What’s Wrong With February?

Evening Star, Issue 23497, 10 February 1940, Page 3

What’s Wrong With February?

Since there was printed out to me lona ago an extraordinary little boy of eight who was doomed not to have ananother birthday until he was 12, I have felt sorry for the month of h ebruary, inflictor of such hardship. Left out of the first Roman Calendar, chipped of a day by Numa Pompilins, further bitten into by Augustus, chivvied and harried from one end of the year to the other, poor February has never had a chance to make good. Short and unwanted, it is overshadowed by January, red with holidays and festivals. ■ Truncated February looks along its little length and finds nothing to be proud of except the twice martyred, beheaded, and beclubbed St. Valentine. Midway, between Christmas, with its stockings, and Faster, with its eggs, February has no wide appeal, and must content itself with bringing the boon of oysters to a few gourmets, and summer sales to bargain hunters. _ , , Badly treated by emperors and almost unhallowed by saints, February is so uncertain of itself that it makes people uneasy and self-assertive. Witness the hordes of holidaymakers who come back dissatisfied with town life. Now is the time when there return from the seaside various young men and maidens bearing upon their persons the marks of the lusty paramour with whom they have been wantoning. And not only young men and maidens, but those of larger growth, old enough to know that there is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, especially when the kisses are as scorching as those of the sun. They return, these sun worshippers, and when they see a sky that is not of undiluted blue, or when they feel a little wind getting up, they are affronted, and exclaim loudly how sickening is the weather. The first cool evening I was joyfully putting a match to the fire that had long been waiting for a fall in the temperatnre, and on whose legitimate naper, wood, and coal an unsightly superstructure of empty matchboxes and torn envelopes had been raised, in came a troop of returned revellers, and mv thoughts leapt to the middle row of a child’s paintbox, since their tints ranged from brown to Indian red, and from ochre to burnt sienna. They weie, of course, in, slacks, except the one who wore shorts because of her Dietrich legs, and when she put them on the mantelpiece I forgot about the paintbox and thought of the nibbles that Mowgli’s brothers used to take as they played with the man cub.

Written by PANACHE for the ‘ Evening Star’

Immediately the visitors, in the trua February spirit, began to complain. They complained o£ me restrictions of town clotnes (of whicll they tuemseives at the moment bore no evidence whatever; ; of tne dust and grime of town streets, (though tney admitted tnat ail the holiday water lor wasuiug nan to be heated m saucepans); of me dullnessof town food (compared with the eventfulness ot a weekly visit from tne butctier); of the rattle made by too city milkmen with their noisy bottles (ih contrast to the soothing silence m which tins of condensed milk are opened); of the exorbitant pnc<? of vegetables (there were none at the seaside) ; of the closeness of town houses (yes, there were six bunks in the bedroom at tlie crib) ; of the stodgiuess of town people (no, tUey hadn’t really mes anybody new in the country, and uit* only books were some old magazines;. This February blight was widespread, almost universal. The usually cheerful gardener moped round the vegetables, cursing the white butterflies whom h» would normally have pursued with bloodcurdling threats. Certainly th» cabbages were tattered and torn, straggling in depressed-looking rows; obviously no one had encouraged them with the old Saxon name for February— Sprout Kale. The butcher, even-tem-pered and whistling through snow,frost, or pelting rain, muttered about an average gale that blew leaves into his basket and grit into his eyes. Nowhere, in stalls, circle, or ringside seats, in limousine, bus. or track, in villa, bungalow, or shack, could be found anyone with a good word for the Govern-, ment, or even anyone who had voted for them.

Pondering the recalcitrance of all my; friends and acquaintances during this uncertain month, I happened on Raphael’s Almanac, and seized it hopefully. If you are accustomed to seek your information from a staid encyclopedia you may not know that Raphael is an astrologer and prophetic messenger. Eagerly I flicked over the pagestill I came to little February, hoping to find an explanation of the vagaries of my friends and acquaintances. Tbs reading was certainly depressing, though the catastrophes were not exactly relevant. There was threatened a labour dispute involving transport workers; there was warning of a railway oi air accident; there were fluctuations on the Stock Exchange; there were indications of floods in the United States. The only cheerful message was the news that, with a couple of exceptions, February is a good month for the success of favourites, particularly in the first race of the day. I was no further on, and when I saw; the first cheerful, enthusiastic Febfuarian he did not at all resemble a punter who has just got his money back on the first race. He was a little boy, dressed in a new suit of clerical grey, bought economically with a view to growth. His socks slipped down to his boot tops, for he had not enough calf to stretch them out; and his shorts were long enough to cover his knees and wide enough to flop round them. He carried a shabby school case, and he stood at the foot of a wide flight ol steps and stared up at a red brick building that towered above him. By all the canons of February lie should hav« complained of the steepness of the stepi and shrunk from the shades of tin prison house. But what ho said wasi “Oh, mum. look, a corker school!’’ Neither Raphael nor the weather cat explain him. But he was too young t« have received an income tax demand.