10
DICK
And
ANNIE
M
·R. WILLIAM CAMERON clearly known... He is a young man of 32 who has Rone hungry in the East End of London, has experienced being Zurned out into the street with his family by the landlord, has seen the inside of a workhouse,
He has earned hit ilving in the fac tory, and as itinerant confurer and Hawker with a barrow, fo the street.
And so his first novel, "Common People" (Collancz, Bs. Bd.), is the real thing-n good story and a true picture.
Boy-merte-girl is very properly the core of the plot, Dick Hela of with Annle at the pictures. But the cause of their quarrel (which they make up in time to get married and live na diappily ever afterwards ጊዜ itte capitalist system will allow them to) could only arize in their own world: Dick gives away the thirty bob they have saved together towards their wedding to the mother of a former Aweetheart. Comie, to postpone the inevitable evletion of her family from their tenement home.
DICK and Annte belong to the com
paratively prosperous
working-
cla That is to my, they have fobs. But Connie's family İlves in the alums. Her mather buys her clothes second- hand in the street market. Her father
15
13 war-victim, shell-shocked and epileptic.
And Connie, doomed to die in hos- pital after her health has been ruined in the steamy heat of a tailoring sweat- shop, proves that plecework has its vie torien no less than war..
A grimiy struggling world is given colour by such characters ns Sol Kur- hansky, the dreamer of the tenement, stalwart Red fighter, who spends tils nights padding softly through the back streets carrying a bucket of red paint and daubing the walls with slogan warnings of the wrath to come.
THERE are funny characters, too-
the gas-man with his impudent Cockney Rumour, and Uncle Ike, the super-salesman of Petticoat-Inar.
The dramatic penk of this book is n vividly described eviction scene. These few pagca leap from Uig book like n cruci Tist aliaken in the face of a economic system.
But this novel is far from being perspiring protent. It is a book about people who are no real, so human, so pathetic and anising and attractive that the reader is concerned about their future and the kind of world they inhabiz.
And so it is the reader who supplies the Indignation Which seems to in dinate that Mr. Carneron in a clever novelist of whom we shall be hearing some more in the future.
W
HEN I was a lad I was taught to take my hat off to the girls. Why I should take off my hat to them I never inquired.
I just did it. I still do it—but this week I've been wondering why.
"It's so silly," said Harold, who is a foreman in a workshop 'and has forty girls in his charge. "*XI these girls really are the equals of us chapa why should we take off our bats to them and give up our scato in the tubes and pay for them at the pictures and so on?. There's no sense in it."
But are they our
I wondered. equals?
"In some things." nald Harold grimly. **they are. When it comes to swearing, Ior instance, they cer- tainly are." He looked round the shop with nome hostility. The Kiris sat at their
THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH,
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22. 1938.
THE GI
machines, singing away at the top of their voices. What they were singing I couldn't tell. Probably, said Harold, it was as well.
"The language these girls use." he said, "would make a Thames bargee blush with shame. I'vc worked in factories with men, but I've never heard anything like the stuff these girls come out with.
"Como ou," he said, "I'll show you round,"
What they were singing, at least on this occasion, was the latest dance tunes. An alternatives they eiggled, or exchanged views on the latest films. Some of them, un- doubtedly, were outspoken...
I
WENT, then, to the staff manager of a big West-End
Не Arm. didn't hear much bad language from his giris, he told me. But that, he added, might be because he could never tell more than half of what they said.
He introduced me to several of them and I soon saw what he meant. They either talked in clipped imitation American, or with
ultra-refained " vencer over their natural Cockney which was decidedly trying. Sometimes the American was in the ascendancy, sometimes the veneer.
And some of them were so at- tractive to look at that it didn't matter. There was one girl, Mabel -but that, of course, is beside the point.
Girls are like sheep," said the staff manager. "One day they're all one way, and another day just
GIRLS
the opposite. And talk about cats!" he said, My God! You've no idea of the sort of thing that goes on when you get a crowd of girls to- gether. Individually they have their points the closed one eye, gravely), but in crowds they're the absolute limit.
"They've no sand, that's the trouble. Superficial, that's what they are. from the tips of their painted toe-nails to the tops of their artificially waved heads of hair. The modern girl is skin deep."
But what a skin!—I thought as I took one last look at a roomful of them, bending over their type- writers.
It's the girls, a cinema manager told me, who keep the standard of flims so low. Only the sillest and sloppiest, films get the patronage of the girls, And the boys, of course, go where their girls want to be taken.
