by Emily Hahn
“ ‘I’m always chasing rainbows,’ ” we sang obediently. “ ‘Watching clouds drifting by.’”
“I do wish we were on the Prince’s side,” said Carola.
The glass slipper fitted Cinderella’s foot, and she and the Prince were married forthwith. The Prince’s valet, a bright young lady in black tights, married one of the ugly sisters. Somebody else got the other sister. At any rate, everybody had somebody to stand by at the finale. Brilliantly dressed, smiling, surrounded by little girls in swansdown, the pantomime actors sang and sang as the curtain went down. We were left dazzled, happy, a little sleepy, but not too much so. Reluctantly, children climbed off their perches; dutifully, fathers helped them on with their coats. Cups and saucers rattled as the ushers carried away the tea trays.
“And there you are,” said the Major genially as we moved toward the exit in a swarm of children. “Just as I said. It’s always the same—just the sort of thing you have in the States.”
20. THE EIDERDOWN
The beginning of the year was marked for us in London by a move which seemed tremendously difficult. We had got possession of a sort of a flat, part of the Colonel’s domicile in Hampstead. The Colonel spent most of his time in Germany, but his wife kept hoping he would retire from the racket, and to that end kept the nest neat and warm. Upstairs there were available a big room, a small kitchen, and a smaller bath.
“You’ll be cramped, I expect,” said the Colonel on one of his infrequent visits home. “The place is only large enough for one, really.”
“Most of the time Mickey won’t be here—I hope,” said the Major.
“I like that!” I said indignantly. “I shall come up when I like, which will be every other week.”
“Oh, you’re not in my way,” said the Major hastily, “but you do spend so much in the toyshops, darling.” It was during one of the periods when he was not buying a book, and he was consequently apt to carp a bit, out of his overweening sense of virtue.
The Colonel’s wife interposed hastily and said she could quite understand the temptation, and that if she could afford it she would bring presents to her own child just as often.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said the Major, “and anyway you can afford it a lot better than we can. Your husband’s a rich man.” This is a family joke in the Major’s clan. I don’t know why it is supposed to be funny, but in England it always is screamingly funny these days to accuse people of being rich.
The Colonel said, “Ah well, I suppose Mickey never had any money. Is that so, Mickey? People who haven’t had much money always spend it when they get it. I’ve never seen it fail.”
I was about to reply, hotly, that the Colonel had never had any money himself until his grandmother died, but I recollected myself in time; rather than sound like a sister-in-law, I kept quiet.
“Never you mind, Mickey,” said Anne. “Someday I’ll go back to work myself and show them, the big brutes. When we first married and I said I’d better get a job, he just laughed and said, ‘You’ll never rate more in the labor market than two pounds a week; that’s your value. It’s hardly worth it, considering you’d have to pay a servant the same.’ Then, just after the war, I had an offer to go back to my old job at eight pounds a week. That shook him!”
“Do you mean to say,” demanded the Major, for the Colonel was glumly silent, “that he didn’t immediately put on your hat and shove you out to work?”
“Well—no. I still prefer to keep my own house, don’t you see. Any woman wants to see to her own housekeeping, I should think.”
The Major guffawed in unkindly fashion, I thought, and the family meeting broke up.
It worked quite reasonably, almost like a New York arrangement on the same lines except that a New York flat would be more mechanically efficient and in New York one would find milk and newspapers delivered at the door. I did the breakfast when I was in town, and the Major went out for it when I wasn’t, or Anne sent him something upstairs on a tray. Without further argument from my husband I brought eggs from Conygar, and bacon, and powdered milk, and butter, and sugar, and coupons for the weekly loaf of bread. If the bread got stale toward Friday, and if he loathed and detested powdered milk in his coffee, the Major had learned not to complain. Anyway I cook bacon much better than most Englishwomen do. I began to enjoy fooling the ration system by buying goose eggs when I got the chance—they are unrationed, but fiendishly expensive—and making large messes of one of them at a time scrambled, mixed up with other unrationed things. What with the time involved in shopping, and doing up the room the days the char wasn’t coming, and dashing out to the Reading Room at the Museum for what was left of the morning, I began giving a good imitation of an ordinary British housewife, and the visits to the toyshops became fewer.
