A LETTER FROM HOME.

Otago Witness, Issue 4041, 25 August 1931, Page 58

A LETTER FROM HOME.

By Sheila Macdonald. (Special for the Otago Witness.) July 6. The all absorbing topic of general conversation this week has been—-not the Hoover plan—but Wimbledon. Re the former I was much amused at a conversation I happened to overhear in a bus the other day.’ One very welldressed elderly woman, after greeting an acquaintance, asked “ Well, what do you think about this Hoover scheme? ” Came the surprising answer “ well its no novelty to me, we’ve had ours of years. I can’t imagine a time when one could keep a house clean without one.” But to get back to Wimble’don with its hopes and its shattering disappointments. I sallied forth one day. the sixth member of a party that set out full of confidence and minus tickets to see our Betty beat Helen Jacobs, and so sail on to the dazzling glory of British champion. It was a day of all round disillusion. The weather, to begin with, was trying to put it mildly. The sky was cloudless and tile sun hot, a distressing combination when one is one of almost twenty thousand perspiring and determined Britishers crowded into a space that could with comfort, contain about half that number. We spent quite half the day forming up and waiting about in queues. To begin with we had to queue up for a train, in which we stood all the way to Wimbledon, then queued up again to pass a barrier where every ticket was separately and minutely examined. Released, there was a helterskelter dash for the courts, where again and again we queued, only to find at long last that for the match there was standing room only. Nothing daunted we stood, and stood, and stood, and the sun went on shining. The lucky standers in front were provided with a sort of shelf arrangement on which to lean. We at the back leaned too, but the leaning was involuntary, and depended on the number and strength of the pressing hundreds behind. To make matters worse all around and in front of us were empty seats into which lueky-ticket holders drifted as the fancy took them. The result of two hours waiting, as far as I was concerned anyway, was that we saw Betty Nuttall's fair head bobbing about on what instinct told us must be the court, and Helen Jacobs’s darker one opposite. The defeat of England’s, hope too was our reward, after which we queued up again for the ices which our parched tongues eraved. It was then, however, that things began to be interesting, for the “ stars ” wanted ices too, and for the most part came to fetch them themselves. Betty Nuttall was there in a very smartly pleated pale blue kit with a fleecy coat and beret to match. She is a plump girl, blue eyed, fair haired, and fresh and merry looking rather than pretty. Her sturdy build makes her agility on the courts all the more remarkable. Victory or defeat she is the idol of. the crowd. AH around her people pushed and strained to stare and comment, and a hundred cameras clicked. In fact one of my chief impressions of Wimbledon this year was the incessant clicking of cameras. Even during the most tense moments on the central court where the crowd hardly breathed, one heard that click. It affects the nerves of some of the players I believe. Perry, it is said,

is very much affected. He is a temperamental player, and as such has been pretty severely criticised for his behaviour. Nerves on the central court are inevitable but must be disguised. Personally I don’t know how anyone, man or woman, stands the strain of a first appearance there. The applauseone dreadful moment of waiting—the opening “ plonk ” of the ball—the strained expectancy of watching thousands. It must be frightful. As regards personal appearance Fraulein Cillie Aus%cm was the greatest surprise to me. She is slim, dark, and vivacious, altogether as utterly unlike one’s conception of a German girl as it is possible to imagine. She has a speaking little face, with a smooth brown skin, sparkling brown eyes, and a delicious head of shining brown hair. Senorita d’Alvarez on the other hand is a typical Spaniard, with an olive skin and long dark eyes veiled with lashes (as a girl remarked enviously in my hearing) thick and dark enough to edge a shawl. As regards the men, J. X - Shields, the American, is easily outstanding in the world of looks. He is quite the most beautiful thing in young men that I have ever seen. Over six feet in height, with a really beautiful head and face, he is built like a. Greek god, slim and supple and exquisitely proportioned. His looks, however, are of the essentially masculine type. The only feature about him that is not classically perfect is his mouth, which looks as if its owner loved life and laughed a lot. When 1 saw him he was talking to our Austin, who had to look up at the smiling young giant of the tennis world, whose nasal accent was as noticeable as his exceeding good looks.

Summer time drifts on, and all too soon the long, light evenings will be closing in. At present it is light until after 10 o’clock, and the moment shops and offices are shut there is a rush to the river, which from Kew to beyond Hampton Court is nightly packed with craft of every description. All along either bank tea houses and restaurants vie with one another in the attractiveness of their set out. One and all are drenched in roses. The fragrance of them is delicious in the unstirring air. Herbaceous borders, too, there are in plenty, with hollyhocks and delphiniums fading with the passing light into a vague blur behind the roses. The tea houses have little tables set out on closeelipped emerald lawns, and as the slow creeping summer twilight mists down a thousand lights from rose-wreathed pergolas, arches, terraces, and verandas make a veritable fairyland of what under any circumstances is a beautiful setting, on the crowded water every punt and skill’ glides lazily to the music of a gramophone. Coolly frocked and flannelled idlers lounge in the boats, but now and again there is sterner business afoot, and the pleasure seekers pull closer into the banks to watch a racing boat cut past, sculls dipping and feathering in that clean, splashless sweep that can be as rhythmic as the lilt of the latest popular tune—which, incidentally, is a song entitled “You Are My- Heart's Delight,” from Franz Lehar's latest operetta, “ The Land o’ Smiles,” But it is not only the Thames that is crowded these hot July nights. London's Parks are open until close on midnight, and the Serpentine is the popular haunt of hundreds of city dwellers whose purses cannot run to railway fares. There are open-air conceits, too. chief of them being the Saturday evening concerts given by the League of Arts. Such entertainments all take place on the banks of the Serpentine. The stage is a grassed lawn in the centre of a natural depression called “The Dip.” The audience crowds round in a circle on the slopes. If you aspire to the stalls or dress circle yon must be in good time to seize one of the chairs on the level. The charge is 2d. If you are too late for a chair, you lie or sit on the grass. 'These open-air entertainments are not. for the rich. Whole families turn up. bringing their evening meal with them, and picnic happily to the strains of classical music. Last Saturday it fell to the lot of the Women’s Symphony Orchestra, with Harriet Cohen as pianist, to give a concert. It was a glorious evening, very warm, with the Serpentine a rippleless sheet of silver, and that fragrance of freshly cut grass and that is so intimately a part of the damp heat of an English summer evening. Amongst other items they played Lizst’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, as a sort of background to a Hungarian costume dance. It was quite delightful, but to hear Hungarian music as it ought to be played there is nothing to come near any one of the numerous tzigane or gipsy bands that war prejudice has only just recently restored to London. These strange "ipsy men, with their high cheek bone, anil sliding dark eyes are the chief attraction at many restaurants. They play as no musicians ever can or will play. Thev have no leader, no conductor, no written notes. Each man seems to be a law unto himself, and yet each combines with the other to pour out a flood of emotional music for hours on end in perfect unison. As the mood seizes him, one man, violin in hand, will step down from the little platform to wander amongst the tables. Smile, if you are a woman, at him; slip a shilling into his hand if you are a man, and he will halt beside you and play for you alone. Whatever you ask, lie can play, and at the first note, without even a glance of direction, the other members of the bn nd will follow on. Tchaikovski, Brahms, Lizst, Wagner,

old English folk songs, modern catch tunes, npgro spirituals—it is all one to the tzigane;

Pork-pie hats have come from Paris to London town. Bowlers, with long feathers. trailing, are a common sight. I overheard a Scotswoman say of the latter in an awed undertone to a Cockney friend: “Are yon thocht tae be hats!”