We asked after her own family. Maudie was getting on splendidly at school, “really a first-class scholard she is, although it’s I that say it. Can read the Bible beautifully now—or at any rate the Testament” (with a desire to be absolutely truthful). “And when I’m writing to her father, and can’t quite rec’lect how to spell a word, she can tell me two or three different ways of spelling it, right off pat!”
At the next cottage we stopped to inquire after a man who had met with an accident, which necessitated the amputation of one leg below the knee. Having given him all our own “Surgical Aid” letters, and fleeced our friends of theirs, I naturally asked why he wasn’t wearing the artificial limb that had been procured? (it was reposing artistically on the top of the chest of drawers in the kitchen, a stuffed sea-gull under a glass shade on one side, balanced by a wedding-cake-top-ornament under glass on the other). Wasn’t it comfortable? I asked. Didn’t it fit?
“Oh, yes’m, thank you; it fits beautiful. But that’s my best leg; and the missus likes me to keep it there where she can show it to everyone, and I only uses it for Sundays and Bank ’Ollerdis.”
Then we looked in on Mrs. Granger, a happy-go-lucky widow who is always passing round the hat. When we knocked at the kitchen door, she was pouring down the sink the liquor in which she had just boiled a piece of bacon. I couldn’t help asking mildly and deferentially: “Have you ever tried using the liquor of boiled bacon for making pea-soup? It’s very nourishing, as well as tasty.”
Mrs. Granger smiled at me indulgently. “Well, ma’am, seeing that I’ve buried two husbands and three children, no one, I fancy, can give me points about feeding a family!”
At Mrs. Jones’s we made a longer call; we simply had to, as we were wanting milk, and she made no move to get it, but merely stood talking. There was the mirror over the parlour mantelpiece, she particularly wanted us to see that. Arundel Jones (aged eleven) had smashed a hole right through the glass when practising bomb-throwing in there. But would you ever know it, the way Patricia (aged seventeen) had decorated it? And as we couldn’t think what to say, we looked long and earnestly at the bunch of artificial and rather faded roses from Patricia’s hat that had been stuck in the hole, with some green paint daubed around on the glass to represent leaves. Fortunately, Mrs. Jones didn’t wait for our opinion—took it for granted, indeed, since there could only be one opinion about such a masterpiece—and proceeded to ask what I thought could be done with so artistic a girl.
And that reminded her, could I tell her where she could write to in London for some Loop Canvas at a penny a yard? Patricia wanted to make some slippers for a young man friend of hers who was at the front, and sweetly pretty too, with forget-me-nots all over; but it said you must have penny Loop Canvas. She had asked for it in Chepstow, but they had never heard of it, the cheapest they had was 1s. 4¾d., and no loops in it at that. But, of course, you could get everything in London.
I had never heard of the canvas myself (and I thought I knew most that was going!), but in any case, she wouldn’t get any canvas at 1d. a yard now, I told her; she had evidently got hold of some very old directions.
No, she hadn’t; it was in last week’s Home Snippets, and she got the periodical out from among an assortment of similar data under the horse-hair sofa squab, to show me.