Also, we had to get a lot of things which had only recently come on the market since the war—things nobody had been able to buy for years. In some cases they couldn’t yet be bought. I had considerable trouble for two weeks finding any dishes and cups and saucers. I was stubbornly determined not to buy any more plastic or Bakelite crockery; it came in horrible vomitous colors, it was not unbreakable even though it was alleged to be, and when used for coffee, for example, it had an awkward way of sticking; the coffee cup traveled to one’s lips accompanied halfway, at least, by its saucer, and the entire business was so unnaturally light that one didn’t notice until the saucer fell to the table with a splash and a clatter. Oh, I do hate plastic. Almost everything in the world, in postwar England, is made out of plastic, and it is nearly always unsatisfactory. Plastic mackintoshes split and tear. Plastic toys snap, or come unglued. Plastic salt cellars warp. Plastic wrist-watch bracelets raise bumps on the wrist.
In a shop which sells “seconds” in china from Bath, I got a tea set which would do for breakfast. It was plain white, which is all the Government allowed for the home market, and it was so irregular that the bread plates didn’t stack neatly, and it cost twenty dollars, but at least it wasn’t plastic. A few months later, naturally, I could have bought a better set from Czechoslovakia for half the price, but one never knew in advance.… I got an enormous bread bin because they weren’t making small ones as yet, and a teeny-weeny pig bucket because they weren’t making large ones. I found knives and forks from Sheffield with gratifying ease only a week after Anne and I almost came to blows sharing out the remaining steel knives at Conygar. It had long been impossible to buy any, and in the joy of finding them I wanted to get a whole canteen, but the Major suddenly interposed with one of his odd streaks of economy. Three knives only, he said firmly. I sneaked out when he wasn’t looking, and bought a special one for the bread afterward.
Spoons? They weren’t making teaspoons yet. We had to wait patiently. It was rather like living in one of those animated cartoons where the artist puts things into the picture before your eyes- boys, girls, furniture, the house cat, and all of a sudden you have a complete interior. I was excited the day I found I could get an iron bed frame and mattress reasonably cheaply without “dockets” —Government coupons for utility furniture.
There were masses of kettles, though Anne had been rather gloomy about my chances of finding one; kettles suddenly appeared all over London like a rash. I had to buy a large one, but who cares? One can always dispense with the extra water. A saucepan, a wooden spoon, a tin opener, an egg-beater hot from the newest factory, a frying pan—really, old England was looking up, said Anne, examining my spoils with a wondering eye. Anne is a child of the war years, and ever since she was a slip of a girl she has been used to doing without new pans and such. She cannot yet bring herself to buy them without a good deal of self-communion and urging.
“Old England isn’t looking up so much as all that,” I said ungraciously. “A lot of this junk is just junk. Look at that damned percolator, for instance. I was so glad to get one that I fell on the first one I saw—I’ve been begging people to send one to me from the States, and having nightmares about breaking the last glass top in th
e house—you know. Or rather you don’t, you abandoned tea- drinker.”
“But it looks perfectly lovely,” protested Anne.
“It isn’t. It’s engineered wrong, somehow. The spout ends too soon, and the very second the coffee starts perking, it spits at me. Look at that wall. Look at that oven. There’s coffee all over the kitchen. All these damned English percolators spit. Pamela’s does the same. For the sake of saving a quarter inch of spout, the penny- pinching bastards—”
“Mickey! Anyway, why not make your coffee in a saucepan? I always do.”
“I know you do,” I said, and did not say any more about Anne’s coffee. Anne is a nice girl and otherwise a very good cook. She can’t help not knowing any better about coffee: it’s a national failing.
