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Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 225, 22 September 1931, Page 10

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An Introduction. STRIKING THING about the two A. A. Milne plays presented by the Repertory Society and the management of the Theatre Royal this week, is that they are so different from one another. “ The Romantic Age ” is a pleasantly sentimental, slightly fantastic story; “The Perfect Alibi” is gripping and dramatic, the perfect crime story. This may seem a rather abrupt introduction to my diary, but the point is that since this is a sort of A. A. Milne week, I cannot do better than saddle him with the responsibility for saying things I would like to be able to say as well myself. Replying to the critics who tell him he should “ come to grips with real life,” he declares that even if he made the excursion he would bring back nothing but the same self to which they take exception. “ J’OR we cannot escape. I have noticed when playing golf, that the more I alter my swing (and I alter it every week in the certainty that at last I have attained the true one, so that one day I am playing like Vardon, on another like Mitchell, on the next like Taylor)—the more this happens the more characteristic of myself does my swing appear to the onlookers. In vain I assure my caddy or my opponent that I am a different golfer altogether to-day; that I have a more advanced left foot, a flatter trajectory of the club-head. He only smiles. He would recognise my ineffective swing three hundred, yards away. . . . “ So then it may be said that, whatever subject an author chooses, or has chosen for him, he reveals no secret but the secret of himself.” J£UT NOW, having written what A. A. Milne has to say about it, I feel that this diary will be a disappointment if it always seems to be written by the same person. No woman likes to think , she brings back the same self from every excursion—too monotonous. At any rate I shall not always turn to my diary in the same mood. The day may even find me so detached from myself as to be quite impersonal. I may yet write the day’s happenings like Milne himself, or even like O. Henry, thus: The Surprise. WAS a pale little wisp of a woman with wide, blue eyes. Whenever she went to the pictures—that was in the days of regular jobs for her husband—she always chose the Jackie Coogan ones, or the programme that promised a story of mother love; and she generally had to borrow Bob’s handkerchief. The day before yesterday she knocked at the door of a sympathetic friend, who lives in Papanui Road, and is well enough off to give two pounds of butter regularly to the pound scheme. Holding out a small vase of Stuart crystal, she offered it for anything the other woman might think it worth. “ To-morrow is the anniversary of our wedding,” she explained, “ and my husband hasn’t had a smoke of decent tobacco for weeks, or any smokes at all the last few days. I just want to give him a little surprise.” I HEARD the rest of the story. That was the only bit of crystal she had left, indeed the only pretty vase she had, and she did love ornaments in her house. She had kept it just to be able to say she had some crystal, ‘but now she thought unobservant l3ob would not miss it. On the anniversary morning she had a good supply of his favourite tobacco. He, too, had a surprise for her. She found that he had not been smoking because he wanted, as a special treat, to take her to the best seats at the pictures, and as a final touch to appeal to her romantic soul he presented her with a bunch of cyclamen, done up with maidenhair and tied with baby ribbon, “ like the ones the fine dames get in the movies. And it’s to go in your crystal vase,” he said. DIANA.