England to Me: A Memoir

by Emily Hahn

  We didn’t really mind too much at first about the back door because if one goes around outside the house, around the drawing- room wing, one can get out to the lawn almost as quickly by using the front door. But then something happened to the latch of the front door. It wouldn’t catch. Thus the door wouldn’t stay shut unless it was locked, from the inside. This state of affairs was directly due to Fitzroy, our dog, who learned somehow that if he hit the front door hard enough with his head, latch or no latch, it flew open and he could come in. After we took to locking it Fitzroy nearly knocked his brains out. Anyway, then we used the side door. Strangers didn’t know this: they rang the front-door bell and then they waited until they got tired, and then they went away, unless the bell happened to be working. Sometimes it did work, sometimes it didn’t, and the uncertainty was very irritating.

  I forgot to give the reason we tried to keep Fitzroy outside. He was subject at intervals to an overwhelming passion for rugs. He chewed pieces out of them. I would never have found this out, perhaps, if a friend of mine hadn’t come down to stay and left her camera lens at Conygar, and telephoned from London the week after, asking me to look for it. I never did find the lens, but at least while looking for it I discovered a whole lot of interesting things about the house, including Fitzroy’s habit of eating rugs. He had been cunningly doing this in the drawing room, which, as I said, we almost never used. We weren’t able to use it at all any more, after what happened one Sunday.

  We had friends in to lunch, and afterward we went into the drawing room for coffee. It was one of those nice long English winter dusks which set in about three o’clock. The room was just dark enough not to turn on the light and it really looked pretty, as long as we didn’t try to draw the split curtains. Sitting back in an armchair opposite the long sofa, which had one arm broken, I felt relaxed, indeed almost house-proud. On the sofa was the Major, sitting tactfully near the broken arm, and at the other end was our friend Mrs. Wilson.

  All of a sudden, as I looked at them, the sofa began to settle back in a gentle, dreamy way. I thought maybe it was just the dark closing in and ruining my eyesight, but it was the sofa all right. First one back leg crumbled, and then the other. Everyone, naturally, was surprised, even a little alarmed at first, but the mood soon passed. Mrs. Wilson scrambled out over the back of the sofa, and we all laughed heartily. We behaved very well, and carried it off magnificently. But Mr. Longman wouldn’t be able to fix the sofa, he said, for donkey’s years, he had so much work in hand. There it lay on its stomach where he left it, in the middle of the drawing-room floor, with pieces of broken leg all around it on the chewed carpet. If only I could have found the key to the drawing-room door, I would have locked the whole thing out of sight and out of mind. But perhaps it cut too deep ever to be forgotten.

  After the affair of the sofa, I was weighed down with a sense of inferiority. There was no doubt about it, I said to myself: I ought to be able to fix some of these things; I ought to do useful things with my hands. The trouble is that I don’t like to. After the sofa legs gave way I began to brood seriously on my shortcomings, especially on something that happened one morning when the Major was home. He never broods about not being able to fix things, incidentally; he not only doesn’t like fooling around with tools, but he is quite frankly and honestly afraid of them. He won’t examine the wiring of a lamp, for example, even when the lamp is obviously not connected to a socket anywhere; he won’t touch a wire, even when all the switches in the house are turned off. He just refuses flatly to be useful. “All that sort of thing,” he says vaguely, waiting for me to light the gas, for he is afraid of gas, “is woman’s work.”

  Ah well, these little frictions, I said to myself after the sofa broke, these little rubs are probably inevitable in married life, but just the same I would like to be an accomplished cabinetworker or piano tuner or rug maker. As a matter of fact, I do make rugs, or at any rate I make one rug. It had then been in the making more than a year. Brightening as I thought of this, I was about to go and look for it, and was just wondering where it could possibly be, when the cook came and knocked on the door.

  “It’s about the tea, Mrs. Boxer,” she said.

  “Ah yes, Mrs. Alford, the tea. What about the tea?”

