BACK TO CHILDHOOD

Evening Star, Issue 22526, 19 December 1936, Page 2

BACK TO CHILDHOOD

[Written by Panache for the ‘ Evening Star. 1 ] There is no stomach that is not turned by something. The man who sails unperturbed on the roughest seas and through the choppiest air finds things on earth that make him sick. When the conductor on a hill tram puts his elbow in my eyo I bear the discomfort with philosophy, for I realise there was no other place for him to put it. When the baker’s boy swears that the only unblackened loaf in his basket has been ordered by tho lady next door I nod and without rancour. lyith a patient shrug I hang up the receiver after the third wrong number, as unruffled as the brass Buddha himself, who, though split in two, neither sags nor frowns as he supports a row of books whose contents he would scarcely care to contemplate. But my philosophy was not equal to an invitation to a back-to-childhood party. You know the kind of thing. Fortunately I was quick enough to have sprained my ankle, and I should probably be in the country all the week, and the entire household was expecting hourly to erupt into some foul disease, and besides, Wednesday was the maid’s night out; yes, and Thursday, too. You know the kind of thing. The more enterprising guests arrive astride tricycles or scooters or bulging out of perambulators, Great hairy knees protrude below shorts; blue butterfly bows rise from frizzy heads usually disciplined into decent waves; frocks, fitting tighter than the proverbial glove, reach halfway down unshrunk shanks; dummies are gripped in faultless dentures. The cutest guests drink their beer out of feeding-bottles and dribble on bibs at r this orgy, which only a swinish amount of alcohol would palliate. Everybody brings a rattle or a trumpet. The most popular bring two trumpets, which at least drown the lispings. Back-to-childhood parties are too near the truth to joke about. Even more pathetic are those organised attempts to snatch at the clouds of glory that are trailing their wisps the other way, those official back-to-childhood parties at which grown boys and girls come back for a weekend to the old school. They put on their uniforms; they sleep in tho dear old dormitory, or they lie awake so late discussing their chances in the Past versus Present match that old So-and-so has to come creaking in next morning to remind them that tho dressing bell has gone; and everything is almost exactly the same as it used to be in the good old days, except that tobacco is permitted, and its smoke partially screens the awful, calculated coldbloodedness of the self-conscious gathering. Such back to childhood excursions seem to be a folly that is exclusively human. Birds do not flutter nostalgically over the strawberry beds of yesteryear, and animals would interpret as senility any assumed mewlings and pukings of their elders, and be nob slow to slay. It is to be hoped that the old boys and old girls who make these backward journ’eyings are childless, or that they have sent their children to different schools. They cannot have read of David Blaize’s humiliation when his father came down to an old boys’ cricket match, and in the ardour of the game, revealed his pink underpants. The attitude, to the old school resembles the attitude to ancestors. It is only the good that is allowed to live, while the evil is carefully interred. In several dozen homes in this country may be seen in miniature, cabinet, or outsize enlargement, the portrait of my great grandmother. It is a most comely face under the mutch, and when strangers have commented, as they usually do, on its beauty, they are told of the six years my great grandmother spent uncomplainingly in bed, and of the endless stream of local celebrities, that made pilgrimages to the shrine. This legendary figure had left me, somewhat shamedly, unmoved, until I learned from a chance remark, that the saintly old lady invariably drank a glass of beer with her morning porridge. Though I envied her the beer even less than the porridge, ’ the even waters of the legend had been disturbed, and a real figure had emerged.

About most reunions there is an enervating haze of sentiment that rises from the warm bath of emotion in which are steeped the back to childhood souls of the Peter Pans, who refuse to grow up. It is unfortunate that only those old boys with the nicer feelings and the more acceptable opinions return to record them at jubilees. It is,to be deprecated that only the popular section of the staff survives, and that even absence does not make the unpopular section conspicuous. Hence the monotony. Borstal reunions, if they have them, will be monotonous too; but a sprinkling of boys who had been expelled from school would brighten a jubilee dinner, and give a true picture of the whole, as well as affording an awful example. Extremists go so far as to taka their sous by the hand and rejoice that their initials still withstand time and the borer in the dear old desk. Most people agree that apart from the lack of uniformity about the pronunciation of the word (and it is the one thing about them that is not uniform) it is fortunate that centenaries occur only once in a hundred years. Some go further, and declare that they do not care it they never again see their old school or their university.

We were passing the university. The grey walls rose from the smooth shaven leisured lawn. The moon shone on the tower which had blinked an empty eye for so many years that the clock made it look over-dressed. Hearing the replication of such a denial on its concave shores the Leith should have trembled and, rising from its banks, engulfed the renegade as the Red Sea swallowed Pharoah. From the archway, used to the gentle homage of etchings, no grey stone loosened to crack the nndeferential cranium._ In its austerity the building appreciated the ruthlessness, so astringent after the cloying “ Alma Maters ” with which it ■is larded ; it suspected that one of its children dared to be wise.