SHE MADE HER OWN CHRISTMAS PRESENTS (2)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 130, 19 December 1941, Page 42

SHE MADE HER OWN

CHRISTMAS PRESENTS (2)

More of the Seasonal Vicissitudes of Effie

Effie liked to have everything pretty round her, and the flotsam and jetsam from Effie’s attempts at poker-work, pewter work, and barbola work still lay in drifts in every corner of the house. But when Effie staggered home laden with her Christmas shopping (forty-five boxes of fancy soap) to find on the doorstep a package containing a small looking glass peeping from its outsize wreath of barbola flowers, she calmly lifted the dustbin lid. Then she took a small dustpan and broom and swept all the ornaments from the mantelpiece and from the top of the piano and from the gramophone cabinet. And she tore the organdie curtains from the windows and the frills from the chairs and then sat down and — \ Effie’s mother used to say,

had a long telephone conversation with a decorator. And the upshot of it all was that Effie packed up a bag and went to stay at an exclusive private hotel in the city while painters and decorators got busy converting the interior of Effie’s little house into something that would not disgrace the pages of the architect’s year book. Effie enjoyed herself in the Big City. She met a number of young people who were interested in Life and Art and used to talk about it quite a lot. And among them was a dashing young man who wore corduroy shirts and his hair rather long, and you would never have guessed that he worked in a Government office in the daytime or that his name was Henry Thomas, because he always thought of himself as Ivan Smourgov. * % * NEITHER Cousin: Olga nor Aunt Caroline would. have _ recognised Effie’s house when the decorators had finished with it. Inside everything was

fawn and functional, and all the furniture was built in except for a threepiece suite (in fawn), with an almost Stonehenge singularity and solidity. The only note of colour was given by the Van Gogh over what used to be the mantelpiece. When Henry saw -he flat he realised that he had been in love with Effie all along, or rather he realised that she was His Type. So they got married and Henry moved in. Effie and Henry were very happy together. They used to give parties every second night, at which people sat round and discussed Plastic Art as interpreted by Dialectic Materialism or alternately Dialectic Materialism as applied to Cinematographic Art, and ate things on toothpicks. And Effie cut her hair Eton and started wearing sandals. Then one day Henry got called up in the ballot and went into camp. Effie didn’t give parties any more because it was against her principles while Henry was away, in spite of her Eton crop and sandals. So she used to stay home by herself in the evenings and after a while she thought it would be a good idea to do something Constructive. But she couldn’t make posies out of old felt hats as she used to do, because she had been going without hats for so long that she didn’t have any old ones, and_ she couldn’t make mock Jacobean furniture out of cotton reels because she hadn’t been doing sewing for so long that she didn’t have any cotton reels. ue x Ea HEN she happened to wander down to the washhouse and she found dozens of empty bottles. She thought what a good idea it would be (what witb this Anti-Waste Campaign and everything) if she could do something constructive with bottles. So she knocked the necks off and painted them with coloured spots and/or stripes with china paint and made nice vases out of them. And she collected a number of bottle tops and stuck them together to make a doormat. And she found a lot of scarcely-used toothpicks and glued them together to make cunning little cottages and ornamental hedgehogs.

The day Henry was due to come back she arranged all the spotted vases as well as she could on the vestigial mantelpiece and put the mat outside the door and two hedgehogs on the window sill and some more vases on the floor because there weren’t many available surfaces, ands she thought how nice and bright everything looked and how pleased Henry would be. Man-like, Henry: didn’t notice the doormat, but he took one look at the vases and hedgehogs, said "Mein Gott" (in Czechoslovakian) and walked straight out again. Eg * \V HILE Effie was waiting for him to come back time hung heavily on her hands, but she managed to get quite a lot of empty cotton reels and old felt hats from Cousin Olga and Aunt Caroline and her girlhood friends, and she took up poker-work and barbola work again. At the end of another three months she realised that Henry couldn't just have gone back to camp for a second term, and that he must have Gone for Good. Well, she had to support herself somehow, and she put up a notice vutside saying "To the Studio" and an-« other further on "Gifts by Madame Smourgov," because by this time it was almost Christmas. She made a number of little tables with cotton reel legs and on them she displayed all her little toothpick hedgehogs and_ beer-bottle vases, to say nothing of the felt posies and the barbola work, poker work, and papier maché. And all the customers fingered them gently and said "So Slav, isn’t it?" * * % ND she realised that all the months she had been with Henry she had been stifling her Creative Urge, and that only now was she finding fulfilment. But the Henry episode wasn’t really such a bad thing because she went on wearing an Eton crop and sandals and talking with a pseudo-Czech accent and she was able to charge twice as much for everything as she would have done otherwise. So she accumulated a nice little fortune and lived happily ever after.