1947-04-02 — Page 2

THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2,`` 1947.

At 2.30, 5.15,

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THE AMAZING STORY OF ARNHEM!

"THEIRS IS THE GLORY"

Distributed by EAGLE-LION-

COMMENCING FRIDAY, APRIL 4TH

(COLE NA PICTURES presveča

CORNEL WILDE in

The BANDIT of SHERWOOD FOREST

TECHNICOLOR

Jame my

The B.M.A. holds a private general election and proclaims itself elected by an overwhelming. majority. It sends for itself to form a new govern-

ment and declares The Affice loT null and void.

OLD LOW'S ALMANACK

renupright in Alt Countr

B and M. Democracy sure cure for

PROPHECIES FOR 1947

Sitting on the

TUIS is the first staggered

column in the history of columns.

The history of columns goes back a long way, the first in Britain being the Doomsday Book.

That was written, I shouldn't. wonder, by gloomy; bald types hired at about fourpence a year by William the Conqueror, who couldn't be bothered with such nonsense; and probably couldn't spell his Norman French either. Must successful men can't spell.

Fence

by NATHANIEL

GUBBINS

Within a few minutes' your hands are too. cold even to cross out the give up till the next switch on. sentence you have written, and you

But, although the monetary re- As you haven't got years and years word of the despised creatures was to do your stuff, like the pampered small, and although William pra old egg heads in the lovely warm bably topped their ears off if he castles, you have to be pretty smart didn't like their stuff, they wrote at your work when the heat's turned their pleces in preaurly heated on again. casties and were properly fed, wailing their boars' heads and legs of beef, below the salt, maybe, but sell wolfing.

This column is also written by a gloomy, but lype in a room that is sometimes heated and sometimes not heated, according to the times when the electric current is switched on

-or-oll

The columnist's money more than fourpence a year, but not anuch more when Mr Bloodsucker, the in- come tax collector, has taken his whack, and his ears are safe,

Apart from that, hip has no ad- vantages over William's boys, as you shall see If you are still awake.

Switch on

Rel WHEN the current is on, you

yourself nice and warm and are Just boiling up to write a sentence when the current goes off and you feet like une of those people who get shut up in refrigerators.

Rupert & the New Pal-19

Next morning Rupert tells his mother what has happened, "Oh, dear," she says, "do be careful: Bilt and the black cat are mix chievous animals." She makes up big packet of sandwiches and oil he trote

Soon he reaches St. Wilfrid's, and sure enough there is hole in the hedge. Bill Badger is already there. "I don't know where the cat is. Let's go, an through, crics Bill. Surely we can't go into people's gardens that way." says Rupert doubtfully. "What would they think?'

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED,

Yes, sir. Pretty smart.

No time for elegant prose. No

time for the art that conceals art. No time for the skilfully turned sen- tence that rings sweetly in the car of the appreciative reader.

No time for contriving the sudden surprise that knocks the render at. Ne-time-for-the-laborigus-compo}~ tion which reads so easily that the reader wonders why he didn't write U himself.

In fact, no time to finish, this. Here it comes. The cold. Hours of the colt.

Switch off ·

"There be triple ways to take with the caple and the snake

"And the way of a man with a meid,

"But the sweetest way to me is a ship's upon the sea

in the heel of a north-east trade,"

I tried going to the low tavern and qui so an tred I slept all the rest of the day.

Switch on

HERE it comes. The lovely heat HER

again. But only two hours of it. I shall have to be quick.

Two hours would be quite a long fine if you started warm, William the Conqueror's egg heads would probably have written a whole sen- tence in that time. But it takes you

an hour to warm up, leaving one hour,

One hour would be useful if you

had been warm all day, with your mind ticking over ready to start with -stop-watch on your desk Not that you would need a stop-watch these days.

