Home life
Waste not, want not
Alice Thomas Ellis
e are still tidying up. I say 'still' but what I mean is we start doing it and are then so overwhelmed by the Augean-stable nature of the task that we have a cup of coffee and decide we'd better go and do some shopping. Contemplating the state of the whole house leads to despair. Every cupboard, every drawer, every corner needs sorting out. Even the jugs are full,of old bills, and all the little bowls have keys in them. Nobody knows what locks these keys are supposed to open, but we don't dare throw them away in case there might be a locked box somewhere containing birth certificates and passports and one of the keys might pertain to this efficient and mythical box.
My system with documents and letters is usually to stuff them into the handbag of the moment until I can't close it any more and then I stuff that into the bottom of the wardrobe and buy a new one. Janet made me haul them all out the other day, and I emptied them and put their contents into plastic bags and put those in the bottom of the wardrobe. Then I threw the handbags away. I don't know why this should seem tidier, but it does. Rearranging things gives one the illusion that one is tidying up. Alfie is preparing to ascend into the loft in order to make room for the pictures which occupy a sizable alcove in my 'study'. I have never been in the loft, because it gives me vertigo, but I have an idea of the state of it. There are prams up there, and papier-mâché baths for babies, and wicker cradles for them, and boxes full of baby clothes, and ball-gowns 'in case our chil- dren have children; and all these items might come in useful. There are boxes full
`Face it, the satyr boom is over.' of broken china waiting to be mended, and trunks of old magazines and documents belonging to a lodger we once had who I think was a spy. I think this because he was a poet and rich, and that is unusual. He spent a lot of time lecturing to students in communist countries and used Fortnums as his corner grocer shop.
There are already a great many awful Victorian pictures in the loft of rosy- cheeked kiddies and big hairy dogs and angels. This is because once upon a time I couldn't resist buying them from the junk stall in the market simply because they cost sixpence. They have the oddly sinister character that only the Victorians could achieve. You have the impression that the moment the artist put down his brush the dogs ate the children or the angels strang- led them. There's one painting of two winsome little souls on the edge of a cliff with an angel behind them, clearly with the fixed intention of pushing them off. I don't think I ever meant to . hang any of these pictures on the walls, so I must have been slightly unhinged when I bought them. There are old gas fires up there and nursery fenders and an iron thing to stand in the fireplace that Alfie's mum threw out when she was tidying up. And there are curtains of cobwebs and carpets of dust, and I expect there are dozens of spiders, alive and dead. We're going to hire a van and transport everything down to the country where there's another loft standing empty except for a few squirrels and maybe a ghost or two.
I had a nice letter from a lady in Holland to say that you could get rid of ghosts by politely asking them to leave, but I don't really want them to go. I find their pre- sence rather flattering, in the same way that one is flattered when bees visit the flowers in the garden. It makes me feel accepted. I was cross with Linda Mary for exorcising the ghost who was breathing at the back of the cottage and all the way up the mountain-side, but I mustn't be selfish. If it was an earthbound spirit and she returned it to the Lord then we can only rejoice. It's much tidier that way.
Alfie has just tidied up the vegetable crock in the kitchen. There was a very old potato in it with huge sprouts growing out of it, so he's buried it in a flower pot in the back yard and perhaps we'll have new potatoes in time for Christmas. Anyone else would have thrown it away, but I have instilled in Alfie a sense of thrift. In a peculiar way untidiness and thrift go together. If you never waste anything then your dwelling place gets so crowded that in the end all that's left to do is throw yourself away. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to re-dispose everything and I'm not going to save old newspapers any more. Some- where in the loft is a gadget for turning old newspapers into logs for the fire. I'm going to tell Alfie he can throw that away.
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