WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO LONDON?

Dunstan Times, Issue 3135, 18 September 1922, Page 7

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO LONDON?

(By a Bengal Colonel.) The east wind may bo a little trying, but I boil and rage—l'm red-hot with fury—when I think of the change that has' come over my dear old London in the last twenty-seven years. My poor old London! I returned home a week or two ago after being "out East" for twentyseven years. Twenty-seven years with rascally natives as companions (I kick them if is a long time, a deuced long time, and I sighed for my old homo and for London. I returned home. Home do I say? 1 felt like a visitor in some foreign land. Everything has changed. The women, the girls, the men, the rules of the Citv, the social code —they are all totally * different. And they've not changed for the beter. No, by Gandhi, they've not. They've all gone rotten, downright rotten. In 1895 it was only by an act of courtesy that we were permitted to smoke in a woman's presence. To-day every woman you meet in a public restaurant blows cigarette smoko in your lace. Brazen hussies! Language! I'm not a prude, but I blush to hear some of the swear words which women hurl at each other. Onlv the other day I was astounded to hear the daughters of a very respected friend of mine, a London vicar, using a sanguinary adjective which, when I left England, was only associated with I knew that this silly inoffensive word had been used on'the stage by Mr George Bernard Shaw to advertise a play of his. I had no knowledge that it had become part of the vocabulary of decent social circles. . So far as British womanhood is concerned it is quite apparent to me that morals perished with the war. How the young men have deteriorated ! None of them appear to make any effort to dress decently. I walked Pall Mall, Bond street, and Piccadilly and encountered one silk hat. Lounge suits and slouch hats were the rule. The youngster who looked the most slovenly seemed the most fashionable. Bah! It is no good calling at people s homes. There is never anybody at home to-day. The clubs—when I was last in England I was a well-known clubman —have, so far as I am concerned, ceased to exist. The few members who still resort to Pall Mall are old and disappointed men. Their society is appalling. There is nothing of the comradeship of good humor which so distinguished London club life in 1895. The manners prevalent in the Pall Mall of to-day are execrable. I went into my club last week and was astounded when an old friend of mine offered me a drink. In 1895 a decent man's club was regarded as his home. If you wanted a drink you ordered it as you would do in your own smoking room. No one thought of saying: "What are you going to have?" as if you were in a public house with a crowd of bar loafers. Most of the plays are tripe. The books are bestial. All this may seem very strange to you, you people who have been growing up in England for the past twentyseven years. You have hardly noticed the changes which have taken place in the national life. But to one who has spent twenty-seven years in India this new London of yours comes as a surprise and a shock. You have read about tho "unchanging East," and you may take it from me that the code of conduet in Anglo-Indian life has changed very little since I first went to that country. We have been introduced to the fox-trot and the jazz band, but we have not been treated to the spectacle of innocent girls—some of them the debutantes of the season —rubbing shoulders with unpleasant characters at night club dances. I am going back to India. Yes, loved it—once upon a time.