We would go to London Monday and come down Thursday, or go up Tuesday and come down Friday, unless the Major felt unusually conscientious. Traveling in England was adventurous, because you never knew if you would have to stand or not. The trains were nearly as crowded in peacetime 1948 as they used to be in the States in wartime 1944, and it was an understood thing that I should be at Waterloo Station forty minutes before the train to Dorchester was scheduled to pull out, to take my place in the queue before the gates opened and then run like hell to save two seats in the right car. When the third-class carriages are full, there is always the chance of getting into an absorbing row with the guard who takes the tickets. It seems to be understood—whether it is the law, I don’t know, and neither, evidently, does the guard—that if all the third-class is full, you are entitled to go in and sit down in first-class. When the guard comes to punch your ticket, he always gets angry and says, “Plenty of seats in third-class.”
“No, there aren’t,” say I, if I feel like showing fight.
“There were at Bournemouth. You’re supposed to go and get a seat in third-class when other people get off at Bournemouth.”
“There weren’t any seats at Bournemouth.”
“Plenty of seats in third-class,” says the guard, “or pay your excess fare, eight shillings.”
If you feel meek, you go back to the third-class and stand, with about fifty sailors and commercial travelers, the rest of the way, but someday I shall not feel meek, and I will probably get involved in a fight, and then in the newspapers. I would like to know the real rules of the matter, but nobody seems able to tell me, just as nobody in the post office ever knows to which country you can post those air-letter cards without more stamps, or how much air mail is to China. Another complete and permanent mystery is country bus lines and their schedules. Dorchester, which is not a very big town, is served by three or four different bus companies, and none of the men on any of the lines can tell you a thing about any of the others. Nor is there an all-round timetable. Suppose I go into Dorchester from Cordwayne on the Bere Regis bus. As I get out, I ask the driver, “When is the next bus back to Cordwayne?”
“No more busses tonight,” says the driver with gusto.
“Of course there is. There’s a bus every single day at five-thirty, and I’m sure there’s one earlier.”
“No, madam. No more busses to Cordwayne tonight,” he says flatly, and drives away, knowing perfectly well that he is telling the truth from his point of view: there are no more Bere Regis busses to Cordwayne, and all other busses are out of his world.
Well, how am I to find out? No doubt each bus company has its office hidden away upstairs in some Dorchester building, but where? And if by some miracle I should happen to know the names of all the bus companies, and if by a further miracle I should happen to find the office room of one of them, there won’t be anybody in the office. It will be either lunchtime or teatime or early closing day, or maybe the attendant just didn’t turn up; at any rate the door is locked, and nobody else in Dorchester—no shopkeeper, no hotel clerk, nobody—will know anything about busses. They really won’t; they are not interested. In Italy, any street loafer will be eager to give his advice, and will shower you with information—faulty information, perhaps, but at any rate he tries. In France, you may have to tip your informant, but after that he will give. In the States, the busses all seem to know each other, and congregate at the same terminus, where, if you are not run over, you will soon find what you want. But in England— In England it is better, perhaps, to accept your fate and walk, or ride a bicycle. Nobody gives a damn if you get your bus or not. The bus company itself couldn’t care less.
Between these adventurous sallies in transport I spent ten days at home to every four or five in London, but even so it did not seem to be enough. If I were optimistic I would take it as a compliment that my presence seemed so desirable to Conygar, and that things went to rack and ruin as soon as I turned my back, but it couldn’t have been that, exactly. At home I did not go snooping about, making sure there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. I closed myself into my sitting room and was stubbornly absent in the spirit if not in the flesh; I was no earthly good to anyone. How, then, could it work out as it did, that calamities saved themselves up for when I was away? Without further investigation one might argue that the situation goes far toward proving the advisability of keeping a king, however much a figurehead he may be. The mere semblance of authority is perhaps enough.
