FIFTY YEARS HENCE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 29 December 1930, Page 8

FIFTY YEARS HENCE

FANTASY OF THE FUTURE MAKING THE BEST OF IT ' All, me! what strange times wo live in now. How well t remember the Christmas of 1930—those were the good old times; I was a smart young man then. Well, well, it’s Christmas Day, 1980, and we must make tho best of it but I don’t like all these nowfungled things. Yesterday I was very comfortable in the Cape Verde Islands, then out comes my granddaughter, May, in that helicopter air yacht-she’s so proud of. “Grandad,” she says, “you simply must come home for Christmas; there, put on your greatcoat, the one that lias the electric heater in it, and skip aboard my yacht, and in five hours I’ll land you on the roof of our house at Highgate.” Of course, I grumbled. I don’t hold with young girls gadding about the world all alone in'air yachts, but they say I’m old-fashioned, only fit for the slow motor days of the 1920’5. So I got up, slipped on my electrically warmed coat, and went bn board the yacht with May. I felt ajflt out of place at first, but really it was glorious, dashing along, 5000 feet above the sea, at 300 miles an hour. And bow wonderfully that girl managed her yacht! She seemed so different to the girls of ’3O, and yet so like them in some respects. As I looked at her face my mind went back to that far-off Christmas 50 years ago, when her grandmother consented to l)c my wife. Excuse a garrulous old fellow, these memories will come hack to one at Christmas time.

As I said, it’s Christmas Day, and we must make the best of it, here at Highgate. Flighty, my granddaughter may be according to the notions of 1930 girls were all so modeßt and retiring then —but really she’s a good girl, and. she landed me here safe and sound. And knowing how I hate these concentrated food tablets we all have to live on now, she has made ine—with her own hands, mind you —a real, oldfashioned plum pudding, but I have an idea that to see me eat such “horrid stodgy stuff” will be the joke of the evening for the young folk. ,

TELEVISION WONDERS So I am sitting here, watching on the television screen my son, Tom, rushing across the Indian Ocean on tlic 400-mile-an-liour helicopter air liner, “Quickstep.” He is coming home from New Zealand to spend Boxing Day with us; he couldn’t get away in time to be here to-day. Yet I Watch him on the television screen, talk to him by wireless telephone, and think of the time in 1928 when jioor Bert Hinkler struggled to Australia in his little aeroplane. Well, it will soon be “dinner” time, and whilst the house party swallow their tiny food tablets, grandma and I intend to sample that plum pudding of May’s. I warded— let .me whisper it!— a slice of roast beef, but there was such an uproar that I gave up the idea; in fact, I overheard Miss Morcame, the poet, declare that she hardly liked to remain in the house with an old man of such repulsive tastes. Quite a number of very interesting people are here for Christmas. There is young Perkins, of the Lunar Development Company, who has “run down” from the Moon in the latest inter-stellar rocket car; and there is also Captaip Highflight, the inventor, who hopes to reach Mars next May in some new-fangled contrivance of his. I feel very much out of place amongst such people, it all seemed so homely and nice at Christmas time, 1930, but now I feel that I am a “stranger” in a world peopled by beings who can read one’s thoughts, control the weather, and grow lettuce by electricity “while -you .wait.” Yet we shall be merry to-night, for grandma and I have promised to show the young folk how we danced the 1 Charleston on Boxing Night 50 years ago. Young people don’t dance now, they say that such amusements are crude and barbarous, everything is reasoned put, and this morning I heard a little toddler of four laugh at the name of Father Christmas. _ “Only babies,” she said, “believed in that rough fellow.”

THE TRUE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT After all, though, these people of this new age have the true Christmas spirit, just as we had in 1930, and just as dear old Mr Pickwick had in the early nineteenth century. My grandsons and granddaughters leave their beloved airbicycles for a few moments to rush in and say “A Merry Christmas, grandfather 1” and they delight -to gather round me and hear me tell of a children’s party which took place in London when I was young. But I don’t altogether like these modern children’s manners, they never pause from their many activities, and speak in short jerky sentences, leaving out nearly all the ‘little words like “the” And “to.” For instance, my'grandson, Jack, said this morning. “Uncle Tom gone moon in interstellar liner, expects come home next week.” When I talk to him, Jack sighs and says, “Cut out extras, Grandad,” by which he means that I am to leave out all the short words, which, to his super-sharp mind, seem

to he “extras.” Yet it is just the modern way oi these young people, and we old folk cannot understand them. They are just as kindhearted as the lads and lasses of 1930, nothing is too good for granddad and grandma. We are to he taken to-morrow to see Professor Backlooker’s new apparatus, with which one can look into the past. I am promised that I shall see William the Conqueror landing at Hastings, and “selected episodes of the Wars of 'the Roses.” It is all very wonderful, and this great London is still more wonderful, with its 12,000,000 inhabitants. The newspapers are wonderful, too, with their colour photographs and pictures, in which the figures appear to move. We. never write letters, for even I, a stupid

old fellow of a bygone age, can speak to anyone in any part of the world with iny Universal Pocket Wireless Telephone. Yet, with all these wonders to fasci-

nate me, I steal away sometimes to a quiet room, and, seating myself in the Georgian armchair, get out my old pipe, and smoke (after 1 have locked the door, for nowadays smoking is looked upon as a “disgusting habit”). Then I take down my copies of the “Times,” dating back from the 1920-1930 period, and for a while I am hack in the palmy days of the ’twenties. There are times, too, when my dear wife goes to the piano and solemnly plays a piece of music published in 1914, whilst I stand as upright as mv lumbago will let me, and quaver forth “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” And to-night,

when Christmas Day, 1980, is ending, I shall, in my old-fashioned grave way, take my wife’s hand, and we shall talk again of that joyous Christmas of 1928, when she made me happy by saying “Yes,” a happiness which has not been dimmed through all the long years of hustle and change through which wo have passed together.—Auckland “Star.”