But cold freezes the mind as well as the body. No wonder they sent elever

with people

dangerous thoughts to Siberia. Siberia would stop you thinking about anything bul, hot roup,

And of all things here comes the hot soup. And there It goes all over the newspaper I was trying to read. Of course, your tiny hands were frozen, but

business is business. Dammit all, I was reading about cheese. And you know how funny cheese is. In England, anyway. I

31 ranks next to sausages for a laugh. It was a debate in the House 053

of Commons. Some poor devil was.

เยร asking Dr Edith Summerskill, Food Minister's right-hand austerity giri.

if, after seven or eight long years, he could have a bit of English Stilton cheese or a bit of Double Gloucester, Instead of the imported lumps of soap they call cheese In foreign parts.

And what did she say? I don't know,

The soup's all over her But I expect it was some nanny-ish remark like "Imported soop is good for you.”

KIPLING wrote that. It probably took him a week to get it right, olther in the summer scribbling in his garden, or in the winter lo front of a blazing fire. Poets don't write in freezing garrets, though smug sentimentalists like to think they do. T have quoted this because it is easier to quote from memory than in fact, to write when you are cold. I thought of doing a Denu Inge on you and filing the entire column' answer. with quotations linked together with the odd sentence here and there.

Heaven knows we need a few laughs

T

By JOHN MACADAM URNING/our, frostbitten foot from the "sparkling' pavements of the West End the other night to seek some alleviation of the horrors of peace, we entered the dressing room of that exquisite droll Bud Flanagan, with a vague idea that here would be a comic onsis, in the ceonomic, descrt.

One light glowered pallidly from a bracket and from the backmost gloom Flanagan said: "Be sure your Shinwell: find you out."

It should be said that almost immediately he left for the south of France, but we take the trouble to quote this quote of a painful pun merely to put on record the fact that it is the only known joke that has come out of the present crisis.

Our observation is that the sense of humour, that carried the British through World War I through the transition to and through World War II, and appeared to be standing up strongly to the facts of demobiluation and rehabilitation, has now given up the ghost.

World

f produced Bairnsfather to record auch orld War deflast Jokes as the Better Ole, but the great point about Balrhsfather was, that he was not one wit in a sen of dullness; he was a wit echoing 100,000 wits. The Jokes passed from man to man and trench to trench, in defiance of boredom, danger and death itself. Bairns father minortalised,

His spirit ran through the years of preparation for the past war, and the people fortified themselves with it. It lusted right up to the beginning of the war, when i misguided wag thought of hanging up his washing on the Siegfried Line. It showed itself in u new slang which sharpened, the quality of Its wit on its disregard of danger.

Mr Bloodsucker, the income-tax collector, flying to the Orkneys to arrest, his victims and lock them up in the local cooler.

Oh, zealous, indefatigable Mr B. When are you going to hunt us with horses and hounds?

GERMAN

Switch off

soldiers stationed Northern Norway during winter months went mad one

one.

Deadly Jobs--there was no future in them anything you hadn't got couldn't or wouldn't get you'd had it; attacks on enemy shipping were slipping strikes. The spirit. there and the wit to match it.

Was

Hurd-bitten Army men kniffed at the R.A.F. Brylcreem Boys. Pesti- ferated civilians,` carrying as much of a burden on any of them; rubbed the debris out of their eyes, smiled and hummed "When the lights go un again"

F

I was all good humoured, because It wasn't in their nature to be

anything else. It was even good huntoured when a grateful country hung

sacklike demob. sulls on their In shoulders and green pork ple hata on their heads. They joked about using the hat for keeping flowers In and the suit for scaring blackbirds off the beans.

the by

Gloomy Swedes living in the re- mole country districts where they are snowed up for weeks on end fill themselves with Swedish punch and attuck their families with axes.

on the

Everybody knows that the Russian moujik used to keep himself warm

to death beating his wife- frozen steppes.

What will an Englishman do if our winters

get

Folder and colder threatened?

as

certainly won't go med foreigners go mad. He won't oven lose 1 his temper unless sumebody oes too far, when he will become

more ferocious than them all.

