Every time I
wash up a batch of crockery I marvel at the unimaginativeness of human beings who can
travel under the sea and fly through the clouds, and yet have not known how to eliminate
this sordid time-wasting drudgery from their daily lives. If you go into the Bronze Age room in the
British Museum (when it is open again) you will notice that some of our domestic
appliances have barely altered in three thousand years. A saucepan, say, or a comb, is
very much the same thing as it was when the Greeks were besieging Troy. In the same period we have
advanced from the leaky galley to the 50,000 ton liner, and from the ox-cart to the
aeroplane.
It is true that in the modern labour-saving house in which a tiny
percentage of human beings live, a job like washing-up takes rather less time than it used
to. With soap flakes, abundant hot water, plate racks, a well-lighted kitchen, and
what very few houses in England have an easy method of rubbish disposal, you can
make it more tolerable than it used to be when copper dishes had to be scoured with sand
in porous stone sinks by the light of a candle. But certain jobs (for instance, cleaning
out a frying-pan which has had fish in it) are inherently disgusting, and this whole
business of messing about with dishmops and basins of hot water is incredibly primitive.
At this moment the block of flats I live in is partly uninhabitable: not because of enemy
action, but because accumulations of snow have caused water to pour through the roof and
bring down the plaster from the ceilings. It is taken for granted that this calamity will
happen every time there is an exceptionally heavy fall of snow. For three days there was
no water in the taps because the pipes were frozen: that, too, is a normal, almost yearly
experience. And the newspapers have just announced that the number of burst pipes is so
enormous that the job of repairing them will not be completed till the end of 1945
when, I suppose, there will be another big frost and they will all burst again. If our
methods of making war had kept pace with our methods of keeping house, we should be just
about on the verge of discovering gunpowder.
To come back to washing-up. Like sweeping, scrubbing and dusting, it is of its nature
an uncreative and life-wasting job. You cannot make an art out of it as you can out of
cooking or gardening. What, then, is to be done about it? Well, this whole problem of
housework has three possible solutions. One is to simplify our way of living very greatly;
another is to assume, as our ancestors did, that life on earth is inherently miserable,
and that it is entirely natural for the average women to be a broken-down drudge at the
age of thirty; and the other is to devote as much intelligence to rationalizing the
interiors of our houses as we have devoted to transport and communications.
I fancy we shall choose the third alternative. If one thinks
simply in terms of saving trouble and plans ones home as ruthlessly as one would
plan a machine, it is possible to imagine houses and flats which would be comfortable and
would entail very little work. Central heating, rubbish chutes, proper consumption of
smoke, cornerless rooms, electrically warmed beds and elimination of carpets would make a
lot of difference. But as for washing-up, I see no solution except to do it communally,
like a laundry. Every morning the municipal van will stop at your door and carry off a box
of dirty crocks, handing you a box of clean ones (marked with your initial of course) in
return. This would be hardly more difficult to organize than the daily diaper service
which was operating before the war. And though it would mean that some people would have
to be full-time washers-up, as some people are now full-time laundry-workers, the all-over
saving in labour and fuel would be enormous. The alternatives are to continue fumbling
about with greasy dishmops, or to eat out of paper containers.
A sidelight on the habits of book reviewers.
Some time ago I was commissioned to write an essay for an annual
scrapbook which shall be nameless. At the very last minute (and when I had had the money,
I am glad to say) the publishers decided that my essay must be suppressed. By this time
the book was actually in process of being bound. The essay was cut out of every copy, but
for technical reasons it was impossible to remove my name from the list of contributors on
the title page.
Since then I have received a number of press cuttings referring
to this book. In each case I am mentioned as being among the contributors, and
not one reviewer has yet spotted that the contribution attributed to me is not actually
there.
Now that explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned have
been more or less laughed out of existence, I think it is time to start a campaign against
some more of the worn-out and useless metaphors with which our language is littered.
Three that we could well do without out are cross swords
with, ring the changes on, and take up the cudgels for. How
lifeless these and similar expressions have become you can see from the fact that in many
cases people do not even remember their original meaning. What is meant by ringing
the changes, for instance? Probably it once had something to do with church bells,
but one could not be sure without consulting a dictionary, Take up the cudgels
for possibly derives from the almost obsolete game of singlestick. When an
expression has moved as far from its original meaning as this, its value as a metaphor
that is, its power of providing a concrete illustration has vanished. There
is no sense whatever in writing X took up the cudgels for Y. One should either
say X defended Y or think of a new metaphor which genuinely makes ones
meaning more vivid.
In some cases these overworked expressions have actually been
severed from their original meaning by means of a misspelling. An example is plain
sailing (plane sailing). And the expression toe the line is now coming
to be spelled quite frequently tow the line. People who are capable of this
kind of thing evidently dont attach any definite meaning to the words they use.
I wonder whether people read Bret
Harte nowadays. I do not know why, but for an hour past some stanzas from
The Society upon the Stanislaus have been running in my head. It describes a
meeting of an archaeological society which ended in disorder:
Then Abner Dean of Angels raised a point of order, when
A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen;
And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled upon the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.