Who would have thought that I would be spending a sunny Easter afternoon washing oranges in a bowl of soapy water? I had never washed an orange before: nor, I now realise, had I ever washed my hands. That is to say, I had never washed them long enough to raise a proper lather.
If cleanliness really is next to godliness, R and I must be getting nearer each day. And Anna, my lovely cleaning lady, some of whose requirements I picture below, must be approaching sainthood. But what was I to do with all these outlandish preparations now that she was in self-isolation too, and we had to clean the house ourselves?
After reading and re-reading the instructions on each container, I felt quite faint and – being unable to make any of the sprays spray – gave up. We now clean the house the way we always did – with duster, damp cloth and cream cleanser. The only innovation, since reading a really scary piece in The New Scientist, is to pour bleach down the loo.
How, I have been wondering, did my mother cope in the war? She had never had to cook or clean before and, more at home in Russian than English, wouldn’t have been able to read the labels on whatever cleaning products she found in the little Yorkshire town where we were living, not far from the hillside beneath which the Lancaster bombers were being built, and towards which my engineer father set out every morning.
One way or another, my mother learnt to cook and clean and mend and she, who had always loved Alsatians, adopted two stray kittens (Flicka and Poika) who I remember getting in the way when she was bottling eggs in the barrel which had been their plaything.
There was, as I have just told my eleven-year-old grandson, captive in Brooklyn as we are in London, plenty to be frightened of in the war but, even as I write these meant-to-be comforting words – after all, here I still am – I think, to myself, this is DIFFERENT. We were afraid of bombs, but not of letters and parcels . . .
Now, every letter that drops onto the doormat, every package left on the doorstep presents a death threat. A pretty pass indeed, when we find ourselves fearful of inanimate things.
Oh, for the days when, in spite of there being a war going on, we played Pass the Parcel, and packages meant presents, and I didn’t have to leave my beloved Tiny Tots and Chicks Own on the doormat overnight, or bake them in the oven to make them safe to touch.