  I felt a comfortable little glow as I thought of tea. We didn’t drink it ourselves, at least we didn’t drink the Indian tea the Government lets us buy on ration. We drank unrationed coffee instead, or China tea we got in parcels from America. Mrs. Alford had thus been able to save up and use our share of tea, and the fluctuating staff, whoever they may have been at the time, had enough tea to satisfy even their inordinate national thirst. Tea was the one thing on short ration in England which didn’t worry me. No wonder I glowed and said in smug tones, “What about the tea?”

  “It’s gone,” said Mrs. Alford.

  “Gone? What do you mean?”

  “Three pounds of it, taken out of the cupboard.” Mrs. Alford looked distressed, and began to twist the edge of her apron. I knew the signs. In a moment she would wipe the corner of her eye and sob.

  Nevertheless I asked sternly, “Isn’t the cupboard always locked?”

  “That’s just it,” wailed Mrs. Alford, and wiped her eye. “It’s that key. Everyone knows where it’s kept.”

  The key, I should explain, was a sort of communal key between Mrs. Alford and me. She came upstairs as soon as she arrived in the morning and took it from the little right-hand drawer in my desk; she put it back there when she went home at night, and when we wanted something extra to eat, as we always did when she cooked cheese macaroni for supper—rations or no rations, the Major won’t eat cheese macaroni—I took the key out of the little drawer, and I put it back. In theory, nobody else ever touched it.

  “But there’s whole afternoons when nobody’s here,” said Mrs. Alford, now in the gulping stage, “and what with all these changes—”

  Yes, I admitted sorrowfully, what with all the fluctuations in the staff, God knows where, in what village cottage, that hoarded tea was being enjoyed at the moment. The English do need their tea.

  “If only we had two keys,” said Mrs. Alford. “I’d keep mine in my pocket and carry it home with me nights, and you could keep yours somewhere they don’t know about. I’m sure I don’t know what else mightn’t be missing. I haven’t had time to count, I’m so upset.”

  “Keys,” I said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I can find another.”

  A flood of housekeeping zeal attacked me, strong if belated. Up in the attic I had once found a large Benares brass bowl, very ugly and heavy, full of old buttons and pieces of sealing wax. I had got into the habit of dropping keys into it whenever I came across them. I was always coming across keys at Conygar—clock keys, keys in bunches, keys with cryptic little ivory labels on them, tiny jewellike keys, and great big ones in chamois-leather bags. Very seldom did I find, or even look for, the keyholes to match any of this collection. Some of them probably fitted trunks which have long since been burnt, or cunning little ivory boxes which are lost, or picnic cases which were carried away by relatives before the war. The Major’s people were great ones for locking things up, or at any rate for buying gadgets that lock up and then losing the gadgets.

  I now went upstairs for the brass bowl, and brought it down to the room where we keep the cupboard. This cupboard is really, strictly speaking, a wardrobe. I don’t know where it used to stand, but I found it in what was once called the servants’ hall, and I left it there with a lot of flotsam and jetsam and old chairs, and began to keep in it rationed food like tea and butter, and extra stores of candy and tinned meat we got in parcels from abroad, and toys I intended to give Carola for Christmas, and that sort of thing. It consists in toto of a little square aperture, three small drawers, one large drawer that always sticks, and a long mirrored aperture. They are all equipped with locks, the key to which was shared, as I have already said, by Mrs. Alford and me.

  I looked carefully at the cupboard key, which wa
s on a rusty ring, and then I set it aside and got to work. I poured out the brass bowl’s contents on the table and sorted out the keys that looked more or less the proper size. One by one, doggedly, carefully, and withal patiently, except when I had a lot of keys on one ring and forgot where I had begun, I worked my way through the collection. Sometimes a key would nearly fit. Sometimes it actually would fit, and turn in the lock as well, but the door wouldn’t unlock anyway. Then at last, an hour later, near the end of the whole lot, I found the right key. It didn’t look a bit like the original, but it, too, locked and unlocked the doors and drawers. I almost cheered. Just before leaving the room in triumph, I hesitated. What I could do someone else might do. What if some temporary member of the staff should pinch a handful of these keys and go around unlocking other things in the house? Whoever had taken the tea would be capable of an action like that. I made my decision promptly, firmly, with commendable efficiency: I put the brass bowl inside the long aperture next to a toy steam shovel and locked it up.

