THOSE CHILDREN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20085, 2 March 1928, Page 6

THOSE CHILDREN

for the boys and girls of the present generation! Alas for their unfortunate parents! We already knew that our girls have the cocktail habit; may they not be seen at it any evening of the week when occupied with their amusement? And now it is the boys. The Bishop of Leicester says that whereas he always called his lather “sir,” the “boy of the present day” calls his father “old bean.” If we had to hazard a short guess as to why boys have stopped calling their father “sir” it is that they never began, and the reason why we need not deplore their calling Kim “old bean” is that they don’t. But who is this “boy of the present day” and where is he to be found that he should be generalised about as though he were a type of mass production? And where are these “fathers of the present day” who patiently allow themselves to be called old beans by youthful impudence, It is doubtful, whether they have any large existence outside the imagination of the Bishop. The nature of fathers and sons changes hut, little, and neither, perhaps, do the terms in which they express their relationships of affection and respect. “Sir” no doubt is semetimes used, and sometimes conceivably the rollicking “old beaii. ’ But, for a rule, we have yet to see the evidence that the “boy of the present generation” does not say what the boy of the last one (barring, perhaps, predestined bishops) said before him.