Country Mouse Giles Wood
‘ RAUS!’ I barked as I intercepted my younger daughter in the act of purloining the very last bag of rice from the secret store cupboard. It’s difficult to keep secrets in a small cottage.
I had hidden our emergency rations in a grotesque Irish sideboard that Mary insisted on having two beefy Ulstermen heave across the Irish Sea to the mainland in a pantechnicon.
This Victorian monstrosity, encrusted with crudely carved ornamental songbirds, now occupies a quarter of the space of Room One. Its presence there signifies the compromises that marriages entail, and in return Mary runs the house. With no head for figures I am happy to leave her in charge of anything to do with bills and brown envelopes while I have taken on the roles of cook, chauffeur and quartermaster.
I had had the vision and foresight, long before lockdown was imposed, to stock up with essential rations in case of emergency, and to use the sideboard, where no probing hands normally wander, to house the hoard.
As quartermaster, I admit I am quietly looking forward to the inevitable phase when supplies begin to run dry. My guiding light will be the sententious slogan of food writer Michael Pollan: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’
It will not be a popular phase with the rest of the family, but to me, the image of Van Gogh’s potato eaters, huddled around a table making the most of meagre supplies, has always been a positive one.
To get back to my order of ‘ Raus!’ I have never used German expletives before now. But then, in peacetime, my authority was never so tested. Wartime memories have generally faded. No longer do boys with outstretched arms, in imitation of bomber aircraft, run down school corridors in tight formation, making machine-gun noises. Neither do they read comics about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, as I did.
Why is it that the German language seems so much more likely to elicit parental respect than our native tongue? Is it the staccato nature of the delivery?
Other German phrases have been unlocked from my early childhood. They were in constant use by my father, whose National Service involved a brief spell as a Commissioned Officer near Düsseldorf. ‘ Aussteigen!’ he would command when we had spent too long in the bath. ‘ Gehen Sie ganzer ein!’, he’d say when he wanted us all to jump out of a boat into a rubber dinghy.
The army had a galvanising effect on my father. His brief spell in the military was said to have ‘made’ him, in that it stopped him, an orphan by 17, from becoming a drifter. He liked the routines and the fastidious neatness, the kit boxes with emergency supplies, flasks, maps and torches, the discipline and the chains of command, a hierarchy he extended post-army to his own family, referring to us all as ‘troops’ when giving orders.
Achtung! (‘Look out!’) seems the appropriate warning as I barge into the kitchen, inadvertently crushing the occupant of the tiny space ’twixt door and fridge, who is busily preparing her third Bloody Mary of the evening for a virtual drink with friends on Zoom. And when she protests that the quartermaster needs to reorder Tabasco, I hear myself growling, ‘ Beeilen Sie sich!’ (‘Get a move on!’)
I’m not saying my father’s paternalistic authority did any harm to my siblings and me, but today this sort of thing is known as toxic masculinity and my daughters and wife seem less inclined to kowtow.
In fact, on day 40 of lockdown, Mary remarked, in mocking tones, that she has never seen me in more buoyant form. This was not intended as a compliment. She claims the improvement in my mood and my enhanced physical prowess (in the garden) are directly attributable to what she calls Fritzl Syndrome. ‘You are enjoying having power over three helpless women who can’t drive and can’t dilute your company with that of any more emollient outsiders,’ she said.
Mary has the wrong end of the stick with this tasteless comparison. I am not enjoying my ‘power’ over the women, nor am I locking them in basements. What I am enjoying is the reassuring confirmation that, at a time of crisis, the male brain is superior when it comes to strategising. The females in this house have shown me that their thinking is woolly, compared with male, survivalfocused thinking which is not derailed by emotional urges.
One of the daughters, for example, wants to use the opportunity of the empty country lanes for driving lessons. Nice idea – but I can see that this would be a mistake as our car is far too heavy and unwieldy for a stripling of a girl, and the result would be that she would lose confidence, not gain it.
It is increasingly difficult to exercise any form of paternal authority in a society where men have lost their traditional role as judge, jury and executioner. Moreover, I have discovered that in this household of Little – and some Big – Women kleptomaniacs, even keeping control of the food hoard is denied me.
It turns out that there is a service called Amazon Pantry. At the click of a button, it allows them to order overpriced items on the internet that will be delivered direct to the doorstep, thus outmanoeuvring the authority of the cottage quartermaster at a stroke.
Gott im Himmel!