  Never have I gone to bed with such a pleasant sensation of virtue rewarded.

  Next morning Mrs. Alford came to my bedroom door very early. “Mrs. Boxer,” she said, “now something’s gone completely wrong with the cupboard door. It won’t open.”

  “Of course it will. Haven’t you unlocked it?” I said, pulling on my dressing gown.

  “That’s just it. The key won’t turn.”

  I stared at her stupidly for a moment, then laughed. “Oh, I know. You must have the wrong key; I probably put mine there instead of yours. I found another one, Mrs. Alford, and it’s probably just a little difficult to work when you haven’t got the trick of it. Just a minute—I’ll be with you.”

  I worked a long time on that cupboard door with both keys, but to no avail. It was very odd. Two of the three small drawers would open, but the third one and the big drawer and the small door leading to the really crucial stores simply refused to yield to any blandishments. A slow-burning fear smoldered away at the bottom of my brain.

  “Good Lord, Mrs. Alford,” I said at last, “I must have locked up the right one inside. Yet this key worked all right last night, I’ll swear it did. How could I have locked everything up if the key isn’t right?”

  “Well, they’re that way sometimes, Mrs. Boxer. They’ll lock with practically any old key, but opening them again is another matter. Oh, dear.”

  We looked at each other in silence. If I had been wearing an apron, I would certainly have started to wipe my eye with it.

  “Well,” I said at last. “We’ll just have to make do without butter today, Mrs. Alford. I’m sorry. On your way home, be sure to tell Mr. Longman to come up here just as quick as he can, and don’t forget to say Please.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Longman every once in a while. “Yes, of course. Yes.” He put on his spectacles and peered at the wardrobe. I sank into a rickety cane rocking chair and watched him. Mr. Longman brought out a skeleton key and opened everything, and sniffed around.

  “No,” he said at last. “You didn’t mix up the keys; you had the proper one right enough. It was just fooling about with these rusty locks did the mischief. They lose their spring without oil. Two of them, I don’t know what to do, I’ll have to take them with me and look again in the shop. I’ll just” He took out a few screws from inside the contraption. Sometimes I have visions of being deft like that, swift and sure with my fingers. He held the locks in his hand and eyed them through his spectacles, and shook his head.

  “Pretty far gone,” he murmured.

  “Well, then, we’ll have to get some new ones,” I said.

  “I won’t be able to match up the key.”

  “Then get new locks with new keys. God, get all the new ones you can.”

  Mr. Longman thought this over and nodded weightily. “Could do that, I suppose,” he said. “Yes.” I could see, though, that he hated the idea. I was being wasteful and American, and it worried him.

  He began to put his tools back into his pockets.

  “You came just in time,” I said. “I was about to take an ax to that wardrobe.”

  “You don’t want to do that,” said Mr. Longman in hurt tones. “That’s a nice piece of furniture. Oh no, you don’t want to do that.”

  I did not reply, but glowered at the wardrobe as Mr. Longman went out. The unlocked door had swung back, exposing its hoard of American soap and sweets. Absent-mindedly I reached out and took a stick of Doublemint. It was very quiet there in front of the wardrobe door. I chewed gum and rocked away, looking at it.

  8. THE GREAT FREEZE

  During the cold spell of 1946-47 English people were cross, I suppose, because they kept thinking perhaps they would soon be hungry. They used to eat— oh well, you know what they used to eat; they were notorious. Not only for watery cabbage and boiled potatoes, but the important parts of a meal. I remember an English officer I used to go out with in Shanghai, and this is what he always ate, even at ninety-eight degrees in the shade: chop toad-in-the-hole (i.e., fried in batter), kidneys on the side, French-fried potatoes, a teeny dab of lettuce, and cheese and biscuits for dessert. And beer and whisky to top it off with. That was the sort of thing I used to get at table-d’hôte meals in London pubs too: meat and cheese and potatoes, potatoes and cheese and meat. Oddly enough, though, pastry in England was always good; better, I thought, than at home. I say “oddly enough,” because nobody has ever mentioned this fact in any book I ever read.

