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
Georgina Grosheim, of course, tried to be funny and pretended that we
were a village inn: “Have no complaints. The cooking is all that can be
desired, the attendance excellent, and the management kind and
thoughtful. Shall come here instead of Margate next year.” That is just
on the opposite page to a very heavy quotation put in by Lady Pulbrooke:
“Philosophers are for ever asking what is the true basis on which the
welfare of a commonwealth depends. They fail in their search because
they do not look near enough. The welfare of a commonwealth depends upon
the qualities of its citizens, on kind hearts and honest faces.” I
suppose it must have been Juliet Savage who wrote “My dear Holmes! How
on earth....” at the tail of this quotation; she was always “ragging” my
Visitors’ Book. Then there is Lord Billericay in his sportive vein—it
must have cost the poor old gentleman a sleepless night, for humorous
verse was not his natural medium:
There was once a good fellow called Porstock,
Who had of misfortune a poor stock,
He’d an excellent life,
And a rattling good wife,
And a safe so full up that the door stuck.
It was a pity that Canon Dives should have been our next guest, but of
course he had to take his turn, in spite of a slight change of note: he
put in an extract from one of his own sermons: “Hospitality is enjoined
on us, as we know, in the Scriptures. We even read that through its
exercise some have entertained angels unawares; and though it is
probable that the word here translated ‘angels’ should be more correctly
rendered ‘messengers,’ the point of the aphorism is the same. Duty is,
however, a word which has tended to fall out of our modern vocabulary,
perhaps unfortunately, for after all the life which has no guiding
principle is a tedious and frequently an ineffective one. But, my dear
sisters and brothers, if we cannot cultivate hospitality as a duty, at
least let us cultivate it as an act of politeness, or shall we not
rather say, of friendship. After all, there is one hostelry which awaits
us all alike at the end of our long journey.” Juliet Savage, I see, has
appended the words “Dives, when you and I go down to Hell,” a quotation,
I think, from Belloc. And next to that is Blanche Engelheim’s charade:
My third is a wife makes her husband my first
And keeps him away from my second:
My whole is a town, though with Temperance cursed,
Where wives by the dozen are reckoned.
Then there is a characteristic scrawl: “Thank God, they taught me how to
write at school. Otherwise I should be in a hole. Tommy Lieberts.” But I
must not go on wearying my readers with all these trivialities. Let me
finish with Lord Hopedale’s quotation, some clever lines from
Mainwaring, a poet who was hardly known at the time when they were
copied in my Visitors’ Book.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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