RICE PUDDING COLD
young
Mort Davis had been
four years old and he had been about four years old in- about 1904 Mort Davis -and Frances Mort Davis had been firmly con- vinced that there was nothing Young George Mort Davis liked so much as a nice rice pudding
Frances Mort Davis used to say, looking quite extraordinari- ly pretty "Now guess what we've got for dinner to-day. You'll never know. Fll give you three guesses!”
And young George, beginning hopefully with the thing be liked most, would say, "Apple Charlotte. and cream!"
And Mrs. Mort Davis, with dancing eyes, would say,
“Baked bananas and custard !”
And then, of course, young George would know it was rice pudding.
ed fe
When he was older the same thing happened, only then it be gan to be reserved for special oc- casions. Whenever he was five or six or seven or it was Christ- had just recover- mas and
measles or suffered the loss of his tonsils or front tooth, or had cut his knee or anything of that sort, there would be an air of mystery and stispense and then at last the rice pudding would be brought in and Mrs. Mort Davis would clap her hands with delight and say. "Mikky pudding for a treat!”
George rather stuff, and said
his tall hat well down or eary and go into some-
and stuff and go through the delicious agony of eating it, a sadistic re past mingled with the saft water of his tears.
The war made extraordinarily Ittle - diference to the Hort Davises. They were such obvious- ly pleasant people that it seemed a shame to kill them. Mort Davis was forty-five and doing very well out of munitions, so he was all right, and Frances Mort-Davis rolled bandages, and when people got bored with rolling bandages, she knitted balleclave helmets, and when people got bored wi knitting balleclave helmets, she sent out hampers from Fortnum and Mason's to a young nephew of hers who had fallen out of an aeroplane on the safe side of the lines and was a prisoner in Ger many. But in the early part of
Short Story
1918 George Mort Davis, who had got his certificate “A” în the of ficer's training Corps at Eton, suddenly became Second Lieuten- ant Mort Davis, and looking real- ly amazingly English and attrac tive and un-maimable, caught a
so. At first at Victoria at ten o'clock
disliked--the
said so with a great deal of clamor. As he grew more fond of his parents and less careless of hurting their feelings, he said so reasonably and with some at- tempt at argument. But he never convinced them.
be came one of those thing In the Mort Davis family it grew into a tradition that what George liked was rice pudding, and Mrs Mort Davis used to wax facetious about it, and say: "Now young fellah don't eat it all! We want some too, y'know. You've got a bit of a tummy on you, old chap, but upon my soul y'know I don't know that those eyes of Yours aren't bigger. Eh? ha!"
Ha!
When George Mort Davis was eight he was civilized enough to protest no longer. He just ate the glutinous wad and looked uncon- cerned. And the legend persist- ed.
It was at about this time that the legend was widened to in- clude the constituents of a com- plete meal As a matter of fact young George Mort Davis rather liked roast beef, if only it could be divorced from its mystical as- sociation with rice pudding. But this came to be a special meal, tenderly thought out and tender- 1 cooked
occasion particularly tender
Thus on the day be fore George first left for his prep school at the age of ten, he ate a dinner of roast beef and rice pud- ding On the first day home for the holidays they killed the fatted calf for him, with rice pudding.
Oddly enough, with advancing years, the sentimental religiosity of the dish began to ttract young George Mort Davis him- self There were times when he
elt homesick and he often
creen away
the morning and went off to the war to fight. The night,
be fore that there had been roast beef and rice pudding for dinner.
The Morts had always been Cavalry people, and there was a Davis or two in the War Office, so it wasn't long before young George Mort Davis got himself mentioned in despatches and col lected an M.C., a captaincy and a D.S.0 and finally carried in his Colonel, for whom he had fagged and at whose hands he had been given a very bad time at Eton, across several yards of mud with all the shells in the world explod ing about his ears. They gave him the V.C. and a fortnight's leave.
He liked the leave best. It was a long time since Captain Mort Davis, V.C., D.S.O., MC, had
wire and goi
to Boulogne pleased
home well
kept
night
It was a tackless ass of s marine Commander who got the ship and blew the whole contrap- tion with God knows how many souls aboard to blue blazes or the gates of Jericho. And in the basement of house in Hans- Place the o pok who had been
the Mort Davises longer than George Mort WAS DELL on the rice pudding. and Mr. Mort Davis had collected
By Anthony Gibbs
extra meat cards from a chap he knew in the Rations for the roast beef, and Frances Mort Davis was in Harrod's buying a box for the Gaiety.
Of course the dinner was put onto the table and the open car went off to Victoria Station and came back empty. Frances Mort Davis and Mort Davis gloomy dinner of roast rice pudding all
because they guessed we what had happened. And they knew that the only pleasant people to do w awfully brave about George's dinner on a hot for him, in case he came went to the theatre. The
it wasn't tilt about eleven o'clock when they got home that they read the telegram from the War Office saying that the whole transport had been blown sky high and that Captain Mort Davis, VC, D.S.O., M.C., was missing and presumed dead, and that the War Office was damned sorry about it, the telegram be
This will be the talk of the town
that
Davi
say would shake her from this intuitive conviction. So they form ed a new legend. It was more than a legend. It was a yearly act of faith. Every year on the
Mort Dx mer th
erfectly shoo
head sadly over the business watered the rice pudding with her salt tears. It was too terrible, too harrowing a thing to do. All the same they did it, every year, religiously, because Frances Mort Davis knew she knew, that her son was alive, that one of those
one word George
Mort Davis H Nish He knew He could give eight-pence penny change out of one and (Continued on Page 7)
and no wonder ! Any sale is an eve but when MAIZEE'S are having it's an
And
nobody
wants
ang style dist
date on your calendar and be there early!
MAIZEE'S
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