Home life
The crumpet season
Alice Thomas Ellis
Winter is coming. There's a nip in the air. The nights are drawing in. The leaves of brown are tumbling down, although belatedly. We drove to Southampton the other day and nearly all the trees were still stubbornly green, owing, I believe, to the lateness of spring and the wetness of the summer, but I remember one year after a comparably wet season when everything turned golden in a mad rush in early September. I don't think anyone really understands the rules. The cats are aware of the coming of the cold. They always behave very peculiarly when the tempera- ture is about to take a dive; their fur stares and their eyes gleam in a maddish way and Puss attempts to scale sheer walls. She makes an odd sound and hurls herself up the kitchen wall towards the light switch and then runs frenziedly down the passage like someone just realising she's left her handbag on the Tube. Cadders, who is an altogether solider type of feline and much less inventive, contents himself with leap- ing between the feet of people as they walk, like a religious fanatic under the wheels of the juggernaut, except that he usually gets away unscathed because every- one is too nice to walk on his toe or his tail and they crick their backs and graze their knees trying to avoid doing him harm.
I am not pleased with Cadders at pre- sent. I had to get up in the middle of the night and fling buckets of water round the garden because some other mog was tres- passing on his preserves and the pair of them were making a very great noise about it. I am, however, consoled by the fact that the water found its mark. I flung it blindly from the path into the dug-out part of the garden and soaked one or possibly both cats — which I could not have done if I'd been watching them and they had seen me coming. As it was, although I'm sure they could hear me swearing, they sat smugly among the leaves, sneering to themselves until — splat. I do not think there is any satisfaction in the world to compare with the satisfaction of getting a yowling cat amidships with a bucket of water. I have just let Cadders in since he refused to rejoin us last night, and he is roaming the shelves hunting for eat food. If there is a tin opened he will knock it to the floor and scrape out the contents with his paw, which is quite clever, but he is not as subtle as Puss, who has 'discovered that if there happen to be towels drying in front of the Aga she can claw them down to sleep on, which makes her nights much more com- fortable. I consider this skill (although annoying because it means extra washing) to be almost on a level with tool-using.
I suppose we shall soon have to turn on the central heating, as it is not only the cats who have noticed that it is getting cooler. Another sign of the onset of winter is that people grow reluctant to leave the kitchen and the beneficent presence of the Aga for the refrigerated condition of their own rooms. They bring down duvets, blankets and sleeping bags to watch television which gives the drawing-room the semblance of a doss-house and detracts from its elegance. Other people have already turned on their central heating. I had dinner with some psychiatrists the other evening and their whole house was as warm as toast. I suppose all those years spent in training analysis must give them a clearer grasp of the realities of life, whereas we still qbsti- nately and neurotically believe that no fires should be lit before the beginning of November and none after the end of March. In leaky, draughty old houses like ours the central heating merely takes the chill off the air anyway, and costs a fortune, floating out to warm Camden Town. The fifth son has ensured that his boa constrictor has her own arrangements. She has a heated cage and lives in some luxury compared with the rest of us. Janet says her toad, Michael, has been sulking for months at the miserable weather and is now about to hibernate in a temper.
Still, autumn has its consolations. Even though one now has to start thinking about wearing stockings, which are a beastly nuisance, and shaking the moths out of the woollies, and preparing to avoid people who are clearly succumbing to influenza, it is pleasant to welcome back chrysanthe- mums which I refuse to entertain at any other time of year, and crumpets are wonderful. Another of my neuroses is a fixed belief that no lady at any season of the year except for late autumn should dream of offering a guest buttered crum- pets.
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