RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30895, 30 October 1965, Page 48

RANDOM REMINDER

TO WHOM IT DID CONCERN

Life in the hillside suburbs does not consist of admiring the view and ringing up friends on the fiat to ask if the sun is also shining down there. It has its own peculiar problems, some associated with the fact that residents require the more admirable characteristics of mountain goats if they are to survive, flourish, and produce their kind. Rubbish collections, for Instance, pose problems for wives whose husbands are forgetful and leave them to pull heavily laden tins up or down hill. Some have followed the plan of the woman in Moncks Bay who put household rubbish into large paper sacks, to the entire satisfaction of all parties. .But recently this woman had a chilling experience. Came Monday morning, and down to the

street went the rubbish, as usual; but that same day, other paper sacks, for the collection of rags for a charitable organisation, were also due for collection. Our heroine took her charitable rags and put that sack beside her gate. Her rubbish was put out to take its place in a military formation of rubbish tins on the footpath edge. After lunch, she says, she came down to the street and her rubbish was still there, although the neighbours’ tins were empty. Obviously she thought, the men must have regarded it as a rag sack and left it, and she would have to take it back up the hill. But she was bent on other occasions and by the time she retu. -ied in mid-afternoon the r. Lbish had gone. So had the rag sacks.

A less sympathetic woman would have simply felt satisfied that a complete clearance bad been made. But, she says, she could not rid herself of the discomforting thought that the easiest way to empty a sack of rags is to upend it and tip the lot out on the floor. And she has been haunted by the faces of those grouped round the pile of pyjamas and wornout cardigans when the deluge began vegetable peelings, pineapple tins, mouldy bread ends, bones no longer of interest to the family dog, although an animal of acquisitive habits. Would the recipients regard the insult as intentional; More: would they take the trouble to go through the bits and pieces to see if the donor could be traced?