To keep up appearances

To keep toilet

I made my toilet to a chorus of impatient twittering. It was a fastidious toilet, for throughout my life I have adhered to the simple but exact dictates of fashion as I left it, when Victoria was queen—a neat white blouse, stuff collar and ribbon tie, a dark skirt and coast, stout and serviceable, trim shows and neat black stockings, a sailor hat and a fly-veil, and, for my excursions to the camps, always a dust-coat and a sunshade. Not until I was in meticulous order would I emerge from my ten, dressed for the day. My first greeting was for the birds.

To keep order

Her stretcher bed was neat with ‘roo-skin rug and bush net, the linen Isabelline from poor water but spotlessly clean. On the same floor a goat-skin mat was spread. An iron stand with an enamel dish held soap and towel, hung on a nail above it a hand-mirror four-by-four, inches not feet, reflecting the face, no more—no time for vanity. The table in the corner was four-by-four feet, half of it cleared for dining, crockery in a stack, cutlery two of each, tea-set and salt and pepper twins. The other half was a leaning tower of Manila folders of rough manuscript, litter of letters, pens, ink a portable typewriter seldom used and then by the hunt-and-peck system with two fingers—she called it a ‘gigglywinks’…

To stitch

‘I made friends with a needle as a very small child at grandma’s knee,’ she told me. ‘I can do the most minute embroideries, but I can’t use a machine, and I couldn’t make myself a pair of drawers to save my life. We weren’t supposed to know such things.’

To maintain self-respect

‘In order to prevent the untidiness that goes to mind and soul if neglected, I have my travelling glass straight forninst me on my table. I’ve never yet sat down untidy to any meal tho’ I have not even a native visitor. Tired, exhausted with heat and failing health though I may be, I look at myself about to sit down untidily and I am up and repairing the damage.’

She admitted to another ‘rather quaint practice.’ When the urge was strong to establish contact with her ‘kind’, ‘I dine with H.R.H. Lord and Lady Forster, or Sir Francis and Lady Newdegate and a few other whose photographs I have the honour and pleasure to possess and I talk or am silent with full thoughts and it does me good and it helps to keep my poise and my self respect.’

To know yourself

‘I am two people, one I like and the other I do not know,’ she observed. And again, ‘A thing of patches am I—here an exaltation of duty, there a love of fun and frolic and again of melancholy.’

To smooth the dying pillow

There is no hope of protecting the Stone Age from the twentieth century! When the native’s little group area is gone, he loses the will to live, and when the will to live is gone, he dies.