"There's not a decent flim that's
G.O.M. of
Romance
FOR reviewers this time of
the year is usually the empliest of the season. But
there's no need for nie to hunt desperately through my shelves this time, for the Grand Old Man of Historical Romance has .just written one of his most ex- citing tales for you-Königs-
BY ROGER
mark, by A. E. W. Mason by assassination, on the night of
(Hodder and Stoughton, îs, fd.). Seventy-three, and with more than forty years of authorship behind him, Mr. Mason aplendidly looks the part. Something of the aristocrat, Something of the sailor. Something of the sahib-with some of the sahib's limitations. But there is a sensitiveness about his work that would surprise you if you didn't know him.
He realises as well as any novelist of his generation that, in his own words, nothing in this world comes off absolutely." Life and cir- cumstance and chance have the Inst word.
•
*
*
You remember, for instance, Harry Feversham. In The Four Feathers (you'll soon be seeing it again at the cinema), 1o redeemed three of those foollah white sym- bols, but one man died before he could take back his charge of cowardice. His creator deliberately cheated Harry of that final feather. "Nothing in this world comes off absolutely. Nothing is perfect. ..." From which you will see that Künigemark was born to be one of Mr. Mason's heroes. A handsome. seventeenth-century soldier of ad- venture, nervously brave and flam- boyantly faithful, he wandered and fought across Europe, entered the service of the Elector of Han- over and met the lovely Sophia Dorothea, who, but for him, would have been an unhappy Queen of England.
Hopelessly in love with her, young Königsmark assisted her in one or two futile attempts to escape her destiny, was discovered. seized and, as the encyclopedias put it. disappeared from history, probably
July 1, 1004.
Still a good disciple of Dumas, Mr. Mason makes the man and his perlod live for you not so much in what he has written as in what he has suggested.
The story is alive with romantic, glowing scenes. A horseman rides through the night, a treason trial sets Stuart London agog, au am- bitious statesman feeds his greed, hate-and Königsmark is trapped a witch of a woman satiates her
and murdered in the darkness.
Such pictures will tease your mind's eye. But Mr. Mason's Inter- pretation of his hero will rouse your imagination. For the shadow of Harry Feversham, a sword and cloak Feversham. falls, in a sense. on Königsmark. ile also has a fear to overcome, a self-conscious- ness to challenge, a gel-esteem to satisfy.
And, again, nothing in this world comes off absolutely." Cer- tainly not for Künigsmarki
As for the writing, let the first paragraph suffice.
*
*
*
"Chancellor Schultz leaned com- fortably back in his cushioned chair and crossed his fat little legs. He laid his fat Intle hands alde by side and palms downwards on the big mahogany table in front of him. He slid them apart over the polished surface to the full reach of his arma.
Not a paper remained to re- proach him. It was half-past eleven by the gilded clock.against the wall. In a few minutes Duke George William, with his hunts- men and his dogs and his horas. would come clattering back from the moortalida.
"The day's work was over and,
PIPPETT
for Chancellor Schultz, his life's work, too. The tablets of his ser- vice were clean now, and he was picased to think that, though much written upon during twenty years, they had never been smudged."
Never was there quieter, more artfully staged opening to a tale of Intrigue, treachery, torture, horror
and too sudden death,
Which reminds me that I have a quarrel with the dust-cover of this book, depicting the stabbed and dying Königsmark pointing an accusing Anger at the hideous Clarn von Platen. The colours are extrembly pretty, and our hero looks as though he is about to faint. His clothes must have just come back from the cleaners, for they are spotless.
I looked in vain for a clot of red on the lace and the velvet. But Mr. Macon didn't forget the blood. He's too old a romantic hand for that!
No, Mr. Priestley!
AM not myself a regalar member of the J. D. Priestley congregation. but I fancy that even his staunchest followers will consider The Doomsday Men (Heinemann) a very poor seven- and-sixpenny worth.
It is like a soufflé,made with ont- mcal.
A crnak zelentist. n disillusioned business potentate and a religious fanatic, all brothers, build themselves
Tmntastic home in the middle of the Californian desert and plan. by Felentine means, to bring the world to an end one morning,
Improbable, but admissible for the purposes of story-telling. But I found Mr. Priestley's character so unreal. his technical devices so clumsy and his style so heavy that only a reviewer's unninching sense of duty kept me faithful to the end.
