RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30190, 23 July 1963, Page 23

RANDOM REMINDER

COLD WAR

Masters of Households will be heartened by this story of a young wife who did not heed the Master’s warnings about taking water from the hot tap to boil vegetables. They were repeated warnings, but there was some suspicion that they were being disregarded, for whenever he happened to be there, his wife smiled deferentially, tipped out the water, and replaced it with cola. The Master considered it neither practical ‘ nor prudent to supervise the preparation of the vegetables—he had other things to do, he claimed —and so, apart from an occasional dire prediction, the matter could not be taken further.

Then Fate, to coin a phrase, took a hand. At 3 a.m. With a drip from an overflow tap at the aide of the house. Nnt without prompting, the

man rose to investigate. Inevitably, the torch batteries had expired a day or two earlier, but the ladder was sound and once he had his head through the manhole an awkwardly struck matdh showed him the tank he suspected to be the cause of the trouble. The second match revealed a fully-grown but partly-decayed rat hold-' ing open a valve. By the light of a third match, he removed it, and with a fourth, he traced the part the tank played in the hot water system. It appeared to supply the heating cistern itself, which led. inevitably, to unpleasant conclusions about the water from the hot tap used for the vegetables. After a starlit burial he conveyed these conclusions to a horrified wife. Her imagination, already fired that night by the ending of Xavier

Herbert's “Capricornia" which, for those who need reminding, tells of a man investigating why water had stopped running from a tank from which he had been drinking, and finding the skeletons of an aboriginal woman and child inside. The Master and his wife spent a sleepless night trying to recall the symptons of bubonic plague. Neither wanted breakfast. But later the Master, who had studied the whole system again and found that the tank which had held the rat was purely for overflow, and did not feed the heating cistern, ate a good lunch. He did not think it necessary to tell his wife, who was still off her food, about his discovery of what was, after all, a purely technical detail. He has been gratified to note that she uses the cold tap for vegetables.