Country Girl: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

snatches of his
histoire
aloud to us, he would take the opportunity to touch my mother’s knee, over her thick lisle stocking, and refer to her as “Mrs. O.,” reiterating what a lady she was. He would also be given tea and fruitcake and then, weary from the
histoire
(my father would have gone up to bed), she would cough and move around, this being the hint for him to leave. When male visitors left, she did two things: she plumped the cushions and smelled the leather seat of the chair, to see if they had farted, and if they had, the removable seat would be lifted out and put on the windowsill to air all night.
    We dreaded tinkers, strapping women in plaid shawls, beating their tin cans on front and back door, insisting that we needed our pots mended and demanding milk, along withmoney. As I had not yet started school, I was given the task of watching out for them when my mother was occupied up in the yard. On many unfortunate occasions they had already come into the kitchen, hussies with their insolent manners demanding things. But one day I was quick enough to spot them as they came in at the lower gate and I yelled for her; we both hid in the shoe closet, which smelled of old shoes and had mice, but it was the only hiding place that did not have a window. We could hear them going all around the house, their threats, their pleadings, since they suspected we were in there, and as they left, they heaped curses on us and swore that we would regret the day.
    That evening, when my mother went to search for her good tan shoes, which she had washed and put to dry on the pier of the gate, they were not to be found. The further we looked, the louder her laments became. She described the shoe cream she had specially bought with which to polish them, she pictured the little worms of shoe cream in the punched holes along the toe cap and instep, she imagined outings that she would now never make in them. She dreaded having to admit that most likely the tinkers had swiped them. It was with reluctance that she told the sergeant, never believing he would take the matter further, except that he did. The shoes were found in the bottom of a pram, covered with ticking and a pillow, in the flea hotel where some of the female members of the tinker families lodged. Others were in caravans over in an empty, haunted field, where they drank and had singsongs and later beat each other up. A summons was served on two women, who had identical names, and to her shame my mother had to appear in the local courthouse, where she was jeered and laughed at by warring tribes of tinkers, especially when she walked up to a stand and identified the shoes as being hers. When the sentence of a fine of fifteen shillings was passed, there was uproar;the judge, banging the table, said a month in jail would do all of them a world of good. The shoes were never the same after that.
    The visitor we most dreaded, after tinkers, was Mad Mabel. She moved with such swiftness: she would appear suddenly, as out of nowhere, tall and fluent and wild-eyed, wielding an ash plant, shouting and hitting out at all before her. She would be in our kitchen scolding our mother for her untidiness and her dirt. The ash plant would bounce off the ledge of the dresser as she took particular exception to the ornamental plates arranged along three shelves, one plate eased into the neighboring plate to make room for the half dozen on each shelf. They had colored paintings of pears and apples and pomegranates, and my mother quaked at the thought of one getting broken. Mabel would then smell the flitches of salted bacon that were hanging up on nails near the cupboard, smell them and say they were rotten. She insisted that we had stolen potatoes and duck eggs from their yard and all must be returned by nightfall. It would be not too long after those fearful visits that we would learn of her being carted off to the lunatic asylum and how she had not wanted to go, had run around the farmyard holding