Pamela Says—

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 September 1927, Page 9

Pamela Says—

A letter from a London correspondent, Miss Pamela Travers, who writes of books, theatres, examination “howlers” and “fiat hunting by cinema.”

■ HAVE just returned from the “Vagabond King’’ at the Winter Garden —a horrible travesty in song of the life of Francois Villon. Still, it was better than most musical comedies and Winnie Melville is the first star of musical comedy I have seen who has any intelligence. She is, as a matter of fact, so intelligent and so delightful that I wonder any manager ever gave her the part of Katherine de Vaucelles. By all the

laws of the musical comedy stage it should have been played by a simpering creature who was only too obviously the result of a marriage between village idiots. She should have smirked and coyed and spoken all her lines with her face turned full to the audience and her back to the other actors. . Instead she played with dignity and restraint. Driving home from the theatre in a roundabout way I spied the windows of New Zealand House in the Strand gently lit. The light sprayed sweetly upon three large recumbent forms in the very front of the window. At a little distance they looked like giants’ heads with one large strand of hair sticking out at the top of each. I got out of the car—curiosity being one of my worst sins—and peered in. My dears, they were onions! Oh, but not ordinary onions. More-than-mortal onions they were r onions from some

Brobdingnagian shore, onions of Arcady. One of them would be enough to flavour sufficient soups and pies for a multitude. The five loaves and two small fishes simply weren't in it. J waited for them to show their magic origin—for surely, I thought, they are part of the ingredients for some witch’s cauldron and will rise and disappear through the ceiling of the window. But no, they would not continue their wizardry until I was well out of the way. When I passed the next day they were gone—fled, probably, to the Hesperides, there to put the golden apples to shame. On the other hand, if you, dear New Zealand, did really breed those onions then you are, surely, the mightiest flavourer of soup in the world! We are not having a summer, though you might think we are by this time entitled to one—not a /’tinnier, merely a disaster. I was driving through Maidenhead yesterday in the drifting rain. Fantastic and pitiful sights met my eye. In every shel-

tered and unsheltered .cove small canoes .and punts and motor-boats were drawn up—l mean tied up—and the draggled inmates sat in pools of water, smiling mistily. And every boat —oh, gallant humanity!—had a gramophone, and every gramophone, splendidly regardless of rust, was squawking out a tune. They were sore-throaty tunes, all very wheezy and asthmatic, but they went gaily through that drifting grey. Frothing muslin that had begun life with such a pretty, anxious desire to please had all the life reft from it the draggled crepe de chine would never, one could see, hold up its head again. But still the’ gramophones went on—reiterating their desire— x “I Want to be Hapee. . .” I could have wept but that the day was already too full of its own tears. A worthy professor, whose business it is to set examination papers for the

young of the male species and to correct the answers, has told me some of the howlers that cried at him at the end of last term. May I divert yon with them? A fugue is what you get in a room full of people when all the windows and doors are shut. A mosquito is the child of black and white parents. The Last Post Is sounded by the burglars of our school spittoon. A Soviet is a cloth used by waiters in hotels. Fallacy is another name for suicide. A polyglot is a dead parrot. Philosophy increases thirty-two feet per second. House and flat-hunting has lost its charm in London. One does it nowadays by cinema. The agent erects a little screen and throws upon it pictures of dwelling places. I saw one of these pictured crusades the other day and I am convinced that when I want a new flat I shall go and see it myself. That is half the fun. You cannot turn on the taps in the bathroom when the bathroom is no more than a pictured reality. How do you know whether the electric light works when you cannot even see the switch? Besides, there is something intangible, some waiting presence in an empty room that eludes the cinema. You cannot stand in the middle of a picture with a tape-measure and say: “The oak table will go there, and if I hang 'Herons and Waterlilies’ just there it will hide the stain on the wall, and the arm-chair, if not moved about, will just cover that extraordinary subsidence in the floor.” No picture can give you those delicious opportunities of calculation. The world is getting very dull and mechanical—and I could wish it was again peopled by fantastic mammals and the people of Atlantis.

I am again on the brink of leaving London. I feel like a swallow that has been moidhered by a swift succession of short summers and winters—aud that it is almost waste of time to fold up the wings. I shall be in Dun Laoghaire to-mor-row morning. Some people call it Kingstown. . •. P.T. London. •