Village Social Events Nostalgic indeed! I have attended two functions
during the past week that have brought a lump to my throat, because of their reminder of les neiges d'antan. I went one afternoon to talk to a Women's Institute party in the garden of a fine old house in a neighbouring village. There they were, the same mingling of rural classes. But the " working " women were better dressed, and the " leisured " ladies somewhat more roughened about the hands, than in the days of the incomparable Mrs. Earle, who wrote of these functions at the turn of the century. The rain poured down and the sun streamed out over the lawns and herbaceous borders, while tea and cakes were served and we all moved about, chatting. Time stood still as it used to stand in childhood, and the scent of roses and honeysuckle and hay rose like invisible sculpture in the air, a monument to the platonic idea of summer ; a summer of the mind that never comes to an end. I noticed, too, that conversation was beginning to drop away from the larger issues of life ; the terrors, storms, politics which have consumed our social moments for so many years past. The small matters of privacy and local concern have begun to spring again, like wild flowers on fields ravaged by battle.
Later in the week I went to Speech Day at the grammar school. The old smell of the cricket-field took me, and set me out of normal time. I hovered between Then and Now, while I watched the march-past of the school cadets, and listened to the same old platitudes of the visiting colonel exhorting the boys to keep their equipment polished for the good of their characters, and to look with diminishing degrees of pride first at themselves as Englishmen, then at Colonials, and possibly also at the foreigner. I saw on the faces of some of the parents a stare of astonishment, as though a ghost from a Kipling-haunted past had brushed against them on that shining green field. .One of them winked at me, and in response I felt a corner of my lip tremble. The Tennysonian scene earlier in the week, and now this one, gave me the illusion for a few sun-struck seconds that the fabric of Edwardian England was still uncracked, and that the squire's lady would shortly arrive in her brougham to shake the hands of the headmaster and the visitors, and to preside over tea on the school-house lawns.
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