Basel: enjoying the present and remembering the past

What a joy it was, to be back in the grand old Swiss city of Basel, built around the elbow of the Rhine when that majestic river turns from its early westward course, to run straight up the map to the North Sea at Rotterdam.

It’s an enchanting and exciting city. That may be a surprise, given the Swiss reputation for stolid respectability. The qualities the nation seem to prefer are hard work and honesty, you might think, not the pursuit of the unorthodox and original.

Well, you’d be mistaken.

The honesty bit is perhaps not quite as obvious as one might imagine, in a country that is home to Nestlé. And Basel itself is a major centre of the pharmaceutical industry, not a sector that has won itself many plaudits for its probity and commitment to equitable behaviour.

Still, on the other side of the coin, I love the fact that Basel can give you sudden and surprising glimpses of a different Switzerland with an attractive sense of humour.

Helvetia on the 2-franc coin, and on her holidays in Basel

In this instance, the other side is that of the 2-franc coin. It shows Helvetia (Switzerland) wearing a cloak and carrying a spear and a shield. One of my favourite spots in Basel has a statue of Helvetia when she decided to take a holiday from the coin. She’s sitting on a low wall with a glorious view of the river below. She has flung her cloak over the wall, and her spear and shield are propped up behind her, next to the suitcase she’s travelling with.

Also on this visit, I went out for dinner with three colleagues. It was warm enough to eat out of doors, in a lovely courtyard off one of the main squares. And what a delight it was to suddenly find an entire choir from the Music Academy assemble practically next to our table and entertain us for half an hour of a cappella singing. What greater pleasure is there than an unexpected one?

A Choral surprise

Still, it isn’t just for the beauty and charm that I like returning to Basel. It’s also the city closest to the French village where Danielle, later to be my wife, was living when I first met her. At that time, she was at the centre of a group of young people who were open, warm-hearted and fun. Where by ‘fun’ I really mean ‘party animals’.

One of my most vivid memories of that time was driving a Range Rover belonging to people I barely knew, down a woodland lane at night with branches whipping its sides, as I tried to keep up with the far smaller car which Danielle was driving at speed towards a clearing where we could light a fire, cook sausages, drink too much and while away the night listening to young people (well, we were all young, but they were younger) strumming guitars and singing songs about such respectable subjects as the consumption of cocaine (not that they actually took any).

Now, I was in Basel for the most sensible, you could almost say Swiss, of motives. A gentleman called Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis had spent time studying in the city and then kept up a long and voluminous correspondence with his former professor and one of his sons.

I can say without boasting that I was at one time the world’s leading authority on Maupertuis. That really is no boast, because I revelled in that rank simply by virtue of being the world’s only authority on him. Obscure? The term could have been invented for people who suffered his fate: he enjoys the somewhat paradoxical claim to fame that his reputation was destroyed by someone far more talented and celebrated. In Maupertuis’ case, that was Voltaire and let me tell you, when Voltaire destroyed your reputation, it stayed destroyed.

To give you an idea of how Voltaire dealt with his adversaries, let me pass on an anecdote which I’ve never been able to verify but I feel ought to be true: Voltaire is said to have replied to correspondence from a critic, “Sir: I am sitting in the smallest room in the house. Your letter is before me. Soon it will be behind me.”

Back then, I was in Basel to consult the large collection of manuscript letters in the University Library. Now libraries tend to be warm, quiet, tranquil places. Eighteenth-century paper has a peculiar, not unpleasant smell, which has nothing of the stimulant and it. And reading handwriting two and a half centuries old requires a lot of concentration.

If you’ve spent the whole of the previous evening with a bunch of party-goers, and the evening tended to be loosely interpreted so that it extended into the small hours – sometimes the big hours (to give you an idea, this was the only time in my life that I missed seeing the dawn because we were simply too late for it) – then sitting in a library poring over manuscripts is a difficult thing to do without your eyes beginning to close.

