When Grandma "Got Going” with the Valentines

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 28 July 1928, Page 24

When Grandma " Got Going” with the Valentines

■ HEN provincial grandfathers, thorough-going maiden aunts, and “Disgusted” write to complacent newspapers complaining that our generation is forward and minxish and out-to-be-smacked, it is high time for us to murmur “Valentines”! That ought to rout them — these elders and betters who have such short memories. . . . It shocks one to realise that one’s •pre-Raphaelite grandmother could so far forget herself as to have had her photograph taken with the eyes fixed (in imagination at least) upon some Beloved Object with richly drooping moiistachios afid a .waistcoat of the button-up-at-the-neck variety (writes Margot Hirons in “Eve”). It pains one properly to know that to this picture one’s forebear attached the caption: “Accept a Heart’s Devotion,” and then posted it —whither? One blushes heavily to think of its destination and of the reception it received. No wonder elderly men cling to the “We are the Lords of Creation” slogan, adding fortissimo, “Your grandmother said so.” Is it possible that grandmamma’s methods can have been so crudely direct? And yet to-day she actually accuses us of being unsubtle. What’s bred in the bone, grandma . . . don’t forget that! These problems have been brought

specially to the fore this Leap Year by an amusing exhibition of old valentines which the Banks sisters recently arranged at “The Sign of the Sibyl,” their well-known bookshop in Kensington. This is a corner of Lon- i don where even to-day valentines don’t seem to be terribly out of place; they j look curiously at home in this backwater of quiet which is sheltered by | Kensington Palace, hemmed in by j Maids of Honour Row. and well away from that tempestuous petticoat of a lane, Kensington High Street. Heaven i • knows how Miss Banks managed to J secure such a fine collection, but there <

they were (and possibly still are), scores of them in all their symbolical glory of roses and heartsease, pansies, arrows, hearts entwined, Cupids, truelovers’ knots, and laced paper. We moderns who went to scoff at nineteenth-century foibles remained to smile gently. They are works of tenderness some of these queer, flowery things—if is not surprising that they have been carefully cherished for sixty and seventy years. One watched old ladies wander round the show dropping sighs and half a tear over some of the tattered, lacy relics. And one wondered wistfully how it would feel to

receive a sort of paper dinner-mat appliqued with flaps of coloured flowers, each of which when raised revealed “I Love You” or “My Heart’s Treasure” written in that spidery German hand made fashionable by Albert the Good. For other valentines our smiles broadened: for instance, there was that delightful piece of evidence which showed a truly gentlemanly youth in blue trousers and a yellow coat sitting in a jibbing Lion chair, his pensiveness garnished with the most genj teel black whiskers —he appeared to I be meditating on verses to thrill some crinolined miss. Underneath was 1 written the quatrain which apparently pleased him most: —• Bright he the dreams that hover o'er thy couch. The lore-lit scenes- that fancy forms for thee. And I midst thy dreams may Cupid's arrow touch Thy breast, and raise kind thoughts of love and me. There is never anything deliberately :unny about these early valentines—hey are rigid with solemnity and nice eeling; it is only involuntarily that heir humour breaks through. Gran- 1 namma, regarding us and them | hrough her lorgnette, wonders why we j .mile. . . .