My house is full of the smell of freshly baked bread! It's an intoxicating aroma. I haven't baked bread for years but a recent holiday in Wales, staying in a tiny rustic stone cottage with a bubbling stream running past the kitchen window, awakened memories of previous years and got me in the mood. In those days, living in a more laid-back country location, I had embraced the joys (and occasional disappointments) of home baking, arts and crafts and home grown veg. In Wales this last summer we bought home made Welsh cakes and Bara Brith (a mouthwatering, dark brown, fruity tea bread, sliced and spread thickly with butter). We visited craft workshops and admired the work of local potters, artists, weavers and jewellers. We enjoyed the slower pace of life and the more 'grass roots' life style that we found there and hankered after the past.
In my enthusiasm I returned home, armed with strong white bread flour, stone ground wholemeal wheat flour and little bags of yeast, ready to recover my lost skills and try my hand at 'country living'. For that's what it's all about really. Nothing like this is ever just about 'the thing in itself'. We're all such romantic dreamers. So the smell of fresh bread in my kitchen conjures up pictures in my mind of scrubbed pine tables in a big country kitchen, of bright, shiny pots and pans hanging from racks and freshly-picked herbs drying on hooks, suspended from the ceiling. All at once I am in one of those 'Escape to the Country' dream homes where the show's latest participants, a retired couple, are drooling over their ideal kitchen: gleaming white, Shaker-style cupoards, fitted from floor to ceiling, with a handy 'island' in the middle. It's the focal point, the hub of their home, where they are going to entertain family and friends to their mid-life experiment in community living. Everything in life has 'associations', capturing our imaginations and transporting us to places we would rather be.
One of my favourite books* opens with a scene in which Mrs. Ramsay, her husband and her youngest son, James, are together in the living room of the country house where each year they spend the summer months, close to the sea. At six years old, James is portrayed as a sensitive child. He is easily affected by moods and atmospheres and by the words and unspoken inferences of his parents. Virginia Woolf describes in careful detail how James belongs to 'that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand." James sits on the floor, cutting out pictures from a catalogue. He is busy with a refrigerator. His mother tells him of the proposed outing they will make tomorrow, in a little boat, to visit the lighthouse keeper, if the weather is fine. At this news, the refrigerator picture, for James, is endowed with heavenly bliss. It is 'fringed with joy'. "But it won't be fine" pronounces his more down-to-earth father. He was incapable of untruth, Woolf tells us, "never alterated a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children." In his intense disappointment, James's world crumbles and he is filled with feelings of hatred. So the refrigerator becomes the target for the little boy's emotions, first joy, then hate and his mother quickly tries to find another picture for him to cut out to distract him from life's harsh realities.
Life is all about associations. Some things are fringed with joy. Others have more upsetting connotations. We love home made bread because it embodies some perceived country idyll. We hate the name 'Eric' because of the little boy who sat next to us in class and pulled our plaits when we were five. "It is what it is" my ex-boss used to say. No it isn't! Things are rarely just themselves.
* To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf. Published 1927.
No comments:
Post a Comment