Memories of the future : $b Being memoirs of the years 1915‒1972, written in the year of grace 1988Knox, Ronald Arbuthnott
History
Memories of the future : $b Being memoirs of the years 1915‒1972, written in the year of grace 1988
Knox, Ronald Arbuthnott
English fiction -- 20th century; Satire, English; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
But I have not yet taken you to the very hearth and centre of the whole
establishment, the nursery, I mean, and the nursery passage. Take my
hand, and let me pilot you carefully, for our way lies up the back
stairs, which are full of perils. That door we pass is the one room in
the house which children are not allowed to enter: that click-clicking
noise you hear is Daddy playing billiards, all in a great room that is
used for no other purpose. In front of us lies the linen cupboard, where
there is a bogy who jumps out if you do not run past it quickly. And
here (be careful!) the stairs are at their narrowest just where you can
reach the friendly aid of the banisters. Now, open the swing-door, and
there is the nursery passage in front of you! I would explain to you the
use of that “pogo-stick” in the corner if you were not already tired of
my _fin de siècle_ reminiscences.... Yes, that is a model of a Handley
Page, only it does not work now, and the split-nosed, pasty-faced pilot
sits there and will ever sit, looking a fool, in enforced inaction. The
badger in the glass case was caught on these grounds—a badger! You would
be no less incredulous if I had called it a hyena. That chart on the
wall was a picture of the “Western Front” in 1916—come away, you cannot
recapture the thrill of those old battles.... And here we are at the
nursery door itself.
Yes, that is my dolls’ house. No, there is no bath-room, no garage, no
electric light laid on. The front wall, I am sorry to say, opens all in
one piece, so that you cannot pay a call without discovering Esmeralda,
if luck will so have it, at her toilet upstairs. There is no lift, and
the staircase does not really pierce through the ground floor ceiling.
And yet, I do not fancy that I was very much less happy, or very much
less proud, when I showed off this thin-walled, vermilion-bricked affair
to my aunts than my friends can be when I inspect their more elaborate
and more realistic dolls’ flats. It is the spirit, after all, not the
apparatus that matters. And that is my toy train, running round the
ottoman. I do not know that its cardboard passengers wave their
cardboard hats any the less enthusiastically because it is only common
electricity, of an inferior voltage, that drives it round those
terrifying loops. That is a “Teddy” bear, named after a once great
predecessor of President O’Shaugnessy. But enough! I would not have
brought you to see my toys, so sacred are they, if I had known you would
curl your lip so disdainfully. Let me fish for a moment under the seat,
and bring out something that will make your mouth water and leave you
envious—yes, here it is ... the stamp album!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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