I don’t quite accept this theory. Actually, I think what happened was pretty much the same whether I left the house to the rather flighty attention of Louise, or the distracted ditto of Lorraine. Alone, in charge of things, Louise was always overcome by a suspicion that people didn’t really appreciate her position or her power. Louise collected domestic snubs and sat over them like a broody hen over her eggs. By the time I got home she had always hatched out a lot of full-fledged grievances, against the Clifton clan especially but also, naturally, against Mrs. Alford, Nellie and Alice escaped her enmity, I suppose because even Louise couldn’t carry on a feud against everybody, all the time. She didn’t like being left in the country anyway while I went gaily off to the dissipations of the British Museum, and no doubt she felt it only fair that I should realize how much luckier I was, away from household crises, than she, left at home to cope. To impress my luck on me, she saved up her fluffy grievances and trotted quickly to put them in my lap as soon as I got back.
When Lorraine supplanted Louise, the resentment waned but the effect remained the same because Lorraine was so conscientious. There are various ways of dealing with household emergencies, and neither Lorraine nor I seemed to possess the secret of moderation. My way of grappling with a problem is to ignore it; if you put off answering a letter long enough the necessity for answering at all will finally disappear, and if you put off grappling with household problems, they have a way of evaporating. At least that is my theory, and that is the way I shape my behavior. Often events justify me, especially if it is a case of a row in the kitchen. The housemaids who are trying to kill each other on Wednesday will probably be billing and cooing on Thursday, united in the bonds of their common hatred for the cook. But Lorraine is not like me, and when things go wrong her impulse was always to think they were not only wrong, but disastrous. After a while the disaster became simply monstrous, universally fatal. She tried to grapple with it, but if she failed to Suppress the entire difficulty she fell on my neck as soon as I arrived from the station, almost sobbing with excited despair, and it was no comfort that I should remain unimpressed, lethargic, and bovine under her recital. It was deflating.
“Mary’s lost a pound,” Lorraine would say, for example. “She left it on the table after Charles gave it to her the other day for Clifton, and it’s simply gone. Whatever shall we do? It’s not very nice to think somebody in the house—”
“Mary’s always leaving things about. Teach her a lesson,” I said absent-mindedly, while I read the paper.
“But you can’t let it rest there. It’s all very well for you—you’re not here all the time as we are—but it’s not nice to think that somebody in the house—”
“Is she sure she left it there
? Often Mary forgets things.”
“Oh yes, she’s sure. After all, when you’re in the house all the time as we are, it’s not very pleasant—”
I went on reading the paper and eating, until Lorraine’s plaints had died on the summer air. After lunch, inquiries in the kitchen turned up the fact that Mrs. Alford had found the pound note and put it into the cabinet, thinking it was mine and that I would come to claim it in good time. A first-rate source of excitement had been stopped up. It was a relief, no doubt, but it was also a disappointment for a girl who didn’t really like a quiet life.
These little accumulated crises did not ruffle my lethargy beyond a certain degree, but they were as so many drops of unassimilated poison in the Major’s mind. Stronger and stronger grew his conviction that his wife was not an ideal mother and manager, and the Major is no philosopher to take these facts as settled things which nothing can alter. The Major is an idealist. He feels that if he mentions rottenness in the State of Denmark often enough, and with enough emphasis, the Danes will be shamed into doing something about it.
I, on the other hand, am a philosopher—or anyway I’m very lazy. The more I am nagged the more philosophical I get—or anyway bloody-minded.
This disparity in our temperaments had caused us to have the most awful rows even before the great battle to end all fights, the Battle of the Eiderdown. I shall recapitulate two of them briefly. The first was the Postage-Stamp Trouble and the second was the matter of the Hairdresser at the Ritz.
While we were cleaning out the Conygar rooms one by one, we made the great mistake of thinking that with two desks, the Major and I could work in amity in one room. He put all his books and papers and pretty blotters and things in one desk on one side of the sitting room, and I put my typewriter on a much more utilitarian affair against the opposite wall. A large round table separated us, moreover. You might have thought this would be a good arrangement, but it wasn’t.