Mrs Fytton's Country Life (20 page)

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Sammy had been asked to l
ook after her and, in his unbow
ing way, he did. She swallowed her pride. She who had never felt challenged by anything in the domestic department, decided to be grateful for his skills. You did not, she realized, pick up the way of the rural from an overnight reading of
Country Life.

But the Fytton Enlightenment was gradual, with several embarrassing moments on the way. The most blushworthy of which occurred during these vegetable garden proceedings when she - in full view of Sam the Pig and wishing to display her at-oneness with nature's bounty - pounced on what she took to be a stalk containing baby cabbages, eulogizing about the perfection of their form and who would have thought these little brassica globes would one day be the size of footballs? To which Sammy replied laconically, 'No one. Being as how they're Brussels sprouts.' Well, she thought defensively,
well
. . . How would a girl from Reigate know about such things? Cabbages came from
shops . .
. Did he know that pineapples grew on the ground? He looked at her blankly and shook his head. Mistake, Angela, she told herself. Big mistake. Anyway, she only knew because she and Ian had once visited a plantation in Thailand owned by one of his clients. Where did
that
Angela Fytton go? she asked herself, not unhappily, as sweat poured from her digger's body.

Sammy was also very helpful with the hives, though she, like Sylvia Plath, felt mean beyond Scrooge to feed the poor things on pale sugar while stealing their own sweet gold. She would have suggested giving them something a little more exciting in return, like maple syrup perhaps, but after the incident with the sprouts she was inclined to say less, listen more.

'Did you know,' she said, as they carried out this sugary thievery, 'that everyone thought the queen was a king until the seventeenth century? Virgil. Even Shakespeare - "So work the honey-bees
...
They have a king, an officer of sorts

'Daft,' said Sammy Lee.

Which proved you did not need much in the way of words to make an oral historical point.

Apart from their vegetables and the hives, the Perrys left much that was desirable in among the dross which went to the vicar. The white pique bed cover, the bed itself, the curtains she had coveted, even the scrubbed (now) kitchen table remained. But one item above all else pleased and informed her. It even told her, at last, exactly what a still room was. Once she knew, she retracted her decision to turn it into Ian's office. It was wholly woman's domain. And it would wholly be hers.

The item that pleased and informed and
told her about the still room w
as a gift from Mrs Perry. It was, apparently, something about which she had thought long and hard before deciding it should stay with Church Ale House. She herself no longer had need of it, but it had served her well in its time. Her own daughter had shown little interest, and Mrs Perry doubted she would even remember its existence when the time came and she was laid in the earth.

‘I’ll
leave it in the parlour on the round table you admired. Like the house, it belongs to you now. Good luck, Mrs Fytton.'

'Why, thank you, Mrs Perry.'

Somehow, at that moment, she felt that Church Ale House really was hers.

11

July

Books succeed, And lives fail.

elizabeth barrett browning

She found it in the parlour, as promised. The gift, the desirable item that came with the Perry blessing, was wrapped in old brown paper and labelled with her name. A note said 'This memorandu
m book was started by Maria Bry
dges, on the occasion of her marriage and just after the front addition was added to the house, when the farm was doing well. It has the original recipe for mulberry wine. We have left you the last three bottles. I have also left you my mother's recipe collection. Good luck and God bless.'

Gingerly she put her hand into the packet and drew out what looked like a book that had burst. Its disintegrating mottled brown and pink and black covers were tied neatly with black sateen tape to keep all the loose pages safe. And there were a lot of loose pages - some looking as if they had been written yesterday, some as if they had been written a thousand years ago. She opened it at random, very carefully, to a page of closely written script headed 'Nothing is done that has not been done well', a saying apparently given to the world by one Mother Julian of Norwich. She squinted at the small, tightly packed and perfectly formed hand that had written beneath the tag:

All within has been prepared with great care and a proper attention to economy and accompanied by important remarks and counsel on the arrangement and well
-
ordering of the household. I have taken the instruction from my dear Mamma, and her Mamma before her. Take the good of the past and add to its store with the benefices of our modern world. It is your duty to be a Good Wife.

This was dated
1807
and it was Maria Brydges's job description, a working tool, her manual. She found a section dated
1837,
headed 'How we live on what we eat', scripted in Maria's hand. There was little in the tone of it to suggest the meek little woman-at-home. This is my world, it seemed to say, and you can't take my domain away from me.

It is curious to note man gathering his sustenance all over the world, how in the search for it he fishes and hunts, rears flocks and herds, ploughs, sows, reaps, goes headlong into anxieties, rises early, lies down late and wears out and renews his strength. There is no land too stubborn for him, no sea too deep, no hill too high, no zone too burning hot or freezing cold, no bird too swift of wing, or beast too wild that he will not find it out; roots, plants, fish, flesh, he has stomach for everything. In accordance with these facts, we find men all over the world acting instinctively. Except perhaps the Englishman in India, who will change not his habits despite the anxious persuasions of his wife, and who eats too much meat for the climate, turning yellow and sickly
...

