About MILLICENT, Who Was Meat-Minded

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 251, 14 April 1944, Page 18

About MILLICENT, Who Was Meat-Minded

: | A Tale for the Times |

by

M.

B.

| N later life Millicent’s mother often reproached herself bitterly for not having called her daughter Dora, Who Was Docile, or even Nancy, Who Was Normal. But there was unfortunately no good fairy present at the christening to warn Millicent’s mother of alliterative epithets likely to be current in the year 1944. Instead there was present as godmother only a regrettable great aunt of Pythagorean persuasion, who insisted on conferring her own name upon the infant by way of a christening gift. But in spite of this handicap little Millicent grew up to be a fine sturdy little girl, her only abnormality being that she consistently refused her bread-and-milk and insisted on having bread-and-bovo instead, and from an early age demanded meat for breakfast, dinner, and tea. Her unfortunate aunt, a lady of strictly vegetarian habit, would watch Millicent demolishing a lamb chop or a succulent veal steak, and murmur reproachfully, didn’t she know that lambs and calves were her little brothers and sisters? And Millicent would go on munching unmoved, or perhaps mutter through otherwise-occupied jaws that she couldn’t be fonder of them if they were. Es * * LL, thanks to her meat diet, Millicent grew up into a fine, healthy, full-blooded young woman. A glance at —

her bedroom might have suggested that the mental side of Millicent’s development had lagged slightly behind the physical, for her bookcase was filled with blood-and-thunder, and Art was represented solely by reproductions of Yeomen of the Guard. However, Millicent had sufficient intelligence to get into Training College and to emerge therefrom two years later duly certified capable of teaching at least something about 10 of the subjects demanded by the new secondary syllabus. And all who beheld her murmured in spite of themselves Mens Sana in Corpore Sano. So Millicent had no difficulty at all in finding for herself a suitable post as (among other things) English mistress at the local Girls’ High School. Her teaching methods were simple. She divided all English literature into two categories. Everything to which Millicent could not apply her highest term of approval "strong meat" was lumped together and pronounced "utter tripe." But the headmistress did not see quite eye-to-eye with Millicent when the latter ‘insisted on having Captain Blood as a home reader and was, moreover, somewhat appalled at the frequency with which the great Australian adjective appeared in the Fourth Form essays. The upshot was that Millicent was relieved of her Eng-lish-teaching duties and was instead assigned complete control of the school’s physical education. And night after night passers-by could hear Millicent’s full-blooded tones as she urged the basketball or tug-of-war teams to Put More Beef Into It. * * * UT a dread blow was to fall. Some months after the introduction of meat rationing the headmistress was appalled to discover that Millicent was making the surrender of meat coupons a pre-requisite of participation in the biggest event of the school year-the Hopscotch Handicap. The good name of the school was at steak. Millicent must go. Millicent went. Her parents did not exactly welcome her with open arms, as (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) they dreaded the inroads of her appetite into their slender meat resources. However, they drew some comfort from the fact that Great Aunt Millicent had recently died (it is said as a direct resuit of Millicent’s disgrace), and that the authorities had forgotten to collect her ration book. They might just manage. But they had under-estimated Millicent. whose appetite had grown by what if fed: on, And it humiliated Millicent’s mother to have to ask for a shillingsworth of cat’s meat every day in addition to her regular order. And Millicent’s father, too, needed his full ration, as he was compelled to spend every week-end doing hard manual labour repairing the cracks that would appear in the concrete of Great Aunt Millicent’s grave as she revolved. It was all very difficult. Finally, however, Millicent’s parents managed to persuade her to take a position as governess at a sheep station where they had three meat meals a day. For several months nothing disturbed the even tenor of Great Aunt Millicent’s days. Then Millicent’s father received a letter from the custodian of the cemetery saying the whole plot would have to be re-concreted. However, Millicent’s father was by this time so fed-up with the whole business that he wrote back saying to leave it as it was and call it crazy paving. Unfortunately they could not keep Millicent’s name out of the papers. They even had her photo. and the caption "Three Years for Sheep Stealing and Cattle Rustling." * * tk HEN Millicent came out of prison her parents decided that the only thing to do was to send her to Chicago to get a job in the meat canneries. So Millicent sailed for America, and for a year her life was one- of uneventful satisfaction. In addition to being allowed to eat as much as she liked on the job, she had managed to secure to herself the honourable attentions of a Meat Magnate, who, aware of her preferences, said it not with flowers, but with tins of corned beef. It is possible she would have married her beef baron had not Fate, in the shape of an RKO talent scout, intervened. For RKO was at this time contemplating the filming of a superbly stupendous and incalculably colossal blood-and-thunder epic of the Wild West, and was interested in assembling a full-blooded cast so that it could, if necessary, spill some. So Millicent went to Hollywood. But her first film test revealed tnat Millicent, though full-blooded, was not photogenic. Millicent was bitterly disappointed, and in her anguish sobbed out her sad history on to the first shoulder that happened to be handy. It belonged to a sob-sister, and the very next day Millicent’s life history appeared in T'rue Confessions. This, thought Millicent, is the end. But it turned out to be merely the beginning. For Millicent found herself showered’ with offers to become Technical Adviser to various film studios engaged in the making of wild westerns,

Millicent, a modest girl, was obliged to point out that her own methods of cattle rustling had not been conspicuously successful, but that, said the big studio executives, was if anything a good thing. It was difficult enough as it was for the Goodies to catch the Baddies, % we * O Millicent settled down to a comfortable salary and a bungalow in Beverley Hills. And by refusing to marry her meat magnate she assured herself of a permanent place in his affections, and continued to receive from him every week two dozen tins of bully beef as proof of his undying regard.