest market town, nine miles off. Asked why he did not lake the bus, he replied indignantly: "I never ahn’t bin on nerra motor ner nerra bus, an’ as long as 1 lives I never wunt!”

A village ancient in the Cotswolds. proud of his tale of years, boasted recently: “I be the oldest man as be buried in Leafiekl churchyard—not as I be buried yet. but when I be I shall be!” It was a Cotswold labourer, too, questioned regarding a local historical monument, who told mo, albeit with some diffidence: “Well, sir, they do say it was where Oliver Cromwell fought a battle with the Anglo-Saxons!” “These 'ere ditches want cleaning out," grumbled a roadman: "they’re bungful of sentiment!" —a delightful malapropism only equalled by that of the cottager's wife who told the solicitous visitor from the rectory: “Well, ye know, mum. James be main bad, ’e be; ’e lost conscientiousness!" To lose conscientiousness surely implies a spiritual degeneration hardly less than that of the lady of whom a neighbour affirmed: "No, sir. she don't go to no place of worship, no she don't not Mrs White don’t, not if I know anything of it." Deplorable indeed: but then, as a man once remarked to me: “Well, sir, what can you expect with all this Russian Communionism about?"

FLORAL VERBIAGE. Discontent is a soil in which flowers of speech flourish. “The dinners we cooks is good enough for the husbands we gets,” declared a Gloucestershire woman who flatly refused a wellmeant offer of culinary assistance; and a labourer, resentful of another’s unaccountable whimsies, growled: "First 'e said ’e wouldn't went, and then 'e went an’ good!" Rustic ways of putting things arc sometimes apt to be a trifle disconcerting, as when a certain noble peer, picking up a pheasant which he had just shot, pointed out io the keeper that it had fleas on it. "IVs all right, my lord,” replied the keeper, “the pheasant's fleas won't bite your lordship, any' more than your lordship's fleas would bite the pheasant.” Equally' innocent in intention, no doubt, was the reply of the woman at a mission meeting when the missioner expressed concern at the sadness of her expression. “Oh, sir,” she exclaimed, “it's just a year sin’ our old billygoat died, and when you were in the pulpit, you looked so like him I could ha’ thought you was our old billy on end, a-talkin' to us.”

Although the old-fashioned village shop is rapdly disappearing before the advance of the übiquitous “stores,” shopping in the country can still provide its humours occasionally. For instance, a customer who had asked for toothpaste received the Ollendorfian response: “No, ma'am, but I have some brass polish!" The other day', in a country town of southern England, a somewhat embarrassed-looking male sidled up to the counter of an establishment specialising in ladies' underclothing, and was asked what he required, “Well, miss," he said gruffly. "I wants a garment for the missus, but I dunno what you calls it —but if it were for I. it’d be a vest and a pair ot pants." That the female of the species can. be at least equally vague is proved by the lady with a large parcel under one arm who was overheard complaining bitterly' to her friend: “Calls hisself a chiropodist, and yet says he can't stuff my pore little dog." And the apocryphal old lady who was melted to tears by “that blessed word ‘Mesopotamia,’ " has surely found her compeer in the genuine old lady from Hampshire who recently' declared that she had always believed that Dan and Beersheba were "Man and wife, like Sodom and Gomorrah!”