The Electrical Experience Read Free Page A

perhaps have an operation.’
    â€˜ Shusssh —don’t talk that way,’ he said, holding her Herco-smelling hand, squeezing it, not liking the clamminess of the idea of a surgical operation on that area of the body. He himself had had no sickness in his adult life to talk of.
    But thinking also that at the same time it would mean an end to birth-control devices, although, on the other hand, a feeling that she would then be simply, well, a hollow body—and maybe of no interest at all.
    He thought then about the Group Scout Meeting that would be held later that week. The plans for the camp up at Mt Keira and the log cabin they were building. Some were in favour of a rustic way of doing the window frames, while he himself preferred atradesmanlike job all round. He would argue that. No one preferred rusticity when it leaked.
    Head on pillow looking up at the new plaster egg-and-dart cornice there in the dark of their new bedroom of their new house, the curtain lace lapping against the window and the breeze slightly bumping the blind cord, lying there he concluded that as far as he could see, everything in his life was being correctly done.
    He was being recognised. He was becoming a person-about-the-town.
    The new house was finished in detail right down to the built-in holder for toilet-paper rolls, and furnished with a number of electrically operated appliances and a new Stromberg Carlson which only gave static during storms.
    He had been elected District Scout Master. In his speech he had said that the supreme challenge of each generation was ‘holding’ the next generation. Keeping control of the young. That it was possible for a generation to be ‘lost’, for control to slip and for civilisation to be without a generation to take over. He referred to the twenties in America, where a whole generation had been ‘lost’. Maybe the law of oak inheres in oak, he’d said; nevertheless, while membership of a family can ensure that the values of that family inhere in the children of that family, Community Organisations had to police this and to ensure that ‘replacement parts’ were available for those families lacking values. Community Organisations had to give these children replacement values.
    He was outspoken in the Chamber of Commercebut was keeping an open mind on tourism. On one hand the tourist spent in the town—on his soft drinks, he was pleased to say—yet he could concede that they depreciated local facilities and roads without paying rates. He was able, he hoped, to place his own personal advantage aside when considering community issues.
    He had reluctantly joined the Sequicentenary Committee, reluctantly, because he felt the country areas had not received the sort of subsidy needed. He suspected it was someone in the city with a big idea for getting themselves knighted, and that the country towns were expected to obey. The city was beginning to look upon the towns as retinue.
    He had refused a donation to the Roman Catholic School Fund because he did not believe in such schools separate from the public schools. Schools should, he thought, mirror the community in all its diversity—the rich, the poor, the bright, the dull, the protestant, the Roman Catholic. This way the child was prepared for the sort of community which lay ahead for him. Education occurred in the playground. One day this division between Roman Catholic and the rest would lead to bloodshed in this country. They had made the division them selves. He hoped, of course, it could be avoided.
    They owed allegiance to an authority outside this country.
    He had moved a motion at the A and H Society to refuse gypsies admission to the showground.
    Gypsies.
    He had a morbid feeling about the gypsies. He stopped once when they flagged him down, parked on the roadside in their American Buicks. A rather pretty gypsy girl just out of childhood, her hair half covering her dark face, and close up he