The second house that Will and Pheobe and their family lived in was a small brick cottage with two windows, one on each side of the front door and the same upstairs. A bedroom upstairs separated the girls from the boys. Off the living room was a scullery: a flagstone-floored large room that had a large cask for apple cider, and all around were the stone slabs on which Phoebe would salt hams and sides of bacon, to be taken out of the brine later and hung on a wall near the fireplace to dry.
Phoebe would make a lot of jam out of the fruit that they had on the place and from the blackberries the children gathered from the hedgerows.
It was common for people to have pig sties at the back of their cottages and a good pig fattening in the sty meant they could look forward to a good winter. The children gathered bushels of acorns under the oaks in the fall to help fatten the pigs. In many families the pig was actually treated like an important member of the family, and news of how it was growing was usually included in letters to children away from home. “Men callers on Sunday afternoons came, not to see the family, but the pig, and would lounge with its owner against the pigsty door for an hour, scratching piggy’s back and praising his points or turning up their own noses in criticism.”1 Will wasn’t too happy unless the pigs weighed around 800 pounds each when killed for Christmas. This meat was the main diet to flavor their vegetables.
Will had two allotments by this time. On one he raised wheat and on the other potatoes, reversing the order each year. At harvest time he and one or two sons would cut the wheat with a sickle and wood hook. The sisters would follow tying it in bundles while the younger ones would glean all the heads they could find that had been missed and add them to the next bundle.
To thrash the wheat it was scattered between canvas sheets, and after being beaten with the flails, which were two hard sticks fastened end to end with leather thongs, the wheat kernels came out of the heads. Then the wheat was winnowed. This was done by one person feeding it slowly through a hopper while another one turned a handle to operate a paddle fan that blew off the chaff. The wheat then fell into a sack under the hopper. The chaff was for the chickens and ducks that Phoebe raised. The children were taught to not waste a thing. They had roast beef on holidays, and Will would catch some fish in the brook to balance out their meals. As a family they had “plenty of good food, but there seemed not to be anything left for luxuries.”
Phoebe gave great love and care to her family. They had what they called a wash house where there was a large cauldron for boiling the linens and a wooden trough for mixing the bread. It also had an oven, which was an arched recess in the wall with an iron door. To get the oven ready Phoebe would build a great fire with cut tree limbs from the wood pile near the chopping block.
When the overhead brick arches were all red hot it was allowed to cool for a short time. Phoebe would make what she called batches; they were rolls kind of turned over. She would get the rolls ready first to try out the temperature of the oven, then she would form the rest of the dough into a double loaf shaped like a figure eight and put it to rise.
When the oven looked to be the right heat she would scrape out the ashes with a scraper and mop it out with a mop she had. Then in would go the batches and some three-cornered sweet rolls. When the rolls came out, the loaves were slid into the oven on a flat peel board and left there. Phoebe knew just how much heat was needed to bake them perfectly without further watching. The children would go for the sweet rolls because they were always flaky and nice. She used “drippens”2 in making them. Fanny was sent to her aunt’s to buy “drippens” every once-in-a-while. Her aunt went up to Malvern and got it from the cooks in the big houses.
The White family didn't have taps with running water in the house as we do. How do you think they got water? They had to go out to the well in their yard to get it. It was a deep hole lined with bricks that had water in the bottom of it. Phoebe would turn the crank and lower the bucket down into the water to fill it, then wind the crank to bring the water up.
How much water do you think a big family like theirs would need? A lot! An it was a big job every day. The little children were never allowed to play near the well or even get close to the door that covered it. Albert peeped into it a few times when Phoebe was drawing water, but she impressed on him that it was very dangerous and that he should not go near it. Later on it was covered over and a pump was installed which made it much safer for the children.
Phoebe knew ow to make very large fish nets. When there was a big storm, Will would go down into the brook that ran under the bridge near their home and set the nets. The next morning he would get up early and check the nets to see what he had caught. Sometimes he'd get eels and sometimes trout. He'd lay them on the floor in the back kitchen until they died. When it was time to eat them, Phoebe would just dip them in four and sprinkle them with salt and pepper. "As they cooked, they'd turn themselves over in the pan as if they weren't dead," says Fanny. "We used to think they tasted good."
If ever Will saw the tracks of a rabbit as he was working on the railway, or if a rabbit had gotten into their garden, he would make a trap. Fanny said, "We used to sit and watch him twist the wire around this thing so many times, then he got a little peg and used another motion till it was all wound up. There was a little hole; and he used to put the little hole through the big one and then put the stick through it and put it in the ground. When the hare, or what you'd call a jack rabbit, came through there it would snap around its neck to pull it tight. He brought many a rabbit home like that, so he was a poacher in his way, I guess."
No comments:
Post a Comment