Between the Lines, To Read

Ambre Nicolson

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 5 times and the word duty, 7. 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 4 miscarriages, probably due to the undiagnosed syphilis that had been a wedding gift from her husband. She died 3 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 saltwater. 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