“Wild, is he? _Wild?_” she exclaimed; “and don’t they charge you
nothing for them?”
She finished the room with one eye perpetually on the windows.
Having a healthy appetite, that had been touched up a little extra with
the hill-top air, she was more than willing to help me get the meal
ready. I made the usual preliminary inquiries as to her experience in
regard to cooking, and was surprised to hear that she had actually won
a silver medal at a Cookery Exhibition.
Surely this was unexpected good fortune, and I asked myself if I really
deserved such a heaven-sent boon as a silver-medalled cook! I decided,
however, that in view of all I had undergone in the past at the hands
of those who were not so decorated, it was nothing more than my due
that I should be so blessed in my declining years. My only regret was
that war-time would allow so little scope for her genius!
Feeling very light-hearted, and wondering how she would get on with
Abigail when cook gave one of her periodical notices and I placed
Eileen on the permanent staff, I said: “Then I needn’t bother about the
breakfast! We will have poached eggs on toast. I’ll lay the cloth while
you get them ready.”
But she looked at me doubtfully. “We didn’t ever have _poached_ eggs at
the boarding-house,” she began. “But I think I know how to do ’em. You
just break them on the gridiron over the top of the fire, don’t you?”
After all, it was I who poached the eggs, while Eileen explained that
the medal had been awarded to the cookery class at the orphanage _en
bloc_, for making a Swiss roll. . . . No, unfortunately, she didn’t know
how to make Swiss roll either, as she had been down with scarlet fever
that term. Still, it was her class that got the medal, so of course she
had as much right to it as anyone else.
I trust I bore the disappointment complacently. I’m fairly hardened to
such sudden drops in the kitchen thermometer.
The great thing about Eileen was her willingness, and her anxiety to
learn.
When I was seeking to impart knowledge, however, she seemed to think
it was for her also to contribute some general information. Hence our
duologues often ran on these lines:—
“When you make the tea or coffee, be sure that the water is _quite_
boiling; or else——”
“Yes, ma’am. Do you know, one of the young gentlemen where I used to
live, couldn’t help being bald, no matter if he used a whole bottle of
hair restorer every day. It ran in his fambly.”
“Really! Well, now we’ll fry some bacon. You put a little of the bacon
fat from this jar into the pan first of all to get hot. Like this.”
“Yes, ma’am. Isn’t it strange, grandmother won’t never have red roses
in her bonnet. Can’t bear red.”
She also excelled in asking questions; from morn till eve life seemed
one long series of conundrums which I was expected to answer. I never
realized before how many queries country life presents; hitherto it had
seemed to me such a simple, straightforward state of existence.
An old man had been secured to do an occasional odd day’s work (at
highest London prices). He described some misfortune that, last autumn,
had befallen “Hussy,” the cow who comes for change of air into my
orchard at intervals—an apple she had eaten (one of mine, of course)
being blamed for the fact that her milk turned off, “like vinegar
’twas.”
Eileen—in common with every other young human under twenty years of
age—thrilled at the word apple, and inquired if “Hussy” had stolen it
off a tree?
“Stolen it off a tree!” scoffed the man; “and why should she bother to
creek her neck up’ards when they was lying by the thousand as thick on
the ground in that thur orchard as—as—well, as apples!”
Eileen looked incredulous.
“Yes, by the thousand they was, and not wuth picking up, no one wanted
’em; no men to make cider; no sugar to jam ’em; child’un all got colic
a’ready as bad as bad could be, couldn’t swaller no more; too damp to
keep. Ay, and we that short o’ cider as we be!” And the aged one—who
had been coining money hand over fist, with letter carrying, and the
sale of eggs and poultry, and a couple of pigs, and the hay in his
paddock, to say nothing of gilt-edged easy little jobs waiting for him
all about the place at any price per hour he cared to charge, and old
age pensions paid regularly to himself and wife—paused to shake his
head and sigh over the misfortunes of the times.
Eileen was likewise moved. To think of it—unwanted apples! And no one
to eat them! She reverted to the phenomenon several times that day,
with such queries as these:—If eating one apple turns the cow’s milk
to vinegar, would eating fifty turn it to cider? If so, wouldn’t it be
cheaper to make the cow grow cider, as the old man said cider had riz
to 7_d._ a quart, and milk was only 6_d._ You would then make a penny a
quart profit that you could put into the Savings Bank to help the War.
After watching some vegecultural operations she inquired: “Why is it,
when he puts potatoes in the ground and beans in the ground all the
same way, the beans come out at the top of the plant and the potatoes
come out at the bottom?”
Another time it was: “What do they use the sting of the nettle for?”
And when she had enlarged her garden vocabulary, she inquired: “Is a
spider an annual or a perennial?”
“I can’t find a tap out there to turn off the water,” and she indicated
the spring outside the gate, tumbling out of a little wooden trough
wedged in among the rocks, into a pool below. “I suppose they stop it
at the main. What time do they turn it off? . . . _Never?_ It runs like
that always! Then how long is it before the whole lot runs away and
it’s all dried up? And don’t they ever come down on you for wasting the
water?”
* * * * *
Yet more accomplished people than Eileen have often surprised one by
their ignorance. An experienced and supposed-to-be-highly-qualified
cook came to me one day with the sad news that we couldn’t have any
stuffing with the duck for dinner that day as there wasn’t a single
bottle of herbs in the house. I reminded her that there was an almost
unlimited amount of everything in the garden, including a sage bush
growing on a wall that now measures 15 feet by 6 feet. “In the garden?”
she repeated in surprise. “But I didn’t know it was good unless it was
bottled! You don’t mean that country people use those things raw?”