City and Suburban
By JOHN
BETJEMAN
MY wife went recently to give a lantern lecture in what she thought was a church hall. She Went to the church and there was no church hall. She asked someone, who said it was half a mile away. She found it, and there was a youth club in progress. The youths said her lecture was Probably at the vicarage. She returned there and rang the bell four times at three different doors. No answer. She returned to the church hall and a Youth said it might be at the Mission House. He took her to the house of the secretary to find out. It was at the Mission House. She was forty minutes late. Her petrol gauge was down to nought. The slides were not in order and a row of nuns and twenty very, gloomy people were Waiting in silence. She said, 'Do please make brilliant conversation for ten minutes while I sort my slides.' Someone replied, `We have, for the past forty minutes, and have no more to say.' All the time she was lecturing she wondered whether a garage would be open.
BROTHER When will the medical profession invent a suitable name for the honourable profession of male nurse? The word 'nurse' is inevitably associated with a white cap and starched cuffs, Yet in the men's wards of lunatic asylums and in a good deal of hospital work, a male nursing staff is indispensable. And when a male nurse is fully qualified, does the doctor call him 'sister'? I should have thought `brother' was a perfectly natural term for him. Hospitals originated with monks as well as nuns and the word 'sister' for a nurse obviously comes from the religious life, as should the word 'brother' for a male nurse.
COUNTRY PLEASURES One of the August pleasures I found in Lon- 'inn is the 5 p.m. from Marylebone to Wood- ford and Hinton. After Amersham the crowds leave the train, and at Stoke Mandeville there are actually oil lights on the platform above the red, white and blue nameplate of the LPTB. After Aylesbury real country begins among the elmY hills and broad valleys of North Bucks, Past the grass-grown track of the Brill tramway and weedy platforms of that forgotten Metro- Politan Railway extension to Verney Junction. Tile huge and splendid lettering of the Great Central Railway begins at Calvert. From now on each station in the misty summer fields has its garden of hollyhocks, candytuft, geranium, lobelia and snapdragon. Vicars wait for wives and sisters on platforms, and in the silence of Brackley Central Station I saw a pond of water- lilies with goldfish in it, screening the entrance to the Gents. An hour in the golden-brown stone streets of Brackley and you can return by a semi- express with a dining car to the echoing quiet of Marylebone.
`WHITHER DEFICITS?'
Certain turns of phrase seem to be the per- quisites of certain professions. Political writers like `Whither?' Towards' and 'After—e.g., Whither Bulgaria?; Towards Asian Unity; After Covent Garden. An alternative title to this is Covent Garden—a Retrospect. Economists like very dull titles, such as 'The problem of Deficits,' `The relation of Credits,' A study in Experiment,' with a sub-title to say what it is about. And a favourite word among clergymen is 'challenge' —the Challenge of the Cross; the Challenge of Basutoland; the Challenge of the Slums; the Lay- man's Challenge; and Lord David Cecil told me that he once saw on a college notice board that an undergraduate was going to read a paper to some Christian group called 'The Challenge of the Under-dog.'
Someone I met travelled in the underground with a party of Americans from Tower Hill to Charing Cross. The guide called out the names of the stations, `Monument,' Mansion House,' `Temple,' and the Americans ticked them off as `done' as they passed underneath.
The owner of 14 Keats Grove, Hampstead, informs us, that contrary to what Mr. John Betjeman wrote last week, he had not felled a fine, or any other, plane tree on his property. Two years ago he felled two straggly limes. Nor does he intend to lop the remaining two fine plane trees in his front garden. He has merely asked the LCC to advise whether they should be slightly pruned. We apologise to the owner for any inconvenience he may have been caused.
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