WAY BACK IN THE MIDDLE WEST.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3128, 31 July 1922, Page 2

WAY BACK IN THE MIDDLE WEST.

(By lan Hay.)

I was greatly struck in America with the large numbers of young people, both boys and girls, in the audiences which witnessed “Tilly of Bloomsbury” during the run of that play in. New York and Chicago. Finally, I asked some of them why they were there, and the answer was illuminating. “We know so- little about English home life,” they said, “especially the life of English boys and girls of eighteen or nineteen,” “Almost as little,” I replied, “as our boys and girls know about you.” It is strange what distorted notions Young England! and Young America harbor about one another. Our homes, especially. 1 think very few of us realise that Americans have homes at all. We picture them working in offices, or flying up and down in, elevators, or shouting at baseball matches. The trouble is that few Englishmen, old or young, can ever visualise tire America, that lies beyond the skyscrapers of New York. New York is not America at all. It is a cosmopolitan excrescence. Not fifty per cent, of its inhabitants are American horn. To know America you must look right past all this—to the country districts of Massachusetts l , with their old colonial atmosphere still jealously guarded: to the great Middle West, with its innumerable small towns; to the South, with its ancient class distinctions; to the perpetual' sunshine and democratic equality of Oalifoniiat — to the wliele provincial life, in fact, of a. nation of a hundred’ million people. I wish I could show you one of those small towns, I am acquainted with some hundreds of them ; and some of the most kindly, simple, and unworldly people in the world live there. They are none of them rich, as our ideas of American riches go. They all live in houses of about the same size—comfortable, white painted, wooden houses, with broad verandahs—set on either side of a wide street, well shaded by trees. Each house stands in its own plot, or lot — usually a plain grass plot—and there arc no fences or divisions between one lot and another. Every one knows every one else. The Americans arc essentially a stay-at-home race. Except in the wealthy society of the great cities. American hoys and girls arc never sent away to hoarding school. There are such places on the English model—hut for the very few. Brothers and sisters stay “right home,” as they say, until they marry. Home life m America is simple and unpretentious. In the first place, there are very few servants to ho had. That means that the housekeeping and cooking are kept down to a simple basis. All, meals are early meals. Breakfast is never later than eight o’clock; usually, sooner. Lunch is at noon. There is no such thing as afternoon tea (as 1 know to my sorrow) ; and the evening meal is usually taken about six. Butcher’s meat is very little eaten in America; in that invigorating climate no one needs it. The staple articles ol food are chicken, in every form; eggs, in every form; hot bread, ice cream, ami strong coffee. This system naturally makes family life the whole foundation of everything American, and it makes the American hoy a very different person from his prototype over hero. Owing to the fact that we live in a small and overpopulated island, a British hoy is trained with one eye on the probability that he may, sooner or later, he crowded out of that island to go and earn a living elsewhere. So we remove him from home influence quite soon, in order that he may learn to stand on his own feet. Our school system is shaped to that end. Our public schools produce a standard type of character which probably moots the needs of a scattered and half-developed Empire l etter than anything else. The American boy has no Imperial duties or leanings. He has no need to step outside his own great country, or even his own home district, in search either of livelihood or adventure. So ho lives at home, where his mother sees that ho gets at least enough to cat, and attends the local high school, where hoys and girls are educated together. Here he learns no more and no less than any schoolboy ever did, and develops into a fine, healthy, very athletic specimen. The main difference between the American and the British schoolboy is the difference between the _ American soldier and the British soldier—differences which i was able to study from persona,! observation during the war. The American soldier Is very brave, full of initiative, and admirable at indirect attack. The English soldier, on the other hand, excels in his extraordinary endurance under conditions of hardship, and his ability to stick his toes in and let his opponent, tire himself out. Physically this parallel is the same. The American has the physique, the Englishman the stamina. That pretty well describes the difference between the English and the American schoolboy. In manner and hearing the American hoy differs from his opposite number over here by his self-possession in the presence of women and girls. He is much more used to female society than wo are. because he rarely gets away from it; consequently he is much more dependent upon it. He marries early—■ and with less preliminary tribulation than wo do. In fact, at the age of twenty-one or so he usually marries the girl from next door, and there is an end of it. You might almost say that the outstanding features of American small-town fife are young married couples and Ford cars.