A LETTER FROM HOME.

Otago Witness, Issue 4042, 1 September 1931, Page 58

A LETTER FROM HOME.

By Sheila Alacponald. (Special for the Otago Witness.) This is St. Swithin’s Day—and it has rained! To the true born and bred Englishman this is a matter of due potent, for anyone who knows anything knows that a rainy St. Swithin’s Day means six weeks of wet weather to follow. Everywhere to-day, in tubes, in buses, in tea shops, _ one heard the question put: "Do you believe in it? I know all the experts say it’s rubbish, but ” and the “ but ” is invariably followed up with the speaker’s own experience as proof positive. But wet or fine St. Swithin’s Day always sees the lavender sellers in the street. Due meets them by the dozen, just as later on one meets the swarthy blue-bloused Breton peasant boys with their strings

of Spanish onions slung across their shoulders. The Breton peasants call of “ on-ions—on-n-ions ” is an autumn cry. One associates it with bare branches, a swirl of dying leaves, and an impudent pillling of bells; whereas lavender speaks of high summer and flaunting flower beds and long warm evenings that drift into early mornings without ever achieving any real darkness. Even in busy quarters the lavender sellers all sang of their wares—or tried to. Now for the most part all one hears is the monotonous repetition : “ Sweet lavender —sweet lavender.” Just now and again though one happens across some derelict of the old school, who, trudging along, lifts-his or her cry above the rattle and roar of the traffic. I met one such this morning in a quaint square off the Bayswater road, and was so intrigued that I stopped to make inquiries. I give the words in their entirety and also a bar of the music to which they are sung or rather chanted:

Will you buy my sweet blooming lavender, Sixteen good branches a penny— You'll buy it once. You’ll buy it twice. You’ll make your clothes smell very nice— Sixteen good branches one penny? Incidentally the branches arc twopence these days, but that is by way of. The music was thus:

The first bar that is to say. but the rest is sufficiently similar to make discrimination difficult. It is only due to the talent of the musical friend who accompanied sue that I am even able to transcribe as much. It always seems such a tragedy to me that the little that is still left to us of the picturesque of another day should be allowed to dwindle out from sheer inanition. There are too many children growing up who have never heard the cry ot sweet lavender on St. Swithin’s Day, or rushed to the door on winter afternoons to intercept the muffin man on his rounds. And yet there are still old ladies loving and active who used to bowl down to Aliteham in their Victoria's on Saturday afternoons to come back laden with fragrant scented lavender, plucked by maidens in print gowns and dainty aprons, with which to make sachets and cushions, for the scenting of linen cupboards and boudoir. Now Alitcham is a horror of brick villas with a factory or two and a multitude of steam laundries, strewing the fields where violets and lavender farms once flourished. Always this dreadful London goes on growing, and always in the growing does the picturesque and romantic give way to the prosaic and necessary. It must be so, of course, but it is a pity. Everywhere, even in the city, old twists and turns are being ruthlessly straightened in a desperate attempt to cope with the ever growing stream of traffic pouring in as ceaselessly as it pours out. The big bend even as far afield as Kensington High street, which gave the Royal Borough its little air of seclusion, has gone now, and instead of the rather haphazard frontage of less strenuous days, Denny and Toms and Barbel's stand up very straightly and proudly in a line with the Hammersmith road. Yet even with the additional space, crossing to the opposite side of the street is as perilous an undertaking as ever it was. As for Oxford street, which has now twelve one-way traffic roads pouring into its Alarble Arch end, it is now given over to automatic controls and warning bells and coloured lights. Police there are too, but as one pessimist remarked, to me—• " chiefly to direct the doctors and ambulances to the dead and mangled.” That, of course, is an exaggeration, but the faet remains that Oxford street has now become as dangerous as Trafalgar square, which at least has underground tunnels for the faint hearted.

However, when I was lamenting the passing of the picturesque the other day, I was pulled up by a man who knows not only his London but his England. I wonder does anyone know that every year on June 18, which is the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington has to proceed to Buckingham Palace, or Windsor, or wherever the King happens to be in residence and there pay his yearly rent for the estate of Strathfieldsage in Hampshire, which Parliament voted to his great ancestor, and the “ rent ” he pays is a miniature French tricolour flag. The said flag -is borne off by the Garter King-of-Arms in full regalia, and placed on the bust cf the great duke which stands in the Guard Cliamber of Windsor Castle. The Dukes of Wellington are by no means unique either. The Duke of Marlborough lias to present a small silk royal standard as rent for Blenheim every August 15. In Scotland the Laird of Foulis (pronounced Fowls) pays his rent by delivering a bucket of snow at Edinburgh Castle. Another Scottish estate is held in perpetuity as long only as the owner provides the King with water wherein he may wash his hands when in the neighbourhood. Lord Romney, on the other hand, is entitled to receive twelve golden pounds every year from the city of Rochester, as a reminder of a favour granted to an ancestor by Henry IV. One Welsh nobleman is bound to provide the King, when in his neighbourhood,with the services of a knight in full armour or else forfeit his heritage. There are dozens of other like absurdities, most of them of course fallen into abeyance, but I believe that the Dukes of Marl-

borough and Wellington faithfully carry out the annual ceremony of the presentation of their silken banners.

The shops are still filled with eager shoppers, and as fast as bargains disappear more take their places. Prices arc at bedrock, for not only must cash at all cost be turned over, but the forecast of autumn and winter fashions from Paris mean that in very truth no woman will have a rag fit to be seen in once the summer is over. Bustles, frills, furbelows, muffs, dreadful little hats with dangling feathers, one horror after another is to be sprung on us. One Bond street shop, very farseeing, is exhibiting the new boneless crinoline, a voluminous shirred and .corded petticoat contraption over which our wide skirts will balloon gracefully. I can't believe that mine will. I even go so far as to say emphatically that it won’t, but m my heart of hearts I know that if my neighbour balloons, then truly shall 1 balloon too. But why, -when we were so comfortable and almost as standardised its our attire as men. I still think the long frocks, especially of organdie and ninon that one now sees on’all sides, absurd in the daytime, unless for garden party wear alone, and even then they require sunshine, blue skies, and green lawns. Worn with a calf-length coat in a crowd they are wholly unlovely. At Lords the other day for the Eton and Harrow match, which after Goodwood and Ascot ranks as one of the fashion parades of the season, practically every girl and woman wore a trailing gown of diaphanous material. A chill wind sprang up, coats—all of calf-length—-were donned, and a more lainentiiblelooking effect it would be impossible to imagine. Except for the few girls in crocheted berets, which, be it said, invariably looked incongruous with the trailing skirts, every woman present was clutching at her hat. The shallowcrowned and wide-brimmed variety simply won’t think of “staying put” in the mildest zephyr, let alone a good stiff breeze. I cannot imagine anything more deplorable this coming winter than to drabble along London's streaming pavements holding up one’s skirts, or to tackle one-way traffic in a crinoline and a befeathered bowler.

Unthinkable! But it looks like happening.