THE COMMON ROUND

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24950, 24 June 1942, Page 6

THE COMMON ROUND

By Wayfarer

From a correspondent: Dear " Wayfarer,"—Your remarks last Wednesday concerning possible names for war babies have prompted me to send you a refrain that proved popular amongst British troops returning to the Old Country after the close of the South African campaign. The words were as follows: The baby's name is Kitchener Carrington Methuen Kekewich White Cronje Flumer Powell Majuba Gatacre Warren Colenso Kruger Capetown Mafeking French Ladysmith Kimberley Bobs Union Jack Fighting Mac Lyddite Pretoria Blobbs! Tunefully set, this little verse always went well and sounded quite good of a night in the tropics when started by troops on the fo'c'sle and thence carried line by line to the stern of the ship and from there back to the bow again.—Yours, etc., Veteran. There is surely an idea here for the boogie-woogie merchants to bring up-to-date and Cab Calloway to go to town on, though neither ourself nor " Veteran" can have any enthusiasm for the result. The ability of the child to summarise more succinctly than an adult was once referred to by Mr James Agate. The whole of childhood, he averred, is contained in the following: Little Boy: I know where we are—we're lost. It is a philosophical discourse in a sentence, which betters even A. E. Housman's simple-seeming statements of the facts of life—and of death. In the field of science the child may again raise and dispose of great problems with negligent skill. From a 13-year-old schoolboy's letter: Last night a doctor made a talk on surgery. He told us about all sorts of surgery, sceptic and antiseptic.

Men have hired the Town Hall and talked for hours in mystic phrases to say much less than this.

To these examples, from the British Isles and New Zealand respectively, add a commentary which was found by an eagle-eyed columnist, lying on the floor of a New York kinema after a matinee: Dear Shirley, I'm not mad and I hope I never will be. You seemed mad in school. I hope that your not mad, Mary said that your not, and I hope it's true. You seemed as if you were not mad in the morning. I hope that this note will pot make vou mad. I may be over today. I don't know. Thats if you arnt mad. I still love you as I said in school. Please don't be mad. I'm not mad and I'll say it a thousand times again, got to go now so I'll sign of.— \ Arthur. * Bear in mind that " mad" is used in the common American idiomatic sense —" angry " —and we may as well admit that it took Shakespeare a couple of his best dramatic works to put over the same exposition of the ecstasy and tragedy of being in love.

From the north we have a snatch of dialogue which will probably fail to evoke loud and enthusiastic applause among a certain feminine section of the community: Nice Old Lady (to member of the American Expeditionary Force): And tell me, what do you think of our New Zealand girls? Doughboy: Well, ma'am, in the State where I come from we bury our dead. There is, of course, a reply to this unwise crack, which is suggested in a little anecdote. Perpend: Montaigne tells the story of a tired and crazy soldier of Caesar's Guard who, in the open street, approached Caesar to beg leave that he might cause himself to be put to death. Viewing his decrepit behaviour, Caesar answered pleasantly: "Dost thou think to be alive, then? " Our womenfolk may care to file this story for suitable revision and future reference.

Neither can we let pass the mischievous observations of a New Zealand airman, writing to his parents from a sister dominion. Excerpt: All the girls seem mature for their ages, and on the whole they are much better-looking than the New Zealand girls. Some New Zealand girls are good-looking, others are plain, but in Canada they are good-lookers. One girl I met yesterday was the prettiest girl I had ever seen, and even she was not much better-looking than the average girl here. The explanation of this rhapsody lies, of course, in the final sentence. Beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder.

We have occasional glimpses of what adds up to womanly beauty in the works of the poets, the painters, the sculptors, and the kinema. But their meticulous examinations of the subject must always leave us a trifle unconvinced. Ii the Venus of Melos, whom so many aesthetes affect to adore as the perfect expression of feminine pulchritude, presented herself fetchingly frocked at the Saturday night dance, she would probably remain a wallflower most of the evening; if she went walking in slacks along the esplanade on Sunday afternoon she would possibly be greeted with comments upon her proportions which fortunately would be Greek to her.

But do not misunderstand us. W,e do not doubt the lady's capacity to get her man. Sooner or later she would meet some fellow and a mysterious chemical reaction would occur —zowie! And before she knew it, he would be pouring into her e,ars a lot of nonsense about the way she does her hair (which privately we consider most unbecoming) and the shape of her nose (which may have appealed to Praxiteles, but leaves us cold), and the neatness of her ankles (which would probably cause a run in any self-respecting pair of full-fashioned silk stockings), and she'd.be lapping up all this incoherent babble with an interest she has never been known to manifest in the scholarly paeans that were written sbout her by visitors to the Louvre.

From all the definitions of beauty that have come our way in communion with the writers and artists who profess to know about such things, we select as the only adequate appraisal a description from an American novelist, Branch Cabell. The hero of this work, who has had some opportunities of studying the subject at first hand, eventually meets his fate, a woman so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. Here she is: Her face was the proper shape, it was beautifully coloured everywhere, and it was surmounted with an adequate quantity of hair, nor was it possible to find any defect in her fea-

tures. The colours of this beautiful young girl's two eyes were nicely matched, and her nose stood just equidistant between them. Beneath this was her mouth, and she had also a pair of ears. Of course, gentle readers will recognise her at once, though they wouldn't do so if they met her in the street, where she is to be seen a hundred times a day. She is just the particular young woman that a New Zealand airman in Canada, or a farmer up in Central, a miner on the West Coast, or a civil servant in the Taxation Department happens 1o find beautiful above all others. That, my friends, is beauty.

Speaking of the war news, all we wish to say is We hope what Rommel gets out of Libya Is a broken tibia, And that he finds Tobruk s Not as good as it looks.