Still Lemonade

Manawatu Times, Volume 59, Issue 262, 9 November 1934, Page 2

Still Lemonade

(M. Turner.) One of tho delights of my childhood was to liavo a glass of “still lemonade.” One came to a confectioner’s shop with an enormous glass bowl of lemon drink —lemons, sugar and water. Tho most attractive to my childish eyes had had some colouring matter added. To this day 1 retain the feeling, originating from the procedure of those occasions, that highly-coloured tilings arc not for the elite. I was always hurried past the yellow ones, but there were many purveyors of this very wholesome beverage, and soon I would have a glass of “still” lemonade — sweet, cool, very refreshing and absolutely harmless. Indeed, I believe it was actively wholesome, but ail this happened in an age when the most that a small boy or girl could expect to hear of anything very pleasant was that it would not do you any harm. The name alone intrigued one. AA’hy “still*” Had it anything to do with a still-room. A.most lovely ward that, which still conveys to mo a sense of pleasant calm and quiet, though I learned long ago that it was the room where drinks, scents and medicines were “distilled” and where, probably, sauces and preserves were made. However, the word “still-room” immediately brings a picture of a serene lady sticking cloves into oranges or drying sweet-scented flower-petals for potpourri, and always with an air of infinite leisure.

To return to our lemonade, I wonder why that delightfully simple and whole* some drink is no longer available for our young folk? Lemons aro sufficiently plentiful, and sugar correspondingly cheap. So simple a drink would add a new pleasure to their lives, and a glass vessel of shimmery liquid, faintly tinged with a suggestion of colour, with tiny particles of lemon floating in it and slices of lemon, or possibly even a whole lemon floating on it, would add to- the poetry of life. Possibly the bottled drink manufacturers would not approve, yet the taste that craves “still lemonade” will always pass tho tizzy drink.

I will mix some of tho concoction for myself, arid drink a silent toast to the huge glass vessels of delectable nectar which I sec when I gaze back' through the mists of years.