B. F.
No old argument on equality, this Just the thoughts of someone who in the past few weeks has had to meet lots of girls,
chy
FRANK TILSLEY
ever been made that hasn't been a failure," he said, "and they've been failures, because they've been a cut above the sily heads of the modern girls.
"The cinema industry is now de- liberately organised give the public what the shallow-minded modern girl wants to see. Do you wonder we rarely see alms really worth seeing? "
T
HAT gavo me an idea, and I called 'round on a poiltical organiser.
"Oirls know nothing about poli- Ucs," he said, "and don't want to know anything. Girls and women alike—they've not a scrap of poli- tical, responsibility.”
For all the good that their votes do, he told me, they might just as well not have them. If they're mar- ried, nine out of ten of them vote the same way as their husbands. It they're single, they vote the game
thelr fathers—when they take the trouble to vote at all. They've got no minds of their
own.
113
I thought it time the parents had their say; and called on a man I know who is a postman and the fathor of a very modern young miss of eighteen.
'I'm not going to talk about modern girls," he said, disgustedly -and talked about them, with two brief interruptions, for an hour and a half.
There appeared to be "no doing no good" with his own daughter. When Helen wasn't at the cinema
she was dancing, and when she wasn't dancing she was gadding about with fellows'on' motor-bikes. And she was always polishing her nails or titivating up her hair. And the money she wanted to spend on clothes! The thirty shillings a week she earned not only didn't keep her. It didn't cover what they had to spend on her.
"
"And on top of all that," said the mother, coming to the crux of the matter. when Eric wants to get engaged to her she turns him down -Eric, mark you; as nice a lad as you'd meet in a day's march."
“Yes,” said the father, "and him earning eight quid a week. Eight quid a week at his age! Why, if she'd marry him she'd never have to want for anything again as long as sho lives.
Д
L
ATER in the evening. In the garden, I got Helen on her own. She is trim, good-looking girl, with meticulously kept blonde hair, coloured ualls, and a miraculous capacity for looking expensively dressed.
"I suppose you're in love with somebody else? " I grinned.
"I'm in love with nobody," she aald, tossing her head, pertly, “but- I don't see why I should marry a man who irritates me just to make sure of an income of eight pounds a week,"
»
You don't?” I said.
"No," she replied, "I don't. And that's all there is to it. do good night."
"Good night," I sald, and took off my hat. I took it off and meant t
ROMANTIC TANTALLON
BLUE day at sen, the waters charged with the electricity of a mirroring the sky
Gulls
tiny white clouds drifted on scorte moving waves, above, calling loudly.
like near-hand thunderstorm.
the
Inside the castle the
stairways
or wheeled grew darker than ever, and full of
tragic
mystery. while sinister
The sea was so calm that, as the shadows seemed to creep here and birds flew above it, their reflections there, and vanish away again, It up the azure water, as with the The stairs down to the dungeons, incandescence of passing white which were lit by two paraffia lamps,
Wred peopled with a processioni
flames...
THE
BURNS PHILP LINE
Passenger & Freight Service. To
AUSTRALIA
at
M.V..
"NEPTUNA"
due WEDNESDAY, 28th SEPT.
sailing
MIDNIGHT. SATURDAY,
1st OCT.
For
SAIGON, MADANG, SALAMAUAJ RABAUL,' SYDNEY AND
· MELBOURNE,
Excellent passenger accommodation, with a large number of single cabins
no supplement. Built-in Swimming Bath and Spacious Sports Dock.
First Class to Sydney:
Single-£47.10.0d.' Return-£76.0.0d.
Passenger & Freight Agents-
Gibb, LIVINGSTON & CO., LTD.
Tel. 28031
P. G.O. Bldg.
SWEDISH EAST ASIATIC
SERVICE OF FAST MOTOR VESSELS
(with limited, but exceptionally good passenger accommodation) TO PORT SUDAN, PORT SAID, ALGIEKS, ORAN, CASABLANCA, ANTWERP, ROTTERDAM, (AMSTERDAM), HAMBURG, COPENHAGEN, OSLO, GOTHENBURG and other SCANDINA- VIAN PORTS. HOMEWARDS:
M.V. "NAGARA"
M.V. "SHANTUNG”
OUTWARDS to: Yokohams, Koba & Osaka,
NLV. "TAMARA” MV. “PEIFING"
Passenger Rates:
To London or' Antwerp
Hongkong. GILMAN & CO., LTD.
Phone: 80966.
Agents:
Canton
Salling about
29th Sept.
29th Oct.
13th Oct
13th Nov.
