"FLOWERS THAT BLOOM IN THE PRING”

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 13, 30 July 1945, Page 18

"FLOWERS THAT BLOOM IN THE PRING”

“ Cairo had a sort of spring, but not the real thing,” said Major R. A. Usborne in a broadcast talk. I found the point rather well made for me when, in what passed for the spring of 1944, I bought in one of the bookshops there a paper-bound anthology called Poetry of our Times. It had been printed in Cairo, and I am convinced that the proofs thereof were corrected at the time of ‘ the flap ’ in Cairo, those harassed days when Rommel was at Alamein, and he was thought likely to become an honorary member of the Turf Club in Cairo at any moment. The first sentence of the introduction of this collection says : *An anthology invariably means by definition a choice, and in consequence omission . . . ” But the omission which startled me above all in this carelessly printed book, and later made me very happy, was the inadvertent omission of the * s ’ in spring in the first line of a piece by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Cairo reading of this line was ‘ Nothing is so beautiful as pring.’ “Pring’s good. There were many other startling misprints in the book. But ‘pring’ pleased me most. Pring ; pring song ; pring in the air ; pringtime, the only pretty ring time ; yet, ah that pring should vanish with the rose . . . The truth is, of course, that Cairo really has no spring : only pring. Pring is the season that hits Cairo in February, and dissolves into summer about the end of March. In Cairo, in the pring, the first fly comes back, and you treat him as an infuriating individual, to be chased and killed ; whereas, come May, he is one of a crowd, and you languidly wave a fly-whisk at him. In pring the Gezira swimming-pool looks very clean, and you would swim in it if it were only a little warmer out of the sun. In the pring you kick your British warm off your bed at midnight, and wake up shivering, to grope for it, at 5 a.m. In the pring the Cairo kites snicker to each other more loudly. Yes, pring is a very definite Cairo season, and, if one likes it at all, it is only because it is warmer than winter and cooler than summer.” — The Listener, England.