[Essay]
Between the Lines, to Read
The inscription is written in faded ink and copperplate script.
Nancy dear,
This book will make clear
Home problems through which you must steer.
When stews will burn,
You soon will learn,
Herein to find the remedy
With hints for every expediency.
Fondest Birthday Greetings,
Your Pal
’Johnnie’
July 10, 1945, Durban
The title of the book appears on the next page. Mrs. Beeton’s Hints to Housewives, and below that a subtitle, with selections on Labour-Saving, Household Work, Shopping, Table Service, Servants’ Duties and First Aid.
Overleaf the preface assures readers that housekeeping is ‘the very lynchpin of life’s daily round.’ The preface is 25 lines long. The word housekeeping appears five times and the word duty seven. No matter, the real treasure of this book appears in the table of contents, arranged by topic, on the next page. It begins:
Accidents
Adhesive Plaster
Almonds, to Peel
Ants
Apoplectic Fits
Arms, to Whiten
’At Home’ Teas
I have no idea who ‘Johnnie’ is except that she was a fan of cute masculine nicknames, unnecessary capitalisation and had no great facility for poetry.
The Nancy that appears in the inscription is my paternal grandmother. On 10 July 1945 she celebrated her 25th birthday. Several months after that she married my grandfather in Durban after he returned from fighting a war 5000 kilometres away.
Brill, to Carve
Bronzes, to Clean
Bruises
Brushes
Buckskin, to Condition
Bunions
Burglary and theft
When she died 50 years later, my grandfather kept the book. He gave it to my father, who gave it to me after an argument we had about the role that women played in British imperialism. I was 25 at the time. Two years previously I had graduated with a liberal arts degree from a university named for Cecil John Rhodes.
Cheese, to choose
Chickens, to Dress
Chilblains
Children
Chimney on Fire
China
Cindersifters
The author of the book, Isabella Beeton, was an English journalist and editor. She wrote the first version of the book in 1861 when she too was 25 years old. At the time she had two children and had suffered at least four miscarriages, probably due to the undiagnosed syphilis that had been a wedding gift from her husband. She died three years later of puerperal fever, two days after giving birth to her fourth child. Her husband sold the rights to the book a couple of years later.
Damp Beds
Dances and Evening Parties
Darning
Decanters
Diamonds, to Clean
Diarrhoea
Dinner, to lay the Cloth
The new publishers had great success with the book and it remained in print for the next century. At first the book was in demand because it met the needs of the new middle class springing up in the United Kingdom around the turn of the century. By the 1930s, however, ‘Mrs. Beeton’ was considered an indispensable addition to colonial bookshelves on four continents where it was often given pride of place next to the King James bible.
Earache
Earwigs
Eggs, for salad
Embrocations and liniments
Entremets, Service
Epileptic Fits
Evening Parties
Mrs. Beeton has had an uneasy place on my own bookshelf for more than a decade. Sometimes, on warm nights when the smell of the fynbos wafts off Table Mountain and mixes with the tang of kelp and the sound of Cape Town’s fog horns, I take the book down and study its mottled cloth bindings and gilt lettered spine. I think of all the other bookshelves Mrs. Beeton must have inhabited. I imagine Mrs. Beeton’s spine being cracked under a mosquito net in Mombasa. I think of what Kolkata’s humid heat must do to paper. I guess at the ratio of living rooms in Perth and Brisbane that made roommates of Queen Elizabeth II portraits and Mrs. Beeton books.
Fainting
Feet, Tired
Fish, Marketing Hints
Flowers, to Revive
Freckles
Freezing Machines
Fur, to Clean
I trace a finger down the list of topics and find myself baffled. What, for example, is ptomaine poisoning and why does it merit its own entry, separate from the rest of the poisons (there are at least a dozen)? Why are the majority of illustrations in the book dedicated to ways of folding napkins? What is Housemaid’s Knee and why are there half a dozen methods for removing blood stains from collars?
General Servant
Giddiness
Gilt Frames, to Brighten
Glands, Enlarged
Goose, to Carve
Gramaphone Records, to clean
Gum–boils
And yet I also find the mix of the everyday and the more metaphysical a source of delight. Mrs. Beeton remains equally steadfast and unflappable in the face of ‘haemorrhaging’, ‘night terrors’ and ‘Hands, Chapped’. There is something very appealing about this self–sufficiency. As I run my eye down the list of topics, I often find myself envious of a mindset in which every problem, from the correct way to blanch a pear to what food to serve at a wake, is simple, straightforward, discoverable.
Haemorrhaging
Ham, to Choose
Hands, Chapped
Hinges, Squeaky
Hot Water
Housemaid’s Knee
Hysterics
Mostly though I am ashamed. I think of the distance between ‘Napkins, to Fold’ and ‘Nursery, to Furnish’. I wonder what Mrs. Beeton would say on the subject of mothers being separated from their children. I think of brown hands being made to serve food in white gloves, of the insistence of hot Christmas pudding in the sweltering heat of a Southern hemisphere December and the provenance of the spices used to flavour it.
Indigestion
Insurance
Intoxication
Introductions
When I hold the book in my hands I think about the Imperial system of units, with its quarts and ounces and I wonder how much the book weighs. I think of my grandmother’s Pall Mall laugh. I remember her pumpkin frikkadels, her love of samosas made by her friend Mr Parbhoo, her insistence that all insects were ‘goggas’ (an Afrikaans word derived from a Khoisan term). I remember how she died mute after a stroke, a year into South Africa’s new democracy.
Publicly I claim to keep the book as an outlandish artefact but privately I am haunted by it. In the past I have even considered casting Mrs. Beeton into the sea. I have imagined how the book would arc over the water, how its pages would be consumed by salt water. But instead, whenever I take it down from my bookshelf I decide again that I will keep it. Not only for all the things it names but also for everything it doesn’t say. I keep it for its absences and because I still think that one day I will stumble on the motherlode and see the truth spelled out in black and white in 10–point Baskerville font. I imagine it will read:
Sovereign Land, to Invade