£53.0.0,
G. E. HUYGEN. Phone: 11405.
OUR BRITISH CROSSWORDS
28
ACROSS
Is of course this to be this (3).
8 The remains of Sunday's Joint
1 Many ladies consider that to this a horse gives them this (0).
12
5 The sort of vessel to "uit" a
mun? (0).
An ineffable peace seemed hover- of prisoners descending into the ing over the ruins of the old castle depths below; one could almost feet of Tantallon where' sca pinks the air heavy with their hot breath- flowered in
ous ings. profusion on precarious chiffs, while crowsfout and other tiny The wind sighed through the gun- sweet-scented plants drifted their holes and screamed past the win- vell of many colours across the hard dows, as suddenly the storm broke, face of the rocks, they passed like in a terrific crash of thunder, which an echo of many long forgotten ro- rolled like the sound of a cannon mances, which had been passionately through the ruined buliding: fight- lived there, even amidst the warning followed, darting in and out, like influence of the ancient keep. revealing hidden corners which ap- As I passed through Into the peared full of struggling combatants. And then the cinsh of steel, and building which has been so wonder- fully restored of late years, the at- bayonet seemed to join in, and re- mosphere of the past enfolded me as sound everywhere: shrieks arose, as with a mantle; I was no longer my- the battle cry of the Douglases rang self, but back in the olden times, out, amidst a deafening roar of can-
16 A shade till the whole place seethed breathing in the spirit of a hundred non.
with a multitude of opposing forces. Douglas feuds..
•
Climbing the dark, twisting stone stuirs, I came out to a higher view
the
*
thunder-
Out and out or in though (3). 10 Was red the favourite colour of
this old master? (0).
11 Distinctly nasty but useful (8)..
13 Summons that seems ungallont
(0).
14 Part of one down (3).
(0)
of meaning perhaps
10 Boys are never christened with
this Biblical nome (7). 20 Try ale" (anag.) (0). 21 Sull 26 No weakling he (0). 27 Part of your car (8). 20 This geographical feature is ob
viously not sea (0),
20 Giving away money and ending
in debt (8).
end (0).
parently (8).
For long It continued, t it al- of the wonderful scene stretching most seemed as if the ancient walls and crumble must break through below, with its heaving tide, which into atoms; and then, as suddenly had now begun slowly but steadily
the It had arisen, 03 to pour In, with a deep warning note storm lessened,
atmosphere in its voice.
lightened, and only in the sea was The
rugged stone
windows ap- upheaval visible, where to gray pealed strangely to me. I felt the waters still bolled and surged and 30 Girl who can never start being presence of other faces, who in by hlased round the foot of the Castle: gone ages had looked out from them hungry. angry waters that drove 81 Not quite in a rare fashion up- also, with the same hopes, the same against the rocks, with the gathered stirrings,
sama restlessness; un congested fury, os it were, of all CASIO while just two miles out sea was the past centuries. the Bass Rock, like a faithful com-
Yel, as I looked down, I could see panion which had stood the strong test of a long friendship, giving now in one of the gunholes of the Mid a peculiar feeling of protection to petrol peeping out, like a dove of Tower the white head of a fulmor the ancient ruin.
which had found sanctuary I found it all a place full of oven in the midst
peace
of the warlike dreams; but as time forgotten. turmoil, while the sea boomed on, wandered on, spattering shower of It wild volce echoing through the rain began to fall, grey clouds scur- lonely stronghold. Fried cross, while the sky" became.
Count the "TELEGRAPHS” everywhere
Edlik A. Vancle
1
DOWN
1 This branch of science causes
sunburn in the ind (6).
2 An old military, ude in Japan
(0).
3 Mediterranean island (6).
4 A bit of AR.P. work perhaps,
8 Epithet for accounts of much
interest (8).
y “Get thing" (anag). (6).
A little walk to show a relative
(7).
15 Not this but a definite part of
16
I down (3).'
Negative form of 15 down (3). 17 Docs this on cheques make
them
go from bank to back?
(8).
18 À tree valued for its decorative
Rower (8).
19 A man of law (8).
22 This acid is an astringent (0), 23 Strength (0)17.)
24 This condict is quite common
In the end (8)..
25 Unstrady (a rum affair?) (6).
YESTERDAY'S SOLUTION BOOKMAKER FATE B
RMYHOMEOOBE
OVERRATED IN AP ORG INNE MOTHEATEN TEA
[BUMBA [NOKNⱭ
GAB CEO]
LEHAB
簇
તો, તમન
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