Bird On The Wire
an online column by Carmel Bird
No. 4
12 May 1998
Previous columns
The future of the book
Time Slices
Outside In
insistence through my fiction is that of the book. And since taking up with WWW and with CD-Roms, I am constantly worrying away at the point about the use and meaning and future of books. A manifestation of this motif of the book in The Bluebird Cafe is the communal cookery book made by the women in the small town of Copperfield in the fifties. Their book is called The Tried and Tested and a few recipes from it are included at the end of the novel. There is something so poignant and yet futile about the women who gather in the Bluebird all dressed like people at a palace garden party. 'They discussed pudding and sponges and rock cakes as if the fate of the world depended on such things.'And yet their creation is a book, a part, the narrator imagines, of 'a huge unimaginable thing which is The Book.'.When I recently visited my childhood home, a place now devoid
of life, wired with memories, bereft, I discovered to my great surprise, in a kitchen drawer, an ancient ledger, blue lines horizontal, pink lines vertical. This book contains entries on the income and expenditure for such people as Housekeeper (thirty shilling a week) and Ploughman (thirty-six shillings a week) and Cowboy (fifteen shillings) handwritten in ink and pencil. The book was never filled, and has been taken over as a communal recipe book, the entries in handwriting, with due acknowledgement to the authors.I have no memory of ever seeing this particular book before, although I was conscious that my mother wrote out recipes, as many a mother did. But this book seems to me to be a template for The Tried and Tested, and I now connect it imaginatively with that book, letting it drift into my novel, across time and outside common sense.The recipes are mostly for cakes and other sweet things, although there is one for egg-and-bacon pie and one for savoury corned beef. Some recipes are written over the top of entries in the ledger, creating a strange palimpsest as butter and sugar mingle with entries for wages, stamps and tobacco. All the ink has faded. The brown boards of the cover are battered and scratched and stained, and the dark red leather spine is crumbling away, as are the edges of the pages.As I read the names the memories of some of these women rise, and I hear their voices, recall the texture of their skin, the smell of their clothes, the objects in their houses, the names of their husbands and children. I imagine them following the recipes, cooking up Auntie Bern's Powder Puffs, Mrs Wise's Delicious New Gingerbread, bringing them round to the back door on a plate with a doiley, calling out Coo-ee! Then during the afternoon I listen, unobserved, as women drink tea, eat and talk. The talk was my personal nourishment, all take and no give on my part. Little pigs have big ears, they would say, and go right on spinning the yarn, spilling the beans.Some of the recipes carry comments: E. Diprose, Coffee Kisses, Very Good. Laura's Alva Alice Cake, Very Good. Mrs Gerzalia's Never Failing Sponge, Excellent. Pearl's Best Green Tomato Pickle. Mrs Plapp's Paradise Square. When did all the writing take place? I don't remember seeing anybody writing. Was I paying less attention than I thought I was, perhaps.This book is a record of a kind of fantastic side to real life. Across a masculine background of entries for Capstain Tissues and loads of firewood flow the descriptions of how to make Wedding Cake, how to make Honey Rusks, how to make Forget-Me-Nots. Superimposed upon reality is the dream of Apricot Almond Drops, of Little Castles Pudding. This is poetry and song. This is so much more complex, so much more inspiring than the book I imagined for the ladies of Copperfield.And this is an artifact, something I can touch and see and smell. I can hear the soft rustle of the old pages. If I wanted to I could eat it. Silverfish, as it happens, have left it alone so far. And with its reliable old technology it delivers up its information -- to make a nice consistency, bake in hot oven for thirty minutes.
I can show you an image from the ledger. Behold. But I can't yet deliver to you an object with fuzzy edges and the smell of must. Although it is possible for you to call up, somewhere in cyberspace, a pizza and have it delivered to your door. Or, for that matter, a book.
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