There were occasions that I just had to get out, breathe some air and even take a brief nap. The closest place I could go to fulfil both aims was the botanical garden behind the library. An enchanting place. And it had benches.

Sadly, even though I’m far from tall (my father used to tell me I suffered from ‘duck’s disease’ – arse too close to the ground), the benches were too short even for me to be comfortable. I suppose the advantage is that it kept my naps short so that I got back to my manuscripts quickly: it’s hard to sleep much with the edge of a bench digging either into the back of your neck or into your ankles.

In the evening, of course, the partying started all over again.

I made a point of getting back to the Botanical Gardens on this visit. A happy trip up Memory Lane. The memory of discomfort, you see, is far more pleasant than the experience of it…

Bench in the Botanical Garden
Not ideal for sleeping

Atlantis in the City of Serendipity

Alone in the fine old Swiss city of Basel, I felt I needed to find somewhere a bit different, perhaps even a bit special, to spend my evening.

As it happens, Basel’s a city I know well. It’s because I needed to consult documents in the university library here that I came to stay for a weeks in Hegenheim, just across the border in the French province of Alsace, way back in 1981. It was because I was in Hegenheim, that I met a pleasant nine-year-old who wanted to talk about the planets, and ended up spending the evening with him drawing a map of the solar system. It was because of that boy and that map that I met his mother. And, 37 years and two sons on, that boy’s my stepson and that mother’s my wife.

There was a place that did rather wonderful open sandwiches I knew, but it’s shut up shop and been replaced by a slightly garish bar. There was a sushi restaurant that tempted me but, hey, they’re two a penny around Europe now. Nothing special there, certainly. But then I saw a sign, on the door of a restaurant that looked definitely closed (lights off, chairs piled on tables): ‘roof terrace this way’.

Door to the sun terrace

I walked ‘this way’, following several more signs. Eventually I reached a door marked ‘Sun Terrace’. Now, that sounded special. Particularly to an Englishman, in other words someone from a country where, as a general rule, there’s far too little sun to encourage anyone to build a terrace.

I climbed a flight of stairs, then another, then a third. The encouraging signs kept urging me upwards. I emerged on a kind of high courtyard that would have been completely open to the sky had a large portion of it not been covered by canvas awnings. Another set of steps took me to the very top, close enough to the canvas to touch it, and where I could see out to a narrow vista of three or four roof tops and typical Basel house walls, plastered and moulded and painted attractive colours.

Hardly had I placed my order and wondered whether the awnings would actually hold out the rain, when the elements provided me with a conclusive answer. 

They wouldn’t.

The sun terrace turning into a rain terrace

Not much makes me proud of being British these days, since a small majority of my compatriots decided that what the world most needed was a country that turned its back on its neighbours. But I have sufficient pride in my British stoicism, and the resistance it gives me to the weather, to want to stay put despite the downpour that gradually developed above – a few drops, a shower or two, then rain, then a true summer storm, lightning and all.

The waiter was good enough to rub down my table from time to time, even wiping the surface of my increasingly moist Kindle – if I have to eat alone I do find being able to read while I do it is the only way to make the experience pleasurable. But I ate my way stoically through my excellent first course despite the increasing evidence that the position was becoming untenable.

Excellent first course.
Note the raindrops in the background

“It won’t last long,” a waitress told me, expressing what was – as I told her – my firm conviction too. Though I suspect conviction didn’t really come into it, so much as a willingness to encourage each other’s denial of the evidence.

Things finally came to a head when that same waitress wondered whether I really needed another bottle of water, but couldn’t instead just leave my glass on the table a while to see it fill up all by itself.

I retreated, Brit or no, to the slightly better shelter offered by the roof courtyard below. And there enjoyed my equally excellent second course.

It was over the chocolate mousse that I heard the waitress explaining to another client that the lease on the building was being terminated and within a few weeks the restaurant would close. She seemed unfazed by the knowledge – ‘it was very badly run,’ she announced – but to me it seemed sad that a place I’d discovered after 37 years was only going to last a short time longer. It was called Atlantis, oddly enough, and it seems I’ve merely caught a glimpse of it before it’s swallowed up by the waves.

