And … something … sea and bellying sail …’
Here, mother’s voice came from the landing where she was putting away the linen. ‘Abergenny! Abergenny! You’ll be saying “Pytchley” and “Cholmondeley” next, and shaming me before the quality.’
But father was our real family stickler and never could resist a grammatic tilt with anybody. When the cook quarrelled with the housemaid in the hall and said ‘Whatever made you do that, Ella?’ father, wholly uninterested in the cause of dispute, opened the billiard room door and shouted, ‘Don’t say “whatever!” “Ever” is quite superfluous in that sentence!’ which stopped the row in a twinkling.
We compiled part of a Handbook Of Etiquette For All Occasions. Father had once harangued Lalage for ‘ejecting’ some gristle on to her plate and had said, ‘As soon should I expect to see a lady spit into the butter-dish’ so our first entry began with that.
‘If anything on her plate is not plesent after eating it she should ashore her host that it was very good but too jenerously rich and turn lightly to the wether.’ (Mother’s comment was, ‘perfectly Oriental politeness. I can’t rise to it!’)
Another hint ran: ‘At a party where a lady may meet a gentleman nobody should say stomach or flea’, for a nurse had once said that to Lalage. But not all the entries were derivative, and one of James’s contributions was For The Wedding: ‘A bride should not bounce to the alter, but carry one glove in the hand.’
V
Every morning father went off to the City in a silk hat and carrying a rolled umbrella and a neat packet of sandwiches cut in the kitchen. We thought it a very grown up thing to do, but he was always more of a parent than mother. Mother really wasn’t a parent at all, and I think she knew it and was glad, and that that may have accounted for the way she threw herself into whatever we were doing. That was how we saw it, then. All the other mothers in the neighbourhood played games as a concession, and I can’t imagine that any of them would, as mother once did, look out of the larder window where she was consulting with cook about lunch, and say ‘Mince …’ then, under her breath, ‘Oh dammit, they’ve begun’, and rush out of the house to secure a good place.
Curious how some people fill a room. Others can be there without being anything except dwarfed and possessed by their surroundings. Mother furnished any place she appeared in. I can’t, I think.
There is one room in the house we live in now which, quite frankly, I couldn’t get on to terms with for five or six years. It had nothing for me, and began by disliking me, and James as well, in an aloof way. I felt that I was taking an unfair advantage by being in a position to make it serve me by using it. And then one day I began to write of her and of Cosmo Furnival in it, and it gave way. I can’t describe the process except that I felt it was flattered. It warmed at once.
Everyone has these rooms if they’d only realize it. And the most important thing is to find out what a room’s trouble is. Usually, it is simply neglect, physical or social.
And so mother furnished that suburban garden she detested, and so we played.
A Furrowed Middlebrow Book
FM2
Published by Dean Street Press 2016
Copyright © 1942 Rachel Ferguson
Introduction copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Crawford
All Rights Reserved
The right of Rachel Ferguson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1942 by Jonathan Cape
Cover by DSP
Cover illustration detail from Interior at Furlongs (1939) by Eric Ravilious
ISBN 978 1 911413 76 9
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk
Evenfield Page 30