Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady

by Edith Olivier

  “And I have to give up my own clothes coupons to get a new one,” she lamented. “ I shall go naked if they go on like this.”

  Those members of the queue who reached town at last, hastily separated, and everyone attached herself to one or other of the food queues which were by now in full session—(perhaps I should say in full stance). Queues concentrate on unrationed foods, for if you have a coupon, you are certain of your allowance at any time during the week. And a food queue is an unfriendly thing. People don’t talk to their neighbours unless they are anyhow a party. Their minds are wholly concentrated on fish, cakes, or liver sausages—past, present, and to come. The queue moves very slowly and in complete silence, except that now and then a snatch of talk comes from two people who happen to be colleagues and not rivals.

  “They ’ ad jam rolls. Splendid jam rolls they was too.”

  “Well, I always say, we may as well ’ave the best.”

  This came from a most dilapidated woman who looked as if she could not possibly have any idea of what the best, or worst, might be.

  Going home by bus, it is wise to start from the bus station, where there is more chance of getting a seat. The station is a spacious square, and buses leave from it for many destinations, starting apparently quite fortuitously. To the newcomer, queues seem to be forming themselves anywhere, and they begin with a vacuum, so it is almost impossible to know on what particular square yard one should begin, in order to catch a particular bus. Then it is very hard to know which is the head, and which is the tail of the queue, and one is pretty certain to place oneself at the wrong end. But these bus queues are very friendly. Everybody seems to know that there will be room for all, and the only question is who will get on first. Everyone helps the other, handing up dogs, parcels, bags, baskets, and portmanteaux, and inviting any lonely person to share a seat. They will tell the stranger where to change, and point out round which corner the next bus can be found. They will even take your part if you get into difficulties through your own folly, and this has happened to me. Not long ago, I was on my way to an important meeting at the far end of the county, and found that I must change buses in a town which was comparatively strange to me. When we arrived, the queue for my next bus already stretched almost the whole length of the street, and I dutifully took my place at its back. When the bus did come, more than half of us were left behind, and of course I was among the unlucky ones. It meant another hour’s wait, and when the bus at last arrived, we learnt that before we could take our seats, it must go to a village in the opposite direction, there to set down and to take up passengers. At this there was a movement of rebellion from behind; and a group of officers decided to make this extra journey, so as to be sure of a place when the bus returned. I joined in this advance, but was not allowed to get into the bus, as the conductor decreed that anyone taking this unfair advantage would be turned out on return, and sent to the very back of the queue. The bold officers who had led the advance were not deterred. They jumped in. I hesitated, and was lost. Off went the bus, leaving me like a lost soul floating on the border of Limbo, for I had forfeited my place in the queue, and now belonged nowhere. I was in despair, for I knew I must now miss my engagement. But then a charming little group of soldiers among whose places in the queue I now found myself, invited me to slip in among them. They promised to smuggle me into the bus when it got back, and they did—among their packs and bundles. But for them, I should have been in the road all night.

  Once one has edged one’s way into a bus, one’s fellow passengers are mostly ready to take a part in entertaining the party with gossip and good stories. A bus ride then becomes quite a pleasant journey. It may be rather shaky, but it is far less noisy than one expects; and if you travel on the upper deck, you get quite a new view of the country. It is amusing to look over people’s garden walls, and a journey along a quite familiar road can, in these circumstances, become a voyage of discovery.

  Chapter VIII

  PIN MONEY FOR FARMERS’ WIVES

  Early in this century, I managed for some years a branch of the National Poultry Organisation Society. Its objects were to encourage the production of eggs in country villages, and to assist cottagers and smallholders to send them to market. There was, in those days, loose in the land, a species of shark called a “higgler’’, who used to descend upon the houses of innocent villagers and carry off, for a ridiculously small price, the eggs laid by their equally innocent hens. Twenty eggs for sixpence was not unusual, but the poultry grower had no alternative. Owing to the lack of transport, he could not send his eggs to a better market; and if he did not take what was offered, his goods soon became unsaleable.

  When I was asked to undertake this work in my own neighbourhood, I at first refused, saying that I hated hens so much that I could not join a society which would bring me into contact with them. Whereupon the friends who were asking for my help promised that I should never see a hen; and in spite of this, within a month I was judging at a poultry show.

  It is true that this was outside the ordinary routine of my work, and I think that I was only invited as a “compliment’’, to flatter my pride in the high position I had now assumed in the poultry world. As a rule, I did see more of eggs than of hens, and, in fact, I gained considerable inside knowledge of the egg trade, so that, when the Ministry of Food began to tackle it, I knew I could have told them a lot.

  Nevertheless, I am still prejudiced against hens; and the more I know of them, the more convinced I am that I have always been right in thinking them brainless, immoral, dirty, and hysterical. As characters, there, is nothing at all to be said for them; though it must be admitted they have their uses. Contact with the human race may have demoralised them, as contact with civilisation is said to demoralise the happy amoral natives of some of the South Sea islands. I am told that, if left to themselves, cocks and hens will continue to lay eggs enough to perpetuate their race; but we have diverted their products for our own purposes, and in so doing, we may have induced in them some of the vices of an industrialised society. They have reciprocated this, and, in turn, they demoralise their exploiters; for I have noticed that the most high-minded and honest of my friends are not averse from a little quiet cheating where eggs are concerned.