Pity after serendipity, I suppose. But at least Basel gave me my wife and she’ll still be there when I head home the day after tomorrow. With a story about a certainly rather different – perhaps, indeed, special – dinner experience to tell her.

Warm memories of hard times

It’s a pleasure to write this post in the dining room at Basel railway station in Switzerland, a setting of some historical importance for my family.

Basel station dining room: tasteful, pleasant, even luxurious
Now as it was 70 years ago

1946 was a hard year for Britain. The Second World War finished the country as a world power. By loading itself with debt and throwing all its resources into the fight, along with quite a few from its imperial possessions, the country managed to defend its home soil against Nazi Germany. It couldn’t go over to the offensive without support from the US. There was no question of its playing a significant role in the Pacific Theatre. That lack of strength and its crippling debts would spell the end of the empire in the first couple of decades after the war, a time when the country would also awaken to a sense that it should perhaps be less concerned with playing the world power, and focus instead on internal justice and opportunity.

That’s a lesson the nation could do well to learn again, in the face of the great power nostalgia that expressed itself in the Brexit vote. Why, Prime Minister Theresa May even suggests Britain can be a truly global player, a notion which would be amusingly quaint if it weren’t also a toxic delusion.

One of the organisations that was trying to improve internal conditions back in 1946, was the Fabian Society, one of the founding organisations of the British Labour Party.

“You didn’t work for the Fabian Society,” says my mother, who did, “if you wanted to make money. You did it for the principle.”

Bankrupt Britain was living with rationing. You could go abroad, but couldn’t take more than £10 with you. That’s the equivalent of nearly £400 today, hardly a princely sum – a yearly membership at Trump’s golf club in Scotland costs six times more. On a Fabian Society salary, however, even scraping together £10 wasn’t easy. To enjoy a foreign holiday, only the second in her life – the first had been nineteen years earlier, when she was three – my mother had to find an inexpensive option.

Fortunately, she had a German friend also working for the Fabians. The friend’s mother had managed to get out of Germany with her daughter during the Nazi period, after having spent some time producing clandestine opposition publications. The daughter reckoned she could sleep anywhere, having got used to being put to bed in cellars with the press clattering in the background.

Her friend told my mother about an organisation that was helping Germans trying to put themselves back together after the Hitler regime – Jews in some cases, but generally any Socialists, Communists, or others who’d opposed the Nazis and had suffered mental or physical injuries from which they needed to recover. The organisation had an Alpine chalet in the Ticino, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton. Whenever there were spare places, they could be made available to Fabians who wanted a holiday at reasonable cost.

It turned out to be one of my mother’s best holidays, one she remembers with pleasure and in detail seventy years on.

One of the key moments came after an overnight train journey down to Basel, her first stop in Switzerland. While they waited for the train out, they repaired to the station dining room for breakfast. Where, to use an anachronistic expression, they had their minds blown.

“The piles of fine white bread!” she tells me, “the heaps of butter! The jam! The coffee with creamy milk swimming in it!”

Bankrupt Britain, cold and with food rationed, could offer nothing to rival it. This, for the generation whose youth had been broken by the war, was luxury.

No wonder she remembers it so fondly to this day. So should we, who take such riches for granted. To say nothing of the international collaboration that guarantees the peace on which they rest.

A smile for brexit, Storks like San Francisco Chinese, a fountain flowing with wine. And much more besides

A French policeman flagged us down as we crossed the border from Germany. He walked over to us, his face set, his air threatening. As we let down a window, he leaned in.

“Brexit or no Brexit?” he asked, having spotted our British number plates.

“No Brexit, no Brexit,” we chorused.

“OK, passez,” he assured us.

We’ve just spent a few packed days in the town where we used to live. That’s Kehl, in Germany, which has been a district of the great German city of Straßburg, or a market town opposite the great French city