RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33869, 14 June 1975, Page 22

RANDOM REMINDER

SWEET AND LOW

Married bliss is known as helping each other. From his point of view this means that when he is engaged on a little job around the house he expects her instant help when he momentarily needs an extra pair of hands; and from her point of view it means that she hopes he will let her get on with the job in hand without constantly interrupting. She knows that he tends to be helpless in the name of companionship — as when he urgently calls for a drier upper when he is washing the dishes — and she is generally ready for this and willing enough to accept it in the interest of marital amity. But when he takes on what she would call a self-contained task, especially when it is one that is normally out. of sight and sound, she is likely to become aggrieved if he keeps joining her to his little problems without reasonable cause.

On the day, then, that he went up to paint the veranda roof at the end of summer she felt that

there was no reason, for her part, that she could not correct an interesting but demanding corner of the garden some distance from that area of roof. But she was still just within earshot.

Each became launched on this afternoon of good works, but it was not long before it became apparent that he had not fully provided himself with the necessary tools before mounting the ladder. He called to her as she had just wriggled the fork under a carpet of convolvulus and was in the process of taking the strain. “Honey, would you mind bringing me the sandpaper from the bench.”

Apparently the one at ground level was expected to ascend the ladder but the one at roof level was not expected to descend the ladder. At the time of the second call she was gathering the last of a double armful of rose clippings preparatory to walking them to the incinerator in one careful trip. “Honey, I wonder if you would bring me the turpy cloth from the bench.”

He always called her “honey”; he could no longer remember how this had started. On the third call she had one end of a length of binder twine in her teeth, she had both arms round a 6ft dahlia bush whose stalks were tending to break in all directions, and she was trying to bring the other end of the twine through a fence picket to make a tie.

“Honey,” he called. “Go to hell,” she muttered, and then guiltily bit her lip — losing the twine for a while. “Honey, honey !” He sounded quite agitated. She found him in a position of acute difficulty, not to say danger. The ladder was a borrowed one — a metal one that could open right out — and he had not secured it properly. It had jack-knifed on him as he was trying to come off the roof. He could go neither forward nor back. She braced it, and he got down. Being a woman she found the whole thing deliriously funny, murmuring something about crying wolf.