  I won’t say more about the unfair promise by which I was inveigled into the Poultry Society, and which led me straight to that poultry show, but I still remember the fall of a lady, whom I have always admired as a shining light of the British aristocracy, as well as of the poultry world. All eggs were sold by our society under the strictest guarantees of freshness and quality, and this lady one day paid a surprise visit to her depot to watch the packing process. She found the manager washing eggs in a dark-brown solution which was new to her as a poultry farmer.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Coffee, m’lady,” was the reply, with rather a guilty look.

  “Coffee?” she repeated puzzled. “ Why coffee?”

  “We have got a very good order for brown eggs,” the manager now explained.

  And how did my friend react to this insidious temptation? She decided that the eggs, in the houses of these pernickety customers, would doubtless make their appearance with the breakfast coffee, so they could not possibly be harmed by a preliminary introduction to the same beverage before leaving the depot. But would she so have fallen if she had not already entered the immoral world ruled by cocks and hens?

  I cannot believe it, and, realising the moral risks which we so obviously run in exposing ourselves to contamination by these dangerous dwellers in our backyards, I am strengthened in my views about hens. My friends sometimes say to me, in the self-righteous tones which suggest a practical knowledge of hen-coops, demanding an awe-stricken respect, “ Of course you ought to keep a few hens in your backyard”. Then such fury rises in my breast that it is all I can do to preserve, outwardly, my accustomed inane expression of gentle good humour.

  Not long ago, I much enjoyed a railway journey to London in
the same carriage with some City men, who appeared to be so very important that there was no doubt that they must have been “City Magnates”. On their way, they fell to discussing this egg controversy. They had all fallen into the snare. Egged on by their wives, they had bought pullets at prodigious prices, in the sure and certain hope of prodigious results. Each wife had met someone playing bridge, who knew someone, who knew someone else, who lived entirely on the produce of two or three hens. These, in turn, lived entirely on the crumbs which fell from these (presumably) rich mens tables. The crumbs had obviously fallen from the remains of the diet of eggs laid by those same two or three hens. I wondered if this was a “vicious circle’’; and with my prejudiced ideas on the subject of the morality of hens, I was inclined to think so.

  Now the magnates discussed their Backyard Balance Sheets. Each of them boasted that they had had some eggs for breakfast. Yes. Certainly. Some. None at all between October and January, of course. No one could expect that, but quite a nice little lot in March. In fact, one of them had, during that month, “laid down” some twenty-two eggs for winter consumption, as well as feasting on pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.

  Now they proceeded to translate this balance sheet into cash. It was less satisfactory. Rather more than one shilling per egg, over and above an unspecified amount of unpaid labour. One of the wives had been cunning enough to make a few extra slices of toast for breakfast every morning, and these added appreciably to the “house scraps’’, as well as adding some of the grit required to keep the hens in condition. The magnates were amused. They laughed a lot, and agreed that they had made a fine contribution to the war effort.

  A surly old man, who, throughout this conversation, had seemed entirely absorbed in the Financial Times, now spoke for the first time.

  “Better have put the money into War Loan,” he snarled; and I should have agreed with him, if he hadn’t spoken in such a cross voice.

  But the magnates had not made me change my opinion. They were rich, and could afford to laugh at the price of their eggs. I know indeed that one must give the lodgers something for breakfast, and no one can be more delighted than I, if that something is occasionally a new-laid egg presented to me by a friendly neighbour, who has been sporting enough to take the risk involved in those backyard hens. For it is a risk. Who can deny it; Before buying the very small but essential allowance of grain required to make those hens lay, you must hand over your coupons for “Shell Eggs”. And if your hens are lazy, and won’t lay the calculated number of eggs, your gamble is a dead loss.

  To return to my personal experience of the poultry world, I shall always be glad that I ran that Society, as it brought me into closer touch with farmers than with hens. There is no comparison between the two. I vote for farmers every time. They are a most human and delightful race, and I am thankful to know that many of them have been my friends from that day to this.

  In those old days, few farmers were really interested in poultry. Most of those who were, generally concentrated on special breeds and sold sittings of eggs, at prodigious prices, for breeding, not for eating. The common or garden hens which snatched and scratched their living in the rickyards, were looked upon as the hobby of the womenkind, and any profit from them was “Pin money for Farmers’ Wives”. If, however, I were a farmer’s wife in these days of the second World War, I think I should change my opinion as to the best way of obtaining eggs. I could escape that gamble with coupons, and leave my hens to scratch for themselves in the farmyard.

