RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30213, 19 August 1963, Page 17

RANDOM REMINDER

HELPING HAND

Many a housewife, kneedeep in potato peelings, has longed for an assistant—a calm, deft person, all competence and selfeffacement, who simply whisked the work away before it was obvious it had to be done. Not many New Zealand women enjoy the luxury of help in the house, many of those who do acquire the privilege only through being seriously ill; and some of those few wish later that domestic aid had never been invented. Into this last category sinks, with a heavy sigh, an old friend of ours, who has written to tell us of her recent difficulties. She had been ill, and she was in bed, convalescing, when the help arrived with- noisy, encouraging shouts. Whatever her shortcomings, the assistant was not lacking in enthusiasm and she did not wait for the wan patient to mut-

ter feeble words of instruction. She simply started by filling the washing machine to the brim with hot water, finding that the washing was all up to date at any rate, and then being without hot water for the rest of the day. But her greatest contribution, in that first week, was to change the place of everything she could put her ample hands upon —that is. everything she did not decide should be thrown out. It didn’t leave very much, but it did take two days to discover that the electric toaster was lurking away in the china cabinet. She was all energy, but she left in mid-afternoon and chaos. That is, everything was tidy, but when the woman of the house staggered from her bed to prepare an evening meal, she could find nothing, save a small piece of cold meat, which she and her husband ate, without the comfort of

vegetables. So it went on. no-one being able to fina anything. But the end of domestic service canpe after the daily help had cleaned the bathroom. All energy and enthusiasm, she had even cleaned the light, but she left water there. Next time it was switched on, there was a sharp report and the bulb, shade and all—the cord having been severed-—showered down over the floor and bath with delicate little linkling noises. Next morning the man of the house could not find his razor. She had put it somewhere. So he had to unearth an old instrument of the cutthroat type, unstropped for years. And using it, with only the flame of a guttering candle to illuminate the ghastly scene, he cut himself in many and various places. Which explains, by and large, why the staff has not since been reengaged. Men are like that.