Listening While I Work (27)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 253, 28 April 1944, Page 22

Listening While I Work (27)

; By

Materfamilias

[t was a change-and for many a welcome one-to have a play instead of the usual Sunday night talk It was avowedly a propaganda play from the BBC on the Don’t Talk theme, but it was written with an economy of words and acted with considerable skill. As the whole play consisted of a series of telephone conversations, this was sorhething of a tour de force. It has however a weakness, even though it was an essential point in the plot, that the spy should be foolish enough to gloat over the telephone to the woman who had been foolish enough to talk. It was also, in my opinion, unnecessary that she should confess herself a refugee. There are many refugees from Nazi terrorism all over the English speaking world who are as bitter enemies of Nazism as we are. Their social and economic position in England, here in New Zealand, or anywhere in the United Nations is difficult enough without further implications that they are perhaps Hitler's agents. Ey * * HE six A.C.E. talks on Nutrition for the Young Housewife supplemented Dr. Muriel Bell’s Health Articles in this journal. The talks were full of useful hints (though I found Dr, Bell’s actual lists of units of Vitamin B and where they are found rather more fascinating). The quantity of food that a nursing mother should eat to get anh adequate daily dose of Vitamin B almost staggered me. But the last of the A.C.E. series seemed to lose grip of reality. The young housewife was asked every week to sit down and plan’ her meals for the week, beginning with a list of the foibles and peculiarities of her fatily that she would have to take into account (e.g,, Grandad’s diabetes and Willie’s allers gies)~and then do a soft of jigsaw ctossword with coupons and shortages for the week’s menus until she had worked out a perfect diet for each and all her family for every day of the week. We housewives need all the help and guidance and information we can get, but I find that if I try to plan for a week ahead my plans just don’t work. The vicar calls on the day when I am planning to fill up the oven with two days’ worth of meals, the butcher hasn’t got liver on the fight day, and Jimmy drinks up all the milk that was intended for milk pudding; or the day I planned for steak and kidney turns out hot and the day I planned for cold salads turns out cold. I take off my hat to menu-plan-ners, but I remain an opportunist myself, * * re O many of our "tribute" programmes are to those who have just died or who were born a hundred years agoobituariés, anfiiversaries, and ceftennials _=-that it was a relief to heat that the Tribute to John Gielgud was for his fortieth birthday and not for his premature demise. I like John Dietyed, in fact I have had an especial and motherly interest in him ever since T saw him faint on the stage in the middle of the balcony scene in Roméo and Juliet’ many years age, He acted very shakily for the rest of the tragedy, but I felt as though I had been allowed to peep at a (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) weak and frail human creature instead of a notable actor, and I have kept an entirely absurd feeling of kindly proprietorship for him ever since. So I was glad that the NBS were not pouncing like vultures upon his obituary but rejoicing that he had reached the noble age of 40. I enjoyed his readings of poems, all pleasurably familiar. The scene from The Importance of Being Earnest with Edith Evans seemed grotesque by contrast. Wilde, like Shaw, should read well over the air because his plays depend on wit, not action, but even Edith Evans and John Gielgud did not succeed in bringing him to life. Is it that the jokes belong to an age that has gone for ever?