AROUND THE TEA TABLE

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 119, 22 May 1928, Page 11

AROUND THE TEA TABLE

MATTERS OF GENERAL INTEREST,

(By SHIRLEY.)

Napier is noted for its hills, its hospitality and its home-made, cakes, thus a Christchurch visitor—but the same three h's were noticeable at a recent more Southern New Zealand gathering when old identities from all parts came to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the settlement's beginnings. The old identity that couldn't mention more than five children was almost out of it. Also, of all those hale and hearty ones, none had experienced an operation (except for accidents), a psycho-analysis, a nervous breakdown, a Freudian complex, or anything else in that line. When they laughed, which was often, they displayed their own teeth. Only the ladies were modern enough to help in the speechmaking, like one doyenne who told about one of the settlers who thought he'd get married to have a wife to close his eyes later on. "I've had two, and they opened mine," said the other settler. . .

Pleasant were the tales told of that school settlement life fifty and more years ago—no intelligence tests then. You were asked at four how many beans made five and if you answered correctly that was all right. But, dear me, we are quite beyond all that now. Seen the list of tests that even our educational authorities are tabulating? The Binet Tests, the Revision of the Binet, the Witner, the Porteous Maize and the Pressy XO. Yes, they aren't jazz dances, these two last, they are really tests by which you are entitled to put mysterious letters and numerals after a child's age and make it of any age except its real age. No child is ever its real age, it seems . . .

No intelligence tests were tried on the British House of Lords the other day when its members came to a conclusion that a man should be allowed to leave his wife entirely unprovided for. Lord Buckmaster was filled with holy horror that women should be regarded as dependents. They were entitled after their husbands' demise to enter any of the professions now open to their sex. You see how easy it all is. After thirty or more years of married life, you simply have to enter a university and study for the law, medicine or the church. Any college will eagerly welcome ladies well over fifty, and train them for nothing. It is quite simple for women to do all those things at any age and without any money. The only thing impossible for them is to enter the House of Lords. Even at eighty they would never be quite doddering enough.

With their romantic Ethel Dell-like minds, the Lords in their discussion seem to see only the errant other lady to whom the sheik-like husband will "somehow leave his money whatever laws are passed." In our little country, however, the other lady is often found to be a sister or other relative who has a mild notion, that she would like a share, and but for tJhe Family Protection Act, she might have her wish, for a number of husbands live and die in the idea that if they make no will, everything will go to the wife, which it doesn't. The only people who seem to study the laws affecting marriage are the bachelors and old maids. . .

A lady in England has an unusual job. Her business i- to wipe out the pencilled marginal notes on Mudie's circulating books. You would think the somewhat aristocratic patrons of this library would be above this annotating trick, but the habit, anyway, is an old one. Thackeray, in the first few pages of "Vanity Fair," predicts some haughty club man pencilling "utter rubbish" or something to that effect opposite his descriptions of Amelia. The marginal writer ao. 2 who objects to the criticism of writer No. 1 is a particularly tiresome person. The same lady, of course, clears out the various articles that have been deposited in the books by dreamy readers. I can't quite see how false teeth could get away unnoticed, or gloves or even hankies. Love letters are quite common, it seems. On inquiry I find that our Auckland readers begin and end with concession tickets or those coupons which will get you a choice of articles on "our halfcrown counter" when you have saved up enough of them. n M '

The Market Ham borough training school for girl migrants in England caused some depression in the British. It was alleged that it was depleting the already small army of women domestics in the Old Country. Then it was dis-' covered that only a few of these trainees have i been domestic helps in England—which is as well. You might as well compare English and Turkish marriage life, and expect one system to train for the other, as to imagine any connection between British and New Zealand "helps." An English visitor here casually mentions a British household which seems fairly typical. The household proper consists of one old lady, but she has, to help her to endure life, two night nurses and two day nurses, an old housekeeper who has grown old in her service and has to be waited upon, also a gardener in the same condition. There is another gardener to trim the lawns and a special one to attend to the hedges. "I doesn't cut no 'edges," said th<s first when imagining this command had been given. It was the lawn edges in fact that the housekeeper, knowing his rights, had asked him to attend to, and these fortunately were part of his work. One person does the inside of the windows in this house and another the outside, and a village woman comes up to attend to the black-leading, while of course there are housemaids' and cooks' assistants. There is a fly, however, in the ointment, if it is ointment. The cook's assistant was found in a bless-the-squire and his relations mood through her wages being raised to three shillings a week. Yes, domestics in England and here do well to keep apart.