It was characteristic of him that the only streak of imagination he ever showed, the invention of a new seed mixture for cage-birds (Bowling’s Mixture it was called, and it was famous over a radius of nearly five miles) was really due to Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel was a bit of a bird-fancier and had quantities of goldfinches in his dark little shop. It was his theory that cage-birds lose their colour because of lack of variation in their diet. In the yard behind the shop Father had a tiny plot of ground in which he used to grow about twenty kinds of weed under wire-netting, and he used to dry them and mix their seeds with ordinary canary seed. Jackie, the bullfinch who hung in the shop-window, was supposed to be an advertisement for Bowling’s Mixture. Certainly, unlike most bullfinches in cages, Jackie never turned black.
Mother was fat ever since I remember her. No doubt it’s from her that I inherit my pituitary deficiency, or whatever it is that makes you get fat.
She was a largish woman, a bit taller than Father, with hair a good deal fairer than his and a tendency to wear black dresses. But except on Sundays I never remember her without an apron. It would be an exaggeration, but not a very big one, to say that I never remember her when she wasn’t cooking. When you look back over a long period you seem to see human beings always fixed in some special place and some characteristic attitude.
It seems to you that they were always doing exactly the same thing. Well, just as when I think of Father I remember him always behind the counter, with his hair all mealy, adding up figures with a stump of pencil which he moistens between his lips, and just as I remember Uncle Ezekiel, with his ghostly white whiskers, straightening himself out and slapping his leather apron, so when I think of Mother I remember her at the kitchen table, with her forearms covered with flour, rolling out a lump of dough.
You know the kind of kitchen people had in those days. A huge place, rather dark and low, with a great beam across the ceiling and a stone floor and cellars underneath. Everything enormous, or so it seemed to me when I was a kid. A vast stone sink which didn’t have a tap but an iron pump, a dresser covering one wall and going right up to the ceiling, a gigantic range which burned half a ton a month and took God knows how long to blacklead. Mother at the table rolling out a huge flap of dough. And myself crawling round, messing about with bundles of firewood and lumps of coal and tin beetle-traps (we had them in all the dark corners and they used to be baited with beer) and now and again coming up to the table to try and cadge a bit of food. Mother ‘didn’t hold with’ eating between meals. You generally got the same answer: ‘Get along with you, now! I’m not going to have you spoiling your dinner. Your eye’s bigger than your belly.’ Very occasionally, however, she’d cut you off a thin strip of candied peel.
I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry. There’s always a fascination in watching anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman–a woman who really knows how to cook, I mean–rolling dough. She’s got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a satisfied kind of air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite. And in her own mind, of course, that’s exactly what she is. Mother had thick, pink, strong forearms which were generally mottled with flour. When she was cooking, all her movements were wonderfully precise and firm. In her hands egg-whisks and mincers and rolling-pins did exactly what they were meant to do. When you saw her cooking you knew that she was in a world where she belonged, among things she really understood. Except through the Sunday papers and an occasional bit of gossip the outside world didn’t really exist for her.
Although she read more easily than Father, and unlike him used to read novelettes as well as newspapers, she was unbelievably ignorant. I realized this even by the time I was ten years old. She certainly couldn’t have told you whether Ireland was east or west of England, and I doubt whether any time up to the outbreak of the Great War she could have told you who was Prime Minister. Moreover she hadn’t the smallest wish to know such things. Later on when I read books about Eastern countries where they practise polygamy, and the secret harems where the women are locked up with black eunuchs mounting guard over them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she’d heard of it. I can almost hear her voice–‘Well, now! Shutting their wives up like that! The idea!’ Not that she’d have known what a eunuch was.
But in reality she lived her life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the average zenana. Even in our own house there were parts where she never set foot. She never went into the loft behind the yard and very seldom into the shop. I don’t think I ever remember her serving a customer. She wouldn’t have known where any of the things were kept, and until they were milled into flour she probably didn’t know the difference between wheat and oats. Why should she? The shop was Father’s business, it was ‘the man’s work’, and even about the money side of it she hadn’t very much curiosity. Her job, ‘the woman’s work’, was to look after the house and the meals and the laundry and the children. She’d have had a fit if she’d seen Father or anyone else of the male sex trying to sew on a button for himself.
So far as the meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything goes like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It was more like some kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the table tomorrow morning in much the same way as you knew the sun would rise. All through her life Mother went to bed at nine and got up at five, and she’d have thought it vaguely wicked–sort of decadent and foreign and aristocratic–to keep later hours.
Although she didn’t mind paying Katie Simmons to take Joe and me out for walks, she would never tolerate the idea of having a woman in to help with the housework. It was her firm belief that a hired woman always sweeps the dirt under the dresser. Our meals were always ready on the tick. Enormous meals–boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig’s head, apple pie, spotted dog, and jam roly-poly–with grace before and after. The old ideas about bringing up children still held good, though they were going out fast. In theory children were still thrashed and put to bed on bread and water, and certainly you were liable to be sent away from table if you made too much noise eating, or choked, or refused something that was ‘good for you’, or ‘answered back’.
In practice there wasn’t much discipline in our family, and of the two Mother was the firmer. Father, though he was always quoting ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’, was really much too weak with us, especially with Joe, who was a hard case from the start. He was always ‘going to’ give Joe a good hiding, and he used to tell us stories, which I now believe were lies, about the frightful thrashings his own father used to give him with a leather strap, but nothing ever came of it. By the time Joe was twelve he was too strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there was no doing anything with him.
At that time it was still thought proper for parents to say ‘don’t’ to their children all day long. You’d often hear a man boasting that he’d ‘thrash the life out of’ his son if he caught him smoking, or stealing apples, or robbing a bird’s nest. In some families these thrashings actually took place. Old Lovegrove, the saddler, caught his two sons, great lumps aged sixteen and fifteen, smoking in the garden shed and walloped them so that you could hear it all over the town. Lovegrove