He won't attack his family with an axe. You just don't do that sort of thing. He will refuse to bent his wife, even if she asks him to do it to keep

her warm. "think he will refise to cumjo- mise with the weather.

The colder the

more stubborn he will become about winters get, the stan-heating. The thing's so dam- nerf unheallizy, anyway.

So I think you will find him irazı t before an capty fireplace, look- ng blue and lean but undefeated.

and

Then they were all at peace again, they grinned their way through the first difficult months of transi- tion....They took the No Beer and the No Cigarettes signs with - as much cheerfulness as they had left

over.

But the spontaneity began to go out of it. The smile didn't flicker so quickly, The jokes on politicians' ncrld names began to take on an flavour,

NOW, it is our observation that calamity after calamity and the feeling that there are more round

the. the corner has dulled

ly edge. Beaten about the lead bomba, danmed with faint rations for years, frozen, blacked out and bowildered, the Brion would appear to have had a lot of the resiliency knocked out of him,

In pube clubs and queues he no longer laughs it off. If there Is a smile is a way smile, as though every silver lining had a cloud.

But maybe it will all come back arali with a blink of sunshine, Maybe.

BY THE WAY

by Beachcomber

or

a

DR. STRABISMUS (Whom out, Homem for the God Preserve) of Utrecht electronic brain, and it reminds me making an attempt to reach the sweater, which could be worn the has announced his intention of of the Strablamus method of knitting

spaghetti into

close-meshed moon in a stratosphatic rocket- eaten or used to stuff trumpels with.

tissole, the Italian to whom

the ship.

sung "Rissole Mio" was dedicated, Preparations have been made in and who invented rissoles, had great secrecy at Waggling Parvo, way of tossing a pancake until it where the enormous rocket 19

the disappeared, which he called already in position, clamped between Indian pancake trick. When gramo- two hellonie struts, and bullt into a phones were invented; he used to concrete, base. The rocket works

gather his friends round, put on the pressure

and is principic,

pancake on the machine Instead of propelled by

enery a disc, and then laugh to see them a forward nozzle made generated in

mown down by bits of pancake. of plutonium. The backward drive of the radio-active force encased in Non-stop radio the central chamber is sufficient to expel the gases, which set up con-

The eternal nanny in all women comes out if you give them the sligh test authority. Their ideal world is a vast nursery with everybody under proper control.

everybody

own

It also suggested to me that there he triple ways for n columnist to take during the switch off.

He can go to bed. He can go for n walk. He can go and drown him- · control, everybody reversing the force of gravity and

} self.

No he can't. solid ice.

up

tinuous explosions in the tall, thus THE B.B.C. Fourth Programme, to the pull of the earth's surface, and enabling the two dynamos in sicel cylinders to replenish the nucleus as fast as they are used up. There the matter rests at present, Haute Cuisine

the The village pond # face, and everybody doing things,

But he can go to the low tavern and drown himself, another way.

to bed early with clean hands and don't want to do because It's or them, and nanny says EO,

mean nice

women, of course.

nights who don't care if you

FAL

pol

That is if he is not a strong-minded Not your nibberty-gibberty fly-by- columnist

I tried going to bed. But I got soned cheese so long as..... tired of dressing and undressing.

.

Oh, lordy, lordy. Here comes the

I tried going for a walk, but I got cold again. Just when I was reading tired of the northeast trade.

an excruciatingly funny thing about

-NANCY · Let the Birds. Beware

THIN

ICE

THIN ICE

1

an

READ of "a machine which will

process row liver into appetising savoury in less than three minules, without cooking.". This

By Ernie Bushmiller

ICE

JANIC.

ISHMILLE)

beslaried 'shortly, will be con- tinuous; It will start on a given date, at a given hour, and will then pro- cred without pause, Interval; or surcense for three months, day and night.. At the end, of that time corps of expert listeners will say, whether they think the pubile have End

enough of it or not. It is thought that Fifth Programme, Lasting, for two years without n break, may be needed to complete the work of battering the public into. a state of complete exhaustion.

When You Feel Tired. and Restless

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