The Old-Timer Looks Back

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 16

The Old-Timer Looks Back

(continued from previous page) | HE dancing girls didn’t impress * mother favourably-she always felt that even now there might be some illicit fascination in them. "You know that woman, Miss Lindemann, who used to teach music, Dad. Her mother was a dancing girl." There would’ be unkind implications in mother’s voice-after all her mother had possessed the refinement to be reared in the: atmosphere of an English parsonage. "That Mrs. Withers, tooalthough you’d never think it now, she’s such a snob. Her mother came from the dance hall at No Town." That the daughter of a former dancing girl could hold herself so high was a permanent slight to the parsonage education which mother felt rather deeply. "Most of them were quite all right," father would reply, swinging the slashet "They made damn good wives for the diggers, too." Father felt that any slur on the dancing girls was a slur on his birthplace. "How do you know?" mother would counter. "You were only about 10 at the time." : Father would bluster for a bit and then relapse into silenge. On we would go. On and on and on. Finally we would become impatient and suspicious.

"Haven’t we come to it yet?" we would chorus fretfully. "The Palais de Venice?" Dad would pause to nick off the top of a promising young rimu sapling with the slasher. "Oh-we passed that about a quarter ofa mile back. "There wasn’t anything

left to see so I thought I'd go on for a bit-you never know what = you'll find about these old places." ae Se FOR us that was the finish, We would heap reproaches on father. Then mother would say’ that’ it was

about time we were getting back anyway, and we would begin to retrace our steps. As soon as we knew that we were on the way home our spirits began to soar. Happily we quickened our steps towards the car. But not so father. He would be glumly bringing up the rear, too depressed even for any fancy work with the slasher. The past had come down over him like a cloud. While mother organised the rest of us into a work party preparing for the homeward journey, father would sit silently in the

driver’s seat of the car. Then as we all climbed in he would say to mother, accusingly: "You shouldn’t come back, Ellen. You shouldn’t come back to these old places. It brings back too many memories. It’s no good..." With a reckless lurch we would start for home. "T expect I’m about the only one left

out of that old place now, Ellen. The only one... All the others’ll be gone, Makes you realise how time passes. And I don’t suppose I'll be long following them, either, with this heart of mine. . ." Taking one hand from the wheel father would.

gloomily pat his waistcoat while the car wobbled about. "Oh-go on, Dad,’ Mother would say brightly. "What nonsense-your heart’s quite all right. It’s just your imagination," While we would be chattering like a couple of jays in the back seat. .. But dad would not be comforted. Not until we began passing the patches of blackened scrub that he had fired on the way out. "Not a bad burn, that," he would observe, a note of pride in his voice. "Not bad at all...’ He would brighten up a little then.