A LETTER FROM HOME.

Otago Witness, Issue 3888, 18 September 1928, Page 64

A LETTER FROM HOME.

By Sheila Scobie Macdonald. (Special fop. tee Otago Witness.) July 23. The sun still blazes from a cloudless sky, and the third week of what is called the “ heat wave ” has actually come to pass. It is wonderful; so wonderful that day and night my windows are flung wide open to admit all the sunshine that can possibly find its way in It will certainly bleach carpets, curtains, and wallpaper, but at the same time leave a joyful memory that lie future winter fog or lowering grey skies can quite efface. And yet there are grumblers by the thousand—l nearly wrote million—people who gasp and pant, talk of “ this oppressive heat,” and long for the “drought” to break. Personally, I hope it will continue until October, although I must admit that when I gaze upon the limpness of my cherished sweet peas I feel a twinge of conscience. But the gardens everywhere are a miracle of loveliness, with ramblers of every description more beautiful thap I ever remember seeing them, and phlox and hollyhocks responding gratefully tc the still heat. \ Yesterday we motored across to Oxshott Common, a great sweep of firplanted, purple-heathered highland near Esher, with here and there wide glades opening out on to plantations of silvei birch in all stages of growth, from fernlike seedlings to tall trees, their head? dappled in sunshine, their. silver white stems standing out in strong relief against the cool green of grass and shaded young growth. On the way we halted for lunch at a village inn displaying the inviting sign of “ The Leg of Mutton and Cauliflower.” “ It couldn’t really give us that,” insisted an optimistic member of the party, but alas! it did! With a temperature of somewhere round about lOOdeg., that dining room was uninviting, to put it mildly, and when the mutton and cauliflower were duly set before us, we shuddered, rose determinedly, paid our bill politely, and hurriedly departed. In the evening, on the way home, we stopped at a picturesque thatched, roseembowered cottage, where a notice board informed us “ Posies, honey from the comb, and new laid eggs ” might be purchased. An old man picked the flowers for us while his wife saw to the honey and talked—how she talked! The old man was almost inarticulate, but at the end, half shyly, he thrust a small unpaid for “ extra ” of pinUs into my hand. “ I thought as you might fancy a William flower or two,” he jerked out. I had never heard pinks so called before, and asked why they were so named, but our two ancients only looked bewildered. “ They just do be called William flowers in- ffhese parts,” the old woman explained, and her husband added: “ That do be so.”

When I returned home I looked up pinks in my flower lore book, and found sure enough that in some parts of England pinks are still invariably known

as William flowers, the reason being that they were originally introduced into this country by William the Conqueror. Hence the name. I thought that most interesting, and a fitting wind-up to a most delightful outing. But what intrigued me almost as much as the ancient couple, their cottage, their old-world garden, and setting generally was their granddaughter, a young thing, silk-stockinged, shortskirted, lip-sticked, and powdered, who, obviously bored with her relatives, was determined to let us see that her outlook on life was not as theirs. I found her most entertaining—she on her part I am sure felt she had done her best to make up for her grandparents’ short comings, and had greatly impressed me. While the old man was gathering his posies, and the old woman was wrapping honey carefully in little wooden containers, she talked to me of Gloria Swanson, of Pola Negri, of Ronald Colman. >“ If I could only get a chanst,” she fretted, “ I’d soon do the same. They say I’ve got a film face, but in this potty place ” —she left the sentence unfinished, but her tone was sufficiently illuminating. The old woman in rapid asides explained: “ My granddarter is a good girl—not but what she doesn’t look like the other kind—but the gals now is different to what they was in my day—not contented like ” She, too, didn’t finish her sentence, and we drove off leaving them all three standing by the gate —an odd trio with only one generation between them, but for all that a veritable world of lack of understanding and general incompatibility.

And Ellen Terry is dead! I like to remember her as I saw her 25 years ago. She and Sir Henry Irving were presenting “ The Merchant of Venice ” at the Lyceum, and I was on my first visit to London. Sir Henry was an old man —it was the last season he played, I think—but how I was thrilled!—almost more by the movements of his expressive hands, his wonderful personality, than by his voice.. Anyway, in my mind his Shylock always associated with his hands, and Ellen Terry’s Portia with the golden notes of her eloquent voice. Later I saw her in “Alice Sit by the Fire,” and was sorry. I should "have liked better to have had my only memorv of her as Portia.

I had a treat last Sunday, for I was given a ticket to the evening service at Temple Church. Since the enormous popularity of that marvellously gifted chorister, Ernest Lough, of “Hear my Prayer ” fame, admission to the services has been more than difficult to achieve. Sad to say, Ernest Lough’s voice is breaking, and although he still sings in the choir, his solo days are gone for ever. I hear that the choirmaster does not think that as a man he will have any kind of a voice at all—at present, anyway, the outlook is not hopeful. More than a million gramophone records of “ Hear my Prayer ” have been sold to date and the demand is still steady. Many people-to whom gramophones are abhorrent have bought, one simply and solely in order to have that particular record. The boy himself has been besieged by requests for his autographs, etc., but the Temple authorities have firmly set their faces against the public adulation, and the boy is quite unspoilt. He was pointed out to me, white surpliced and innocent looking amongst the other choristers. He looked a very ordinary, healthy boy, probably bored. stiff with the notoriety his exceptional voice has brought him. Another boy, a little fellow of, I should say, not more than 12 years of age, sang “Oh! For the Wings of a Dove” so feelingly that women sobbed quietly, and the dusty, dim atmosphere of the old church seemed to quiver with emotion. - I wondered inwardly what that small boy’s opinion of it all was, whether his thoughts, for instance, were as angelic as his expression and voice, or whether, as a small chorister at St. Paul’s recently confided in me, he considered it- “a beastly grind being able to sing.” Another boy at St. Anne’s, Soho, a church famous for the quality of its music, also bids fair to make a name for himself—and incidentally relieve his parents of every anxiety regarding his education, but I don’t suppose any boj- for many years to come will create the furore Ernest Lough has.