A Small Part of Myself
DEAR TOOTH,
Your active career has just been abruptly terminated by a piece of toast. I cannot allow the melancholy occasion to pass without expressing my appreciation of the loyal service which you have rendered me for the best part of half a century.
Your position on the extreme right of the line gave you no doubt a certain pre-eminence among your fellow-teeth, but it meant that I saw very little of you, for I am a busy man and cannot afford to spend much time in contemplation of my remoter molars. I was, I confess, shocked to see the condition to which you had been reduced by your long tour of duty.
I was aware that you had been badly knocked about in the course of your service. On the rare occasions when I gave them the chance to do so dentists carried out extensive excavations in your. superstructure, filling them up with lumps of some cement-type substance which eventually fell out. In the end you were converted into a sort of crater, and as time went by the sides of this crater flaked away. For the last two or three years you have been reduced to a single sharp pinnacle.
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For reasons which I forget but which I suspect to have been insufficient, your comrade, No. 2 in the rear rank, was removed at the end of the war by a Punjabi dental surgeon, a man of immense physical strength. The isolation in which you thus found yourself was enhanced when your pristine bulk was diminished to a slender fang. On my tongue this tapering protuberance produced an impression of savage majesty, and I thought of you, when I thought of you at all, as resembling one of those sheer, lonely, jutting rocks to which reference is often made in the shipping forecast.
But when we tackled that piece of toast at breakfast and you broke off, I was surprised and disturbed to see that you were quite small, rather wizened and coated on the outside with what appears to be tar but I suppose is nicotine. You do not look like a tooth at all. Had I not known that until an hour ago you had for nearly fifty years formed part of a perfectly reputable human being I would never have guessed it. I should probably have put you down as a fragment of a meteorite, or one of the symptoms of some obscure arboreal disease.
It is not, I hope, an unmanly emotion which steals over me as I contemplate you now. We have after all been through a great deal together. ) In the very early days, I seem to remember, there used to be a certain amount of va-et-vient among one's teeth. But I do not think that you and your fellow-stalwarts at the back took part in this; when you came, my impression is, you came to stay. There was nothing fly-by-night about you. One of those which did fly by night disappeared, It had been there when I was put to bed; in the morning it had vanished without trace, and I Was adjudged to have swallowed it. My nanny, steeped in peasant lore, told me gaily that a child wit° swallowed its own tooth grew a hound's tooth in its place; and for several anxious days and nights:- thereafter I awaited with trepidation the nlY pearance of this distinctive addition to nil features.
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Although now you bear the marks of sufferini and ill usage, I like to think that you and your colleagues benefited from my adoption of the slogan 'Every Man his' own Dentist!' This alal sound over-ambitious and unpractical, but all involved was simply never going to the dentist This policy proved economical and seems to have worked reasonably well. We have nevertheless been to a variety nil dentists in our time. Perhaps you remember tlheat better than I do? I can recall only two at ail clearly. One was Mr. Herne, in Stratford Mice, to whom we were always taken on the first daY d the holidays; he inflicted excruciating pain, talking knowledgeably about deer-stalking the while. Tilt other was a German dentiSt in Peking, through' out whose ministrations soft gramophone played while by an ingenious device an endless' sequence of coloured patterns were projected (41 to the ceiling above the patient's head. I have never understood why his example has not been f°1' lowed by the whole profession. Perhaps it has
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We have come now, my poor tooth, to the Pal+ ing of the ways. A few centuries ago, had I been a saint, you would have ' been assured of an honourable career as a relic. As it is, I barb know how to dispose of you without seeming flint-hearted. The only precedent I can conjure up is that of Sir Osbert Sitwell, who in the Twenties Was engaged with certain others in a mild persecuti° of Wyndham Lewis; it was felt that he took 110'1 self too seriously. Their campaign consisted I or sending the sage incongruous and disconcerting; communications through the mails, a task which( they performed in rotation. One day it was Sir. Osbert's turn. As he was racking his brains for suitable missive, a stopping came out of one °, his teeth. On his desk lay the notice of a theatrical performance in aid of charity, attached to it a slip bearing the legend 'With Sir Gerald du Mauriees compliments.' An envelope containing the stop' ping and the slip was soon on its way to WyndhP., Lewis.
Alas, tooth, I can think of nobody to whom Ira s would have .he heart to dispatch an object ae macabre as you. The most convenient and til most seemly course is to throw you out of the window into a flower-bed, there to rot qusetlY away to nothing in the Loamshire soil, vv.hero; in due course the rest of me will join you.
Goodbye for now,
STRIX
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