4. Delivering letters, because the postman doesn't like walking up the
hill.
Now I maintain that there would be insuperable difficulties in making
George carry out all these various activities under the lash. Anyone, I
suppose, under a properly constituted Soviet _régime_ might be detailed as
George Harrison's lasher, Mr. SMILLIE, Mr. G.K. CHESTERTON, Lord CURZON,
Mr. CLYNES or the Duke of NORTHUMBERLAND. Can you imagine Mr. CHESTERTON
walking about on guard duty in a rabbit warren while George Harrison set
springes in accordance with the principles laid down by the Third
Internationale for rabbit-snaring? or the Duke of NORTHUMBERLAND standing
in gum-boots in the middle of a stream and flicking George Harrison about
the trousers if he didn't rake out old tin cans at forty to the minute as
laid down by the Moscow Code? Now I ask you.
And then there is this half a herring and boiled bird-seed arrangement.
George Harrison has a sister of eighteen who kindly comes in to do cooking
and housework for us every day. She thinks us frightfully queer, and if we
bought some herrings and bird-seed and asked her to cook them for us I have
no doubt she would oblige, but, though she doesn't much care what we eat,
there are a lot of things she doesn't eat herself, and fish is one of them.
Porridge, which, I suppose, is a kind of bird-seed, is another.
Not that Jane calls it eating, by the way. She calls it "touching," and
there are any number of things that she doesn't fancy touching. She will
touch enormous platefuls of bacon or sausages or almost any derivative of
the domestic pig, and the same applies to puddings and cake. But beef and
mutton she does not touch, nor margarine, and we have to be almost as
careful that Jane Harrison has plenty of the right things to touch as about
the whole of the rest of the family.
Now here again I think it would be quite possible to induce the people of
England in our large industrial centres to ration themselves on boiled
herring and bird-seed. We should not use those names, of course. The
advertisements on the hoardings would say:--