NEW STATES

Timaru Herald, Volume CLI, Issue 22202, 20 February 1942, Page 6

NEW STATES

Old Flat To New Flat A Moving Entertainment (By E. Merritt in the “Sydney Morning Herald.”) War, or no war, there is a form of entertainment in the city known only to those who have experienced it. I refer (however reluctantly) to moving froi/ one flat to another. Having an/used myself with this farce recently, I am impelled to write, so that others may take due heed and preferably build themselves a lean-to far out in the bush. To find a new flat in the city is, of course, easy. All you need is: Three months with nothing else to do and fifty friends who will tell you when their best friend tells them that a relative of a cousin is about to move from her flat. This strategy Is necessary because flats are never “vacant.” The walls just hold their breath for a second and then gasp to find new tenants already sitting up criticising the stains on the wallpaper. At the end of three months’ walking your weight is nicely reduced and your sense of values increased. When, at last, you are shown a small bolt-hole which the landlord describes as a flat, you shout for joy. Yes, there will oe room for the piano! Yes, there are two bedrooms! Yes, there is a window to each room. Yes, everything’s clean. No. nothing’s broken. Yes, lots of light and air. So you engage a carrier. This, also, is easy. You merely make thirty-nine 'phone calls each day for two days and finally you find a man who will begrudgingly move your furniture on the very day you desire. Humbly, you await his arrival. He is only two hours late, which means he is practically on time. Three hefty offsiders help him to heave out what suddenly seems to you to be a very valuable collection of furniture and, when they get the piano jammed on to the landing, you hold on to the only chair left in the lounge-room and jump up and down with anxiety, like an ape. At last the load's on the van and the carriers’ shirts are skin-tight with honest sweat. Three hours later you are installed—that is, the furniture is all jumbled up, but in the correct rooms. The .casualties of the trip (three glass dishes, a leg of a table, a thermos flask, a picture frame, and your favourite hat which somehow got squashed under the entire load l are heaped in one corner of the k I hen awaiting disposal. No linos, or carpets are yet down and the floor-boards, you discover for the first time, are loose here and there. You wonder where your eyes were when you looked the flat over with the caretaker some days ago. And now you come to the most interesting features of the entertainment. Who can see what from where? This takes you on a round-tour of window-inspection. There are five windows in 'your flat; and the flats around, above, and below you are similarly built. So no matter at which window you stand, you can be seen from some other flat’s window nearby. You spend the first afternoon in experimenting. You lie on the floor and look up. Somebody in a pink frock is looking down and grinning at you from a flat above. You stand up and look down. A man is munching near the open window in that flat below. You lie ou your bed and look across. A lady snaps down her bathroom window as though suspecting you're watching when you shouldn’t.

Helpful Advice After window-inspection, you realise that, unless securely locked, the doors of your wardrobes, pedestals, etc., are always open. You wonder why. They were never like that before. You sit down and try to work it out on paper. Then you fall jn to hands and knees to see if something is holding the back legs of the furniture on a slant. Then you gently shut all doors and move away softly to see if it’s only Temperament. Slowly, all doors swing open. “The place is haunted!" you decide, desperately. But a chap, who, unknown to you. has been watching your antics from the flat above, now shouts down helpfully: “All the floors slope here and there, so you’ll have to jiggle the furniture round till it stands still, that’s all.” Surprises now some thick and fast. Your wife calls to you from one room. You answer. Another question is asked and you answer again. Your wife calls back, “That wasn’t me. That was the flat above." Then YOU ask HER a question. She doesn’t answer. You yell: “Hey, that. WAS me that time!” The answer is an impatient “What did you say?”—but it isn’t your wife’s voice. It’s a man from the flat on the side. You find two little vases and a rathole near the gas-stove in the kitchen. Your wife washes the vases and you watch the rat-hole. After a minute you determinedly write “Buy trap” on your wife’s shopping list, though you feel sorry for the rat because you yourself are feeling that trapped sensation, too. You decide on a bath. At the end of the half-hour’s work, you realise that the heater is a penny-in-the-slot affair and that the last pennyworth must be only a memory. You are the sole possessor of a penny; if anyone else in the flat possesses one he or she is too sensible to admit it. “Good-bye” Other surprises are a horde of mos-

quitoes, which seem to be permanent boarders; a nearby baby with lungs of iron and a determination to exercise them; nails in the uncovered floor which rip through your slippers; a window which rattles all night; and a light in the outer hallway which shines into your eyes till grey dawn. Next day you are gamely tacking up cupboard curtains, fastening bolts on to doors and windows, hanging pictures, and replacing parts of the stove which your wife very cleverly took to pieces, when suddenly there’s a yell from the lounge-room. Your wife has been looking carefully at every board in the room. And just where she wants to have the piano, there is one board with definite evidence of borers in it. If there's one thing which uncurls her hair with horror, it’s borers, so you are promptly sent down to the telephone in the hall and despondently ring the carrier who “moved” you. “Come around as soon as you can,” you say in the whinnying voice of a man reconciled to the inevitable. “We’ll be storing the furniture and boarding for a while while we look round for a new flat. Yes, we're leaving this one! My wife says it’s borers, but I think it just Fate. .. . Good-bye.”