Reading this essay on good eating habits, Angela remembered how she felt when she was first up at Cambridge and she saw a re-run of the first moon walk. How, when Neil Armstrong said those famous words, 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,' she had filled her mouth with chocolate creams in a valiant move to make one small love-handle for woman, one gigantic spare tyre for womankind. No women tread here, she had thought sadly, switching off the television set. And she had sighed with frustration.

What did they think women did all day in history before consciousness-raising groups wrote them back in? Lay around mutely in caves drinking gin? And that moon walk was in the last gasp of the valiant sixties. Here at the end of the century the world still turned on an establishment upholding the feudal law of fraternal primogeniture.

Chocolate creams were the best compensation she knew for such iniquity. Though she did feel a little squeezing of the heart arteries from time to time at the thought of what a fighter she was once, and how it all seemed to get lost beneath the canopy called Real Life.

At least Maria Brydges had the excuse of a century and a half of gender-biased linguistics. Whereas only recently, when Angela went to register with a doctor in Taunton (kindly old Dr Tichborne was no longer practising), she found a pamphlet published on hypothermia which began with the words, 'The first thing to do for the patient is to make sure he is well wrapped up
...'

'So, no hypothermic women there, then?' she said loudly to the receptionist, who had seen it all, every kind of nut on offer, and did not react. 'Or if there were,' she added, 'you could safely leave them out in the cold.'

So what was new?

She played the old consciousness-raising trick on Maria Brydges's text to bring those cave-dwelling, gin-sodden mutes back into the picture. It still worked. Maria would certainly have been shocked to her stays.

It is curious to note woman gathering her sustenance all over the world, how in the search for it she fishes and hunts, rears flocks and herds, ploughs, sows, reaps, goes headlong into anxieties, rises early, lies down late and wears out and renews her strength. There is no land too stubborn for her, no sea too deep, no hill too high, no zone too burning hot or freezing cold, no bird too swift of wing, or beast too wild that she will not find it out;

roots, plants, fish, flesh, she has stomach for everything. In accordance with these facts, we find women all over the world acting instinctively
...

A couple of thousand years of that kind of affirmation, she thought, and we girls wouldn't be chewing our finger-ends worrying how to manage our homes and children and careers. Or beatifying the rare woman who managed it. A very good rule of thumb was that if you had to single out a woman in any argument you had already lost your case. As in Queen Elizabeth I or Margaret Thatcher.
R
ara avis.

You could also use it to point out the absurdities of gender behaviour. Some texts just did not reverse.

Except perhaps the Englishwoman in India, who will change not her habits despite the anxious persuasions of her husband, and who eats too much meat for the climate, turning yellow and sickly
...

Hardly convincing, the idea of a rigid-backed lady with a face like custard ploughing her way through the roast beef of old England while her abstemious husband nibbled a biscuit and implored her to go easy on the slices.

Well, well, this was no time to ponder upon the mighty fist of language. She turned the pages very carefully. This was a time to concentrate upon the tasks ahead. So, what exactly
was a
still room? She found it described in the memorandum book. In no uncertain terms. Which was when she decided that Ian should have none of it.

Solely the housewife's domain. The apartment for your jams, jellies, preserves, chutneys, liquors should be cool, of even temperature and free from damp and draught. Keep it clean and wholesome and check the contents regularly. You are best to entrust this task to no one but yourself. If there be any sign of mould, gently boil up the contents of the jar anew. Brandy papers may be used and should be changed every six month. Keep not any of your containers up against the walls for they maybe damp.

It would be so.

She remained in the parlour, surrounded by half-empty boxes, wholly absorbed in Maria Brydges's wisdom. The household journal represented everything inherent in the Goodwife - her memoranda, recipe book, blessed herbal, book of housekeeping, gardening, goodwifery, neighbourliness, mothering, nursing and virtually the curing of souls -and it seemed to Angela, at the honourable age of forty or so, that it held information much more useful to her now, woman to woman, than her raised-awareness meetings in the seventies. At this ripe old age she dared to say that she was much more interested in learning how to bone a chicken than in finding out what her own untrussed innards looked like.

She was overcome by a sudden desire for jams and jellies and preserves to inspect and brandy papers to change and the delight of tasks which should be entrusted, guiltlessly, to no one but herself. She wanted, suddenly, to be allowed to be supreme in one thing. To say, like Maria, 'My world - this is
my
world.' How refreshing after those designer wives and hopeless nannies and halfway house-husbands with this season's designer accompaniment of a baby on their backs, wittering on about weaning. Show me one house-husband, she thought, who rinses out milk bottles or makes tea in a pot or does any of those thousand and one small, light tasks that drive you nuts, like cleaning the rubbish bin, boiling the flannels, wiping sticky door handles, which no one ever notices unless you stop doing them. And I'll show you a hundred others blessed with brilliantly incompetent sparsity.

'Urn - darling
...
Um, how do I separate an egg?'

Not on the floor, usually.

'Um - darling
...
How do I iron silk?'

Not at a temperature likely to melt steel, usually.

And quite right too. If they were looking after the baby, they were looking after the baby. And that was what they were doing. Looking after the baby did not mean wiping down door handles or rinsing out milk bottles. It was all about
focus.
Women now had lost theirs. Maria Brydges had focus. She could, and she did, decide what was important -and what was not. And she never underestimated the importance of anything that she felt was important to
her
...