Pamela Sends a London Budget

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 92, 9 July 1927, Page 24

Pamela Sends a London Budget

PAMELA TRAVERS, THE SUN’S CORRESPONDENT, SENDS ANOTHER CHEERY LETTER ABOUT THE DOINGS OF LONDON

S RIVING through Windsor yesterday—(no, I was not going to see the King because he was, of of course, at Buckingham Palace) —I peered into the grounds of the Castle. The person in a red coat, whose face was immured in a busby said through the fur that I might go in. Could I, I asked, see the King’s Beasts. I Could, he thought, for wern’t they on the top of the Chapel. Now, I am not trying to lead up to an odd zoological story. The King’s Beasts have every right to be on the pinnacles of the Chapel instead of in cages. There are fourteen of them, all very ferocious and all very harmless for they are made of stone. If they ever had any life of their own it has gradually frozen into stony quiet. It was dear Christopher Wren who removed the Beasts from the Chapel in 1682—they had been set up as heraldic symbols by Henry VII. to illustrate his claim to the throne through the houses of White York and Red Lancaster—because, Wren said they would crumble and fall, and* maybe, upon Elizabeths head and she going forth to prayers. But now somebody has filled up the crumbling —and probably hungry—innards of the Beasts and they are on their pedestals again. The Beasts are very strange beasts and beautiful in a rather comic and pathetic way. I think I liked best the goat with the cockatoo’s crest, who squats on his haunches, bearing in his hands a shield and round his neck a crown chained to his hooves by a stony chain. He looked so sad and proud up there on his pinnalce, bravely holding the King’s shield against wind and storm. The lion, too, has a shield and there is a crown on his head. But—and you will see by this that he has no manners—he has put his tongue out. Probably he did it in the days when he was a real live lion and when he turned to stone he wasn’t able to put it in again The Black Bull of Edward the IV. looks a little idiotic as he stares into space holding his shield with a languid hoof. But he is good enough for Edward IV.—who was rather an idiotic king and completely ruled bv the galumphing Elizabeth Woodville. The sternest and most savage beast is the fewan. Its stone neck rears protectingly above the shield that lies against the stony breast feathers and the eye that looks downwards is fierce and glowering. I went very softly from the Chapel courtyard for fear that the littlest sound would turn those dangerous, wild, prisoned eyes in my direction. . .

I’ve had a peep at this year’s Royal Academy. Cubism looks old-fashioned and dowdy beside some of the new efforts. It looked as if—in two of the rooms, at any rate—Victorianism had died at last. Every picture was a flower on the grave of that Grundian

lady. People went about talking in whispers, rather as one does in church just before a service. Very few artists were present hut people in top hats abounded. They took spectacles out of little cases and little note-books out of their pockets and jotted down cryptic words. I could see by some of the expressions on the grave and reverent faces

that some of the people who were hung in the room where Victoria died were going to get it in the neck. I sensed highly technical and condemnatory phrases mounting up through the air. “As for Mr. Jinks —he cannot even draw. And that is the kindest thing we can say about him.” And of course there were Royal portraits. The reverent gentleman glanced at these with respect mingled with a curious wonder and then turned quickly away as if somebody had suddenly accused them of high treason. They talked together of the mysterious refusal of the academy of the George Bernard Shaw latest portrait. Why—why? It was a good portrait, well painted. Why not have included it and left out that dreadful thing of the girl without —and here an expressive shudder came to the assistance of words.

I have been to two noisy places this week —one was Covent Garden on the first night of the opera season to hear “ Rosenkavalier ” moderately well sung. The audience was restrained and consciously appreciative, while the curtain was up, but in the intervals there was a screech of conversation, which would have done credit to a gathering of cockatoos. Tiaraid heads nodded at each other like friendly goats trying to rub noses. There was a great deal of semitechnical criticism' shrilled in high keys among the sibilant rise and fall of lesser conversation. I find that the Russian Ballet has palled upon the pale youth of London and that now the opera’s the only wear. It is no longer “Mai deah—but you murst see the “Three-Cornered Hat!”; but

“Darling, you positively mursn’t tail to go to the Garden!” I heard a much more enjoyable “Rosenkavalier” in Paris last time 1 was there. It was sung—nearly all ot it—at the Cafe de la Rotonde in Montparnasses on Christmas Eve and the clink of glasses and the shouting

voices went very well together. Here, in Lincoln’s Inn, where I live, the past still lingers a little. The curfew has just this moment rung. 1 would love to be sentimental about the curfew. It is such a gentle, goodnightish sort of word. But unfortunately our curfew has a habit of striding across these legal silences with a sound that hurts rather than soothes. Bang, bang bang, go the 48 strokes—as If the tongue of the hidden bell were nagging fiercely at the bowl for past offences. I often wonder who rings the curfew. It would be easy enough for me to find out but I prefer to keep the secret with myself. i hope it is rung by the ghost of the bishop who is buried just under my window and over whose grave in the pavement I always walk so that he will know that somebody is thinking about him. Or perhaps the curfe® is knelled by the wicked student Who, in the early days of the Inn, would shoot the rabbits in the gardens with his bow and arrow —so persistent in this sport was he that a special la* had to be made to prevent the wholesale death of rabbits and to this da; it is written in the laws of the inn that “students may not shoot tn rabbits with bow and arrow.” it is. ® course, now quite as meaningless as tn clause in the leasehold of the bouse of a friend of mine, which says tn» he may not keep a cow. As the area is hardly large enough to hold middle-sized cook there would not room for a cow, let alone a grazing pasture for it. ~. Did you know that among wT“® trees there are two genders—Mr- ’V. low and Mrs. Willow? I didn’t un an hour ago. It is Mrs. Willow, appears, who provides cricket for the world out of her own breast. She gives up her arms g erously so that little boys idiotic men can hit balls into le ® 3 stumps and be glad on Saturday ane‘ noons. Mrs. Willow, it appears, been too generous and there ** “ hardly any more of her left. ® facturers, alarmed at the dwl , d , of Mrs. Willow are ranging the lorra pathways looking for other gene „ ladies who are as hard of lm> they are soft and kindly of he Miss Birch will not do —she i* thin and bending, and Miss Elm 0 way of shrivelling when she is cn if you had offended her innermos stincts. As for Miss Pine, fm e much too snappy—at an;' ratl? h „ n grown-up bats—but she has known to give her arms for little that do not demand much musc ”T power from their wielders. 1 . pose It will eventually come to tn that when Mrs. Willow has don she can for the snorting world. 1. have to fall back upon AUcos r cedent and use a stork as a c bat. But, then again. I’m atr< . » would never do that. The sp world cannot bear being laugne that is why I am not one pi us habitants.