While The Kettle Boils

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 82, 17 January 1941, Page 43

While The Kettle Boils

Dear Friends, : Quite a few housewives over the holidays took advantage of these free days to get some extra job done. One apartment house proprietress I know spent two whole days washing blankets while all her boarders were away on holidays. For these diligent souls I have the greatest respect, but I do think they are confusing their household gods. Here is my own holiday confession. With one whole day free on my hands I, too, was moved to some sort of diligent action, so I got busy on some old trunks-with firm intention of clearing out all unwanted rubbish. Though I was persuaded this was a needed household task, it was with a secret thrill of excitement I opened the first trunk. A moment before, the spare room had been just a spare room-now it was filled with ghosts, crowding out from that halfopened lid. The time slipped by. There was no time. The past had merged with the present. ... Such an assortment of old rubbish ..,.. no, treasured mementoes of a beloved past. To the casual outsider that old velvet cape starred with sequins was just so much excess baggage. To you it was a memory of your mother — as you always remembered her — with flowers in her hair, bending over you to say goodnight before leaving for the theatre. You remembered how she had loved the theatre, and how, as a special treat, you would sometimes be allowed to sit up for her. Old, tattered books — "Ivanhoe" — your first school prize. Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson-thumbed and faded copy books that held your first scribblings, and the beginning of your first novel when you were 12 years old. Your first dancing slippers — silver brocade, now frayed and tarnished to a dull green. Whatever use are these to anyone, you think, as you slip them hastily beneath a bundle of old letters. A stack of old family photographs come to light. You take them to the window to survey them at leisure. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and old family friends looking at you stiffly out of their stereotyped setting. ' ‘The fashionable lady of the ’60’s and *70’s was a walking barricade. On the skill of the carpenter, the blacksmith and the steel worker, depended the success of her wardrobe. When fully dressed, she had attached to her person a formidable collection of iron, wapd, and horsehair. The flat-chested lady of that day resorted to an expanding bosom called a "patent heaver." It set them in the mode. "Plumpers," composition pads, were slipped into either side of the mouth to achieve: the effect of rounded cheeks. But the main thing was the corset. me women to-day, comfortable in eir elastic girdles, will remember those old torture devices. Iron rings were often embedded in bedroom walls, and to these the hapless victims would cling, while determined hands laced them in to the fashionable 18 inches. No wonder fainting spells and migtaine were fashionable complaints in those days. You wonder what those pictured faces would think if they could see you ing |

your abbreviated play-sult-your bare legs and toeless sandals? Someone is calling for tea. You thrust all your old treasures back into the trunk and close the lid on them with a little sigh. Your day’s work was only a pretence after all. You knew all along you would not part with one of those useless objects.

One day you will go and do the same thing all over again. Some people call it sentiment. I think of it as memory. Yours Cordially,

Cynthia