Cabbages drying outside an apartment building.
The Vice-director of education at my school saw me taking this picture from her fifth floor apartment. She asked me about it at school the next day: ‘what, don’t people get ready for winter in America?’
The moulded cabbage-leaf jugs for which Worcester is famous are very plentifully available in blue and white, often with the mask spout, as are also all the vine-leaf dessert and tiny pickle-dishes, pierced baskets, comports, salad bowls, soup tureens, butter-dishes, sauce-boats; there are even such items as knife and fork handles, knife rests, salt spoons, tea-caddy spoons and a pierced variety of the latter which are claimed to be egg-draining spoons. Tea jars take on several shapes, oval, round or square, sometimes with ribbed moulding; and teapots come in many shapes, some peculiar to Worcester, others of universal adoption.
My Aunt Philip’s aunt, Mrs. Pring, complained bitterly to my aunt of the parson of her village (of which she was squire) who had come to see her during a serious illness, ‘and you know, my dear,’ she said, ‘he read the bible to me, just as if I had been any old woman in the village’.
Her gardener, Curtis, had consulted her as to how and where some cabbages were to be planted. Later on the gardener came again with a suggestion which was obviously an improvement. ‘Curtis’, said she, ‘if I tell you to plant the cabbages with their leaves in the ground and their roots in the air you will be pleased to do so.’ And yet, as she said to my aunt, she knew Curtis’s way was much better, but she was not going to have settled questions re-opened, and she was going to be mistress of her own house.
The richer the character, the harder and slower in general is its development.* Two boys were once of the same class in our Edinburgh school; John ever trim precise and dux, Walter ever slovenly confused and dolt: in due time John became Baillie Waugh, and Walter became Sir Walter Scott.
The quickest and completest of all vegetables is – the Cabbage.
* Cf. Plutarch, Cato Minor, (1.3)
So I settled down at once as a full-fledged anarchist.
Figure to yourself a group of naked cottages with bald slate roofs untempered by the years – no moss, no house-leeks – dropped down at random in a sticky clay cabbage-field – and you see our colony. […] Most of these young men were good fellows in their way – very simple-hearted anarchists. I do not credit it that they could have blown up a Tsar, or even dropped a bomb into a suburban letter-box. They confined themselves to cabbages and passionate denunciation of the oppressors.
To abolish seduction is a mother’s goal.
She will replace it with what is real: products.
Demeter’s victory
over Hades
does not consist in her daughter’s arrival from down below,
it’s the world in bloom –
cabbages lures lambs broom sex milk honey!
These kill death.
— 65, catch your cabbage!
Everyone laughed. Mr M’Coy, who wanted to enter the conversation by any door, pretended that he had never heard the story. Mr Cunningham said:
— It is supposed – they say, you know – to take place in the depot where they get these thundering big country fellows, omadhauns, you know, to drill. The sergeant makes them stand in a row against the wall and hold up their plates. He illustrated the story by grotesque gestures.
— At dinner, you know. Then he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big spoon like a shovel. He takes up a wad of cabbage on the spoon and pegs it across the room and the poor devils have to try and catch it on their plates: 65, catch your cabbage.
What, bred at home! Have I taken all this pains for a creature that is to lead the inglorious life of a cabbage, to suck the nutritious juices from the spot where he was first planted? No, to perambulate this terraqueous globe is too small a range; were it permitted, he should at least make the tour of the whole system of the sun. Let other mortals pore upon maps, and swallow the legends of lying travellers…
A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.