In town a woman’s only outlet, as a rule, is the bargain counter or annual sale or remnant day. These dissipations are denied us in the country, but we make up for it in many other directions. My own particular weakness is jam-jars, and the way I pounce on any round pot, be it glass or earthenware, that looks as though it might be made to hold jelly or jam, is quite a study in efficiency. And, like all expert collectors, my collection has sub-divisions, or perhaps you would call them ramifications; cups that have lost their handles, jugs ditto, glasses that once held a rolled tongue, or fish paste, are all included; and friends, as they bring round a portmanteau full of empty jars at Christmas or on my birthday, say, “It is so nice in your case that one knows what you actually want; so much better to give anyone what they really like, and will use, rather than some useless bit of jewellery.” And I quite agree.
There was one moment when I feared my jars would have to go in the general rending asunder of domestic life caused by the War, even though I had determined to stick to them as long as I could. But when that “one clear call” came for jam-pots, naturally I couldn’t be a traitor to my country, and I decided the jars at least must go, even though I might perhaps retain the handleless cups and jugs. So I told Abigail to let me know when the grocer called.
I interviewed the young lady wearing high white kid boots and an amethyst pendant on her bare chest, who brought my next large consignment of groceries, that had to be bought in order to secure a little sugar. But when she heard that there were jam-jars to go back, she looked at me coldly from the doorstep, and hurriedly pushing her basket further up her arm (lest I should attempt to force them into it, I presume), the Abyssinian gold bracelets clanking the while, haughtily informed me that her motor was for delivery only, not for the cartage of empties, and suggested that I should write the manager and see if he would consent to receive them.
I’m only human after all, and naturally any woman’s temperature would rise in the face of such spurning of her free-will offerings. I didn’t write, and I’m using the jam-jars still. The nation doesn’t seem any the worse off—though Virginia points out to me that the War might have ended sooner had I insisted on handing them over; she says every little helps, as is proved by the fact that the very week she put her first 15s. 6d. into Exchequer Bonds the Government got the first “tank.”
At any rate, as I never eat preserves myself, I can still, even with a restricted sugar allowance, enjoy the peculiar pleasure that arises within a woman’s soul when she is occasionally able to say, quite casually as it were, to a friend: “Would you care to have a pot of my new gooseberry and cinnamon jam? They say it’s rather good, though of course—etc.” And the friend replies: “Oh, I should love it, dear; such a treat; that jar of ginger marmalade I took home last time was positively delicious. Everyone said—etc.”
One favourite item for collection among the cottagers is old bottles, and the stock you will see in some of their outhouses is often most extensive and varied. On one occasion an old man who was doing some odd days’ work for me about the garden, in the absence of the handyman, was deploring the way the rabbits devastated the cabbages.
“I’ll get rid on ’em for ’ee if you’ll leave ’em to me!” he assured me. I said I only wished he would, as they are a real plague at times.
Imagine my horror a few days later when I took some friends along to see the vegetables, to discover a legion of empty whisky bottles, labels intact, neck downwards in the soil, and dotted about the vegetable garden in all directions. The old man explained that they were put there to skeer they rabbits, as they was dreadful frit of bottles! But my friends refused to believe that so honest-looking an old Amos could have brought them with him!
The inside of the wood-house is as aloof as are the hills from our machinery-driven, smoke-begrimed, petrol-flavoured twentieth century. Even when work is in progress, here is no hustle; there are no short cuts to the other side of a larch log; the saw must go steadily, patiently, almost slowly, if it hopes to get through the tree at one standing.