THE PLEASURES OF SKATING.
CE strong enough to bear any one but the furtive urchin who in a dash across the frozen pond takes his chance of a ducking is so rare in England that its arrival always signalizes a certain break-up of routine. Men who have not missed a day at their work for years except at their regular holiday times searoh out their skates and play truant. Men and women who have almost come to believe themselves held in the grip of chronic ill- nesses venture on the ice and find themselves, somehow without surprise, when hunger has supervened, sitting on a bank of snow eating sandwiches. People who have not felt warm for weeks melt under the genial exercise and discard their greatcoats as though the north-easter were the gentlest zephyr. At night people who are customarily torpid and immobile after dinner continuo the sport with lanterns—anti-Zeppelin rules permitting. The oldest play hockey with the youngest, and fall with loss injury than might have been expected. To-day the ice is here, to-morrow it may be gone ; carpe diem ; the opportunities of skating are a lawful incursion upon the too measured habits of our life. Even for schools skating means afternoons of special licence. If the ice were always here, we should think nothing of it ; but as it is hardly ever here, we think everything of it. And there are grown men now present in England who have never before looked upon frozen sheets of water. Thousands of Australian and New Zealand soldiers for the first time walk, slide, or skate upon ice. True, strong ice may be found in the mountains in both Australia and New Zealand. and oven below the mountains in the South of New Zealand ; but after all it is seen by comparatively few. It must have been sheer enjoyment of paradox which induced the late Mr. Arnold-Forster in one of his books to show an Australian postman making his rounds on ski among the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.
The rarity of good ice for skating was probably the cause of the high tension with which ingenious English brains applied themselves in the " sixties " of last century to think out the science of skating turns. Up to that time figure-skating consisted of the simple outside and inside edges and a " 3 " turn. Then Mr. Vandervell and Mr. Witham (whose book, though it is out of date, is still treasured like an early version of the Bible by middle-aged figure-skaters) thought out a whole series of new turns. They invented the rocking turn and the bracket; and skated the former in defiance of doubting friends who said that a turn from an outside edge forwards to an outside edge backwards, or vice versd, in a single movement violated the laws of gravity and could not be done. Since those days the rocking turn has come to be known as the rocker, and is skated on all edges, and 'another turn from an outside (or inside) edge forwards to an outside (or inside) edge backwards, or rice verse, is known as a counter, being dis- tinguished from a rocker through the revolution of the body at the turn being made in the opposite direction. Combinations of " 3 " turns, of rockers, counters, and brackets, within a few years of the beginnings of Vandorvell and Witham's experiments, led to the development of the English system of figure-skating, which for its proper enjoyment and expression must bi skated in sets by two or more persons. English figure-skaters will always associate the name of Monier-Williams with that development. An orange placed on tho ice as the point of departure and return for each figure is the traditional emblem of the English figure-skater. If the person who calls the figures to be skated is a practised caller, so that each fresh movement dovetails into the last, and the skaters are skilful enough to time their movements in unison, nothing is prettier than a set of figures in the English style. And nothing is more gracefully thrilling—or more baffling to the uninitiated—than to see six or eight persons swooping in upon the centre at high speed apparently about to crash into one another and form a struggling heap, but really to swerve off simultaneously on a different edge at the critical moment and scatter centrifugally in a fresh movement. It has been said, and the writer has found it true, that a rocker at speed where the edges are held clearly is one of the supreme pleasures of human movement. Possibly flying has changed our available standards. But even that is doubtful, for a man flies not with his own body but inside a machine. A friend once said to the writer that the three greatest delights in the world of sport wore a good smack to square leg, a fast rocker, and the first rush of a hooked salmon. If he had been a rider, he would have added the first jump with hounds running.
A remarkable fact which is worth remembering historically is that Englishmen, for all their very slender opportunities, led the world in figure-skating. What was once known as the Continental style, and is now known as the International style, grew out of the English style. It was the English experimenters who taught the Continental skaters what turns were possible. No sooner had the Continental skaters mastered the hitherto unsuspected possibilities of fresh turns than they began to embody them in their own style of skating. The differences of style between the English and the International methods are very striking to the eye. It has been said that the effect of the International style is to make an easy thing look difficult, and that of the English style to make a difficult thing look easy. That was said, no doubt, by a practitioner of the English style. The Internationalist calls the English style (which requires the body to be held erect and impassive) stiff, whereas the English skater might call the International style, with its wriggling% postures, and throwings-about of the body, showy and tricky. At one time there was jealousy, some derision, and a good deal of misunderstanding between the two schools. To-day there is mutual respect, though it would be impossible to expect that there should ever be absolute agreement or sympathy. The writer has been accustomed to skate in the English style, and frankly writes therefore with what may be thought to be the prejudices of his education. He thinks that for a sense of power there is nothing like bold skating in the English style, and that to mistake erectness and composure for stiffness is to fail in the essential points of appreciation. After all, let it be repeated, English skaters led the way, and it was these inventors who deliberately chose the style we call our own as the beat style. Some very proficient skaters in the English style have changed to the other style in order to enjoy its more nimble and various movements, but there is no recorded case of an International skater becoming a really first-class performer in the English style. Curiously enough, though the artificial rinks of thirty or more years ago at Southport, Brighton, and elsewhere encouraged the English style, the rinks of to-day do not do so. They tend to • obscure it, for the fact is that there is not enough room for big skating or skating seta in the English style, and most figure-skaters take to valsing, and to the smaller International figures and the numerous one-footed movements in that style.
' Not since 1895 has there been a good spell of skating on open ice. Here's to every one who reasonably can, making the most of it ! The middle-aged figure-skater may go warily, and feel that falls hurt more than they used to do, but at least he learnt his turns in the golden days of the " seventies " and early " eighties " ; and he looks with a kind of superior wonder on boys of twenty who have never learned to skate at all. Yet there are tragedies even among those whose age may have placed them in the accomplished class. For example, a member of a well-known English skating club has had his Mother-Williams blades affixed to a special pair of boots for :thirty years, and for the last twenty has hardly used them at all. A fortnight ago his servant drew his attention to these wasted boots, impressing upon him the advisability of economy when new boots are expensive. Accordingly the beautifully fitted blades wore removed. The act of desecration was the signal for the barometer to rise, for the wind to veer into the freezing quarter, and for a black frost such as we have not known for twenty-two years— but enough
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