  But even when, by fair means or foul, you have escaped the many pitfalls which lie in the pathway of him who would fain walk honestly among eggs, shell eggs, dried eggs, egg powder, and egg-producing foods, and when you have succeeded in enticing the long-desired “ new-laids” out of those tricky hens of yours—even then you are not out of the wood. Unless you eat them all yourself, those eggs must be disposed of “ according to the regulations”. This is really as difficult as getting an egg laid in the first place. Some time ago, I went with a farmer friend to see his poultry farm. In the packing-room was the henwife, a dear old lady who had been for many years in charge of the poultry at this place. She was what would now be called old-fashioned, for she had been brought up to know the difference between a “ new-laid” and an “ election” egg. She now sat weeping amid stacks of those well-known egg-boxes which each hold twelve dozen eggs, and which, in old days, would have made her glow with pride.

  “They’re all full,” she said, “and the Government won’t take them away. That bottom row was put there three weeks ago. And the next row, a fortnight. These ’ere on top are last week’s. But they won’t collect ’em till next week, and we ’ad such a name for our new-laids. And they take ’em all together—the new-laids with month-olds. Why, we never saw an egg of that age on this farm. It breaks my very ’eart, it do.”

  “It’s a case of the lowest common denominator,” said the farmer grimly. “ Our best eggs go to market jumbled up with the cookers. Those of us who had a reputation to lose in the poultry market would rather get rid of the whole lot. I shall soon come to that. Most of my friends have.”

  Now I believe that no Government regulation is entirely unreasonable, or, at any rate, that none is quite illogical. But, on the other hand, I have always thought that logic itself is the most unreasonable of all branches of knowledge. Apparently, you cannot convict a logician of illogicality, if his conclusions can be legitimately drawn from his premise. But what if the premise is false? Logicians make no answer here, and leave Dean Swift with the best of the argument:

  “Her foe’s conclusions were not sound,

  From premisses erroneous brought.”

  And in spite of the most effective weapons used by the opposition at election meetings, I shall never believe that you are sure to reach a sound conclusion if you start with a rotten egg.

  But, after all, it is unfair to say that the policy which has resulted in the diminution of our poultry stocks, begins with a rotten egg, though it may end in one. The reason for the embargo on poultry food is that the weight of grain to be imported in order to keep the fowls alive, is greater than the weight of food which can be expected from them. If this is so, I think that a flock of poultry should be treated like a pack of hounds. Only a few should be allowed to live, to be bred from in happier times.

  I suppose it is because people are so afraid of breaking the regulations that we now hear nothing of the tricks, which were practised in my poultry days, for deceiving the hens into laying more eggs. There was one system which banked on the brainlessness of the hens, as being stronger in them than the ordinary laws of reproduction. The birds were kept in darkened pens, which, about three times a day, were brilliantly illuminated by a light from the east. The hens were always taken in by this “ phantom of false morning’’, and, with one consent, they fled clucking to their nests, there to produce a new-laid egg three times a day. Poultry-keepers who can demonstrate their success in this Maskelyne and Cooke deception, might certainly be considered to have qualified for a substantial ration of poultry food, for the produce of their pens must always bring them out on the right side of the Great Grain Gamble.

  Chapter IX

  THE RISING GENERATION

  I remember thinking, when the war began, that, however incapable we older people might be of dealing with the future which was opening before the world (or rather closing down upon it), yet I felt sure that the rising generation would rise to it. I believe this more than ever now, for I had a party to-day which has shown me how courageously they react to circumstances, such as few people of my age ever had to face.

  My younger lodgers, and various other young people, had met, more or less fortuitously, in my garden; and, as young people have done in all generations, they at once found that they spoke the same language, and that they had plenty to say in it. No one in the party appeared to be over thirty; and as I listened to their talk, which sounded light on the surface, there seemed to be an undercurrent in it, making them
unlike the young people whom I remember in my youth. It is not until now, when, in the silence of my own room, I think over the afternoon, that I realise what it was which they possessed in common, making them like visitors from another planet when I compare them with my own contemporaries.

  Each one of those hoys and girls knew what it meant to step quickly into a boat, with enemies close at hand, and then to push off, leaving everything behind.

  In my day, such things only happened in adventure stories in the Boys’ Own Paper, but now they appear to be everyday occurrences in most parts of the world. Holland, France, Norway, and the coasts of North Africa—from one or other of these widely separated points on the map, these young people had now descended into my garden. Far from them all was any idea of telling a Traveller’s Tale. Their talk was light and easy; yet kindred memories lurked beneath each light-hearted exterior, and now I tried to piece together some fragments which floated to the surface, from each of the half-told stories which I overheard.

  There was one enchanting girl who had never before been in my house, though I had often seen her as a première danseuse in the ballet at Sadler’s Wells. Her figure was of that ineffable slimness which seems the prerogative of ballet dancers: her skin had the flawless pallor and the texture of a magnolia blossom: her eyes really were the colour of sloes. In the summer of 1940, the Sadler’s Wells Company went on tour through Holland. Germany and Holland were then at peace. No cloud had appeared in the particular bit of sky embracing those two countries. Then suddenly, not one, but many, clouds appeared above the city of Rotterdam. They were aeroplanes, and they killed thirty thousand people in two hours. The friendly Germans were offering their “ protection” to this little people, who were their closest neighbours. Thus they demonstrated their “New Order”. It was no world for the fragile figures of ballet dancers, and the Sadler’s Wells Company had to fly. The story of their escape sounds like the scenario of a ballet.