PUTTING BILL TO IT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 42, 20 February 1933, Page 6

PUTTING BILL TO IT.

I am a thorough believer in the ennobling influences of music on the human animal. So i» Mrs. (say) Smyth-Smyth, who lives along our suburban terrace. She is blessed with a son whom she, like most mothers, considers far superior to any other boy in existence. Bill (or it may be Bert, Alfie or Harold) has never impressed me or any of the other neighbours, as a particularly charming or intelligent child; he is, in fact, generally considered a very ordinary specimen of boyhood, just as much a nuisance to his elders as most of us were when we were boys. Bill's father cherishes no illusions about his offspring, but mother love is adorably blind. "Music," his mother announced, "has such a refining influence. I'm going to put Bill to the violin." Bill has now been at the violin for three or four rears. His attitude towards that refining instrument is still very much what it was when •lie began hi* lessons. He attacks his compulsory practice in the spirit in which a hard ; labour gang sets to at a job of stone-breaking. He is still in the "Keel Row" stage. Every six months or so something mysteriously happens to his violin. The cat knocks it off the shelf and smashes it, or it accidentally comes into violent contact with the firewood axe. But there is no respite for Bill. His mother sympathetically buys him a new one, and the daily scrape continues. Bill's father regards it all with the half-liumorous cynicism of the looker-on. "Go on, old chap," he says, when the mother makes her customary appeal to Bill to "Do your practice"; "go on and get it over." Every once in so often a neighbour, hearing those familiar sounds borne on the terrace air, inquires about Bill's progress with the violin. "I'm keeping him at it, is the reply; "you know one can never tell how useful it may be to him some day." From what I know of Bill and his musical taste I am inclined to think that the only possible professional use his fiddling can ever be to him will be the earning of a copper or so to go into another street. However, some deserving teacher gets a few guineas' out of it. He earns them, by heavens he does! I ~ —TANGIWAL i