BUSY DREAMS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3378, 13 June 1927, Page 2

BUSY DREAMS.

(By Jane Doe.) Seeing that we- are two extremely hard-working young women, putting in our eight-hour day with the best of them, juy daughter and I consider ourselves entitled now and again to indulge in fond, idle dreams. Indeed, so used are we to keeping our noses to the grindstone of scholastic endeavor (in her case) and the earning of the joint living and the continuation of much-needed education (in her mother’s case), and so pleasantly inured to filling in all our odd moments with gardening, embroidery, strolls to see the shops, water-color painting, book and newspaper reading, the wireless, the new gramophone records, the care of our private menagerie, and the classification of and researches among cigarette, stamp, postcard and scrap albums, that we prefer instead to call them busy dreams'. As we live in Olapham, naturally, the ones that engross ns most and are nearest our heart’s desire arc the dreams of the ideal homes wo are going to establish for ourselves when my ship comes home. Other people, of course, are content with just one ideal home, built for and lived in a lifetime. But not so us. Netta’s seen a bit of the world in her time, and as I’ve had twenty-one years start of her I’ve seen even more. Neither itinerary is much to look at if you think in terms of Sir Alan Cobham’s , little bits, Mr Thomas Cook’s tours, or the best regulated war correspondent’s yearly expense account. But what there has been has convinced us that the world is very good and very lovely and very enjoyable. We couldn’t, for instance, possibly look forward to spending all the rest of our days at, say, Sunset Way, Wembley Park.

Oh, no. Not when we’ve seen how pink the sunsets can bo at Menaggio; not when we’ve had the Jungfrau practically in our back garden j not when we’ve seen the brilliant white shadows of the twin lighthouses at Le Touquet sweep the midnight seas of Paris Plage like mad, guilty ghosts; not when we’ve bathed in the sapphire, tidelcss Mediterranean ; not when we’ve thrilled to the spring airs of Canterbury Woods; not when we’ve fished for rainbowbacked fish with a bent pin and a stick in Locarno’s peaceful lake; not when we remember the haunting of fog-horns on misty heigths up the Hudson, and on starry ones watched the little white steamboats with many golden eyes on their evening trips to Albany. . You could never keep u? down in one place after we’ve seen all this. A little travel is a dangerous thing, you know. There’s to be first a pied-a-terre somewhere in Thanet. With luck a fiveacre plot from the cliff’s edge. Here I shall build a long, low home, with every room facing the sun, so that we may progress from bedroom to bath room to, breakfast-room to workroom to diningroom. and to drawing-room, bathed in glory from sun up to sun down. It will be nice to have a home large enough to harbor aIL the cigarette, scrap, stamp and postcard albums, her beloved children (stuffed), her toys, her library and mine. ‘ And every ’room will be named and patterned after our favorite flowers. (Will the management of the Mayfair Hotel accept our kind thanks for this lovely idea?) This, I hope, may do something to appease the strange craving for things that grow out of the brown earth which for ever burgeons in the tender bosom of my daughter. I can only put it down to the fact that we must have had an unknown ancestress, a woman who loved her own flower gardens and the sweet weeds of the fields, but who subsequently suffered for the rest or her life imprisonment in some vile hole where the blue skies, the sun, and the perfume of God’s blessed nosegays never came, and long and bitter years went by when she held no more roses in her hands.

But flowery rooms won’t satisfy my child, 1 know that. There will have to bo some little polished wood chalet on a Swiss Alp, set amidst pied meadows, where the higher she goes the redder will be the Alpine roses, the bluer the gentians, the more tasty the mountain strawberry. All these joys beneath her feet ought to keep her busy and content from May to July each year. Then I want a flat in New York, not less than 30 storeys up. with a vista oven- half a State and where all I have to do when ! want to dry my hair, give myself an ultra-violet rays treatment, make the coffee and many other odd and tiring jobs, is push a button. Where I can enjoy such feasts as peaches that can be pulled apart showing the kernel lying neatly on the halfshell ; strawberry shortcake, clams, 1,000 varieties of salads, Thousand island salad dressing, hot waffles and maple syrup, and have a colored maid at my service with a voice as soft and true as. molasses candy.

A two-poomed villa near Nice. A small, white Georgian house on the edge of Hichmoml Park. A charming little forest villa in the pines of Lo To uquet. We don’t want much, do we?

And the joke of it is (the joke being on me) that the ideal home really clearest to my youngster’s heart is not so much an ideal home as a kennel. I have every reason to know the filthy, tarpaulin-luing hut of the night-watch-man which is scarcely ever absent from the top of our road owing to the neverending excavations on the highway represents the abode she would he proudest and most thrilled to own. it is there she would like to he seen, cutting mighty doorsteps of sandwiches with a clasp knife, cleaning the red lamps, am! tending the glowing brazier. Ves, and what would put the finishing touch to her private joy would he to have me come along each twilight, lean over the harrier, sniff at the friendly atmosphere of toasted kipper, warm my hands at the fire, and say, respectfully, “Watchman! What of the night?” And T even promised her a bedroom in the Swiss chalet with a blue ceiling painted with, golden stars.