Word: rabbiters
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...urgent message flew last week from Buckingham Palace to Clarence House, out of which Queen Elizabeth's family had just moved. "The Duke of Cornwall is crying," it ran. "He cannot find his rabbit." Within moments, the white angora, overlooked in the moving, was rushed to the palace by limousine, and the most pressing problem in three-year-old Prince Charles' life was solved...
...elder relatives were not so fortunate. By tradition, the heir apparent to Britain's throne has first claim on the revenue of the Duchy of Cornwall (an estimated $300,000 yearly) for his own uses, so young Charles could afford to cuddle his rabbit without worrying where his next shilling comes from. The rest of the royal family, even though the crown nominally owns huge chunks of revenue-bearing real estate, must still depend on parliamentary generosity for their livelihoods.* The royal wage scale, known as the Civil List, is drawn up within, the first six months of each...
...life. Take his father, a man who "could rarely get the top off anything . . . was forever trying to unlock something with the key to something else." How could Thurber, or any kid, ever forget that his dad, wearing a derby hat, tried to repair the lock to the rabbit hutch, and "succeeded only after getting inside the cage, where he was imprisoned for three hours with six Belgian hares and thirteen guinea pigs"? Or take his mother, who "once distressed a couple of stately guests in her father's home by descending the front stairs in her dressing gown...
Another boy might have fled from that kind of background into the impersonal logic of physics or mathematics. Not Thurber. As writer and as cartoonist, he became the top U.S. humorist of the day. He did it largely by making all the world a rabbit hutch and every man in it his father's brother. His first 17 books of prose and drawings, with their battles between the sexes, their bewildered males running a maze that leads inevitably into another, are the century's finest guidebooks to the schizophrenic ward of modern man's booby hatch...
...universally. The argument that Templer-type combat is too reminiscent of Communist tactics is both specious and suicidal. In hand-to-hand street fighting, no man ever won by appealing to the spectators that he was being fouled. The victor must concentrate on winning, and if it takes a rabbit-punch or kidney blow-he uses it, and quickly...