  When I got back to England this time it was all different. We eat very little meat, and vegetables have appeared in striking profusion. We are glad to have cheese, I suppose because one is always glad to get things that are rationed. Mostly, though, people make out with fowls (very expensive), rabbits (rare), macaroni (unrationed), spaghetti ditto, and a peculiar sort of goo they call semolina. Do we have semolina in the States, I mean do we call it that? I can’t be sure. It is like farina, or a fine-ground hominy grits. You cook it with cheese on top, or if you have been reading ladies’ magazines you put in raisins, curry powder, whatever you have in the cupboard. But no matter what you put in it, your husband doesn’t like it.

  The English used to ruin an incalculable amount of good rice by boiling it into a soggy mess of milk and calling it rice pudding. Now they can’t get rice, or enough milk, so that’s all right. Nevertheless they have learned quite a lot about cooking lately; they had to. They still throw away the carrot water, though, and boil the life out of everything boilable. They have grown cunning at keeping cooking fat and using it again and again. They know when and how to use saccharine. In time they may even learn how to make coffee, because coffee is not rationed, and tea is, closely.

  They are not starving, and most of them are not exactly hungry. “It’s not starvation,” to paraphrase one of my favorite columnists; “it’s just not quite enough, of the same thing, for too long a time.”

  Restaurant meals in general don’t seem to be worth the money, I think because you can’t eat bread in unlimited quantity in a restaurant, whereas at home there is plenty of bread. It is usually more satisfying to eat in Soho at a Greek or Italian place, or Chinese, than at one of the swanky hotels, but then it always was.

  There is a lot of talk about the black market in food. There must be black marketing because I see so much in the papers about it. But to an American, England still seems astonishingly honest; the very fact that the “spivs” are talked about so much, the indignant squeals they evoke in court from magistrates, the way they are discussed in the House of Commons, is an indication of the high level of British expectations of justice. At home, our really honest people are mostly rich drones, the wives and daughters of millionaires though not the millionaires themselves. Medium rich people are honest within the limits of their sense of right; look at the way we all flouted the Prohibition law because we simply didn’t really accept it. But our city rabble, of course, breaks most laws of “control”; and we go in for black markets just as the French and Italians do. We all know it
; we aren’t really shocked. But the British are shocked.

  As I write, it occurs to me that I would much rather go on prosing like this about ethics than chatter about cooking and queues. I’m so tired of talking about cooking and queues! We all are.

  Which brings me to the subject of the British housewife. Like the British miner, she is the darling of all political candidates. They woo her from the soap boxes and the loud-speaker vans; they tell her what a hard yet noble lot is hers; they say, “Yes, all this is heaviest on you, but patience for just a little while longer.”

  Naturally the British housewife loves this. She pats her kerchiefed head, straightens her shoulders, and is good for several more hours’ search for food.

  Let’s take a look at her. To American eyes she is no beauty, but she is well dressed in her way, until we scan the details. We appreciate good tweed in America, partly because it is a nice thing in itself but mostly, I fear, because it costs so much. In England it doesn’t cost so much: it is a necessity rather than a sign of wealth. The British housewife wears a short-skirted tweed suit and a knitted sweater, except in the middle of an exceptionally warm summer, when she uses wash blouses or printed cotton or rayon dresses. She loves prints, and seldom uses block color in her summer dress. In winter she wears all the underwear she’s got, and always a topcoat or mackintosh. She goes without stockings if she possibly can; if not, she wears much-mended cotton, rayon, occasionally silk, or very occasionally nylon stockings, or bobby socks (fewer coupons). Her shoes are especially characteristic, because unless she is very much dressed up the British housewife goes in for flat-heeled footwear, and well she might, considering how much walking and standing about she must do.