LONDON CARRIES ON

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20955, 7 November 1939, Page 9

LONDON CARRIES ON

SEES THE LIGHT SIDE NOTABLE JOKES ON HITLER IN THE DARK HOURS (From a Correspondent) LONDON, Sept. 25 Londoners have not forgotten how to laugh. In the streets, in the airraid shelters, in public vehicles and public houses, even in the pitch darkness of the nightly black-out, the people of London are managing to see the light side of every situation. A khaki boy piling sandbags round a section of the barracks was asked by an onlooker: “Why that corner only?” “Ssh, lad. This is where the canteen is.” Pack Up Among the happy children singing “Pack Up Your Troubles,” as they marched under the evacuation scheme was heard the voice of one little girl, waving to an older friend: “I am being evaporated.” “That’s not right,” said her little friend a year older. “We are being excavated.” Two women chatting on the doorstep in a thickly-populated district were approached by another, wildly excited, who exclaimed: “Our Bill’s been promoted. He’s in charge of a spittoon.” A couple of cockneys working on sandbags were discussing Hitler’s epic phrase: “As an old soldier I know what the front line is.” Had To Miss Him One of them, also an old soldier, said bitterly: “There y’are, mate. Millions of ’em got ’it, and, blimey, I ’ad to miss ’im.” When the sirens went off one of the men on a cab rank yelled to his friends: “Come on, mates. Ttler’s alarm clock.” A couple of workmen were eating their lunch on the sandbags outside a Fleet Street office and reading the news of the second pamphlet raid. . One of them said: “Blimey. ’Ere we are at war, an’ what do we do? Perfec’ little gents, we go and drop confetti on ’em. Lor!” Sand is going round in some very strange vehicles. A beer dray, with the brewer’s name on the side, was unloading sand. Two postmen were watching and one of them said: “Look what they’re putting in the beer now.” Hoarding Father was queueing up for a motor coach with his three youngsters and five belonging to a neighbour, all bound for a mutual friend’s farm home in the country. Father blushed at looking quite such a “family man,” but he blushed still more when the conductor doled out his bunch of tickets and said, with a sly grin, “Hoarding, eh?” During the first air-raid warning a man was settling his daughter in their shelter when he realised his wife had not come down. He shouted up the stairs: “Are you coming or aren’t you?” She didn’t answer, so he dashed up the staircase—and found her making the beds. “What on earth are you doing that for?” he asked. “Now don’t be cross. If the house is damaged there’ll be a lot of those wardens around the place, and it must be tidy.” And she finished making the beds.