Governments of the historical era who wanted to distract public attention from their greed or uselessness usually went to war, but when war with outsiders seemed too dangerous or expensive they declared war on a part of those they ruled, and for at least two thousand years Jews and gangrels were the traditional victims. Between 1942 and 44 the German government tried to kill all the gipsies and Jews in Europe and killed about six million of each. In 1990 the British Home Secretary (a politician employed to protect British households) accompanied a police attack on a camp of gangrels on the ancient common of Glastonbury. Men and women were clubbed, their mobile homes smashed with truncheons, and next day the British Prime Minister announced in Parliament, “I see it as my duty to make life hard for these people.” Yet while making life hard for these people governments who served big property owners kept making people homeless. At the start of the twenty-first century for every tramp, gipsy, tinker or vagrant who liked the life there were a dozen too poor to rent a home and twice as many migrants in temporary accommodation where employers used them to cheapen the wages of settled workers. Before homes became self-supporting and the commons were restored to everyone most people became travellers after forced eviction.
CHAPTER TWO — PRIVATE HOUSES
Page 24.
A stately woman of fifty was mother that day.
Every home had at least six experienced women who could order the powerplant and who did the job by turns, a week at a time. During that week whoever did the job was regarded as mother of the whole household. It was hard work so no younger women wanted so stern a title. Besides, many girls bore children when too young to patiently nurse them. In modern homes no infant was in danger of neglect. Most attached themselves to an aunt (the title given to any childbearing woman over eighteen) or granny (a title given to all women past childbearing).
Page 25.
Silencing the organ she attended to the orders of the day.
The organ could draw from the powerplant every recorded form of music, art and industry less than the diameter of the stalk. All housemothers were skilled musicians since anyone who could play Bach’s Mass circa 1740 easily managed the fingering which summoned the components of a Triumph motor cycle circa 1956. No skill in fingering was needed to make simple substances like chocolate or dynamite, though for health reasons organists kept this knowledge from children. (Note: the noise, stink and danger of the oil-fired Triumph made many adolescent youths prefer it to the safer, cleaner, more efficient models of the twenty-first century.)
Elastoplast
Trade name of an antiseptic adhesive bandage first manufactured in the early twentieth century.
Page 25.
The cooks [ordered] milk, cheese, flour, sugar, coffee beans.
The extra fertilizing of the powerplants’ roots after large funerals let them deliver meat with unusual speed. Most families avoided the taint of cannibalism by being vegetarian for a fortnight unless hunters brought in game from the commons.
Page 26.
Granny Tibs was one hundred and twenty.
Granny Tibs was not an immortal. Her age (like the greater average height) had grown naturally with modern housekeeping, which used the elderly with affection and respect. The link between long lives and respect for them was first discovered by a joint team of U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. scientists who visited the Russian Caucasus in the late twentieth century, investigating rumours of unusual longevity there. They found the rumours true, and that the longevity had little to do with diet and climate. Their discovery was tersely summed up by the Anglo-American Alistair Cooke who said, “If you want to live a long time teach your children to love you, and your grandchildren to revere you.”
Page 29.
A marble bird-table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier.
This must have been derived from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s pond sculpture in the garden of Little Sparta, near Biggar in Lanarkshire.
Page 30.
A fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house.
Powerplants could synthesize any form of healthy nourishment but food connoisseurs believed that synthesized foods more elaborate than maize, rice or cornflour lacked the flavour of natural growth, were as tasteless as the food in days when vegetables and livestock had their growth forced by factory farming and genetic engineering, their decay retarded by freezing, atomic radiation and chemical additions. Apart from grain crops the foods ordered from the powerplant were those which could not be grown locally such as tea, coffee, sugar, oranges and lemons in northern Europe. All modern households had large kitchen gardens. Berrying, nutting and mushroom picking on the commons were popular seasonal pastimes, hunting and fishing were popular sports. The increasing popularity of these activities during the last days of the early matriarchy were among the factors which helped humanity survive the great plague with so little loss of life.
Page 30.
On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife.
In northern Europe the henwife of large households had a status which gave her a place in folklore. Her work with poultry outside the walls made her a commoner, but she brought her produce directly to the senior lady of the manor, since fowls were meat for nobility when the main diet of the lower classes was flesh of beasts killed and salted at the onset of winter. The henwife’s permit to enter or leave the great house when she chose made her inconvenient to the janitor or doorkeeper. A fifteenth-century Scottish poet (sometimes thought to be Dunbar) tells how his wife dies of thirst, goes to heaven, gets work as the Mother of God’s henwife, “holds Saint Peter at strife”, and finding the ale of heaven sour, works in a public house outside the walls for travellers on the way there. The likeness between this henwife and Wat Dryhope’s mother is a consequence of their profession.
… Saint Mary’s Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan.
The wooded character of this scene is recorded in the ancient ballad of the Outlaw Murray, which describes King James Stuart leading an army of full five thousand men against the border clans:
They saw the derke forest them before,
They thought it awesome for to see.
In the eighteenth century this ancient forest was destroyed by a system of housekeeping based upon sheep and the wool industry. Sir Walter Scott later celebrated the transparency of the loch but also its arboreal devastation:
Oft in my mind such thoughts awake
By lone Saint Mary’s silent lake.
Thou know’st it well — nor fen nor sedge
Pollute the pure lake’s crystal edge;
Abrupt and clear the mountains sink
At once upon the level brink;
And just a trace of silver sand
Marks where the water meets the land.
Far in the mirror, bright and blue
Each hill’s huge outline you may view;
Shaggy with heath, but lonely, bare,