GRANDMAMAS

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1780, 8 July 1926, Page 3

GRANDMAMAS

THE CARE-FREE MAIDEN OF TO-DAY. " Young people aren't what they •were." 1 IHow often you hear that on the lips of succeeding generations. But is the change so great as it seems? Everything has happened before, and every- \ 'thing will happen again. Life in circles, and, human beings are naturally reactionary. The father whose one craze is his garden has a son whose one interest is aeroplanes. The missonary produces a dancer, the dancer a puritan. The generation which revels in gaming, gallantry, and dissipation is often followed by a period of extreme rigidity. A century of puritanism wil'l not fail to cause the pendulum to swing violently in the opposite direction. And, after all, it is largely a matter of fashion. Could the advent of jazz have shocked early Edwardian ladies more than the revival of the waltz perturbed their grandmamas— -. and grandmamas who had only jasfc emerged from the tradition of theminuet and who never danced anythingbut quadrilles, gavottes, and en occasional schottische, which they performed with a fascinating d,emureness? And we" remember how the waltz, when introduced from France by his sister, the Duchess of Suffolk and Brandon, sometime Queen of France, disturbed the chaste susceptibilities of Henry VIII.

The pendulum, as I have said, will swing back. We shall see—if we live —the shingled, careless, freedom-lov-ing, devil-may-care maiden of to-day turn gradually into a thoughtful and more or less serious grandmama. From behind whatever spectacles may then be in the fashion she will lament tfiat " dear Elisabeth's girls aren't what, we were in our young days," and, if she is a critic, she will sadly sigh, "Autres temps, autres moeurs," just as her mother did when she was gay and giddy.

Her metamorphosis will be gradual, though, like all great changes. Laughing, pleasure - loving, inconsequent youth turns imperceptibly into a steadied-down, quiet, and perhaps critical old age, just as spring becomes winter through the gentle changes of summer and autumn.

, But if, instead of being of a critical disposition, this grandmama possesses the rarer and better qualities of a philosopher, she will visualise the past gently to herself as she gazes into the fire, a wise smile will flit across her lips, and she will murmur to herself that wise French proverb: "The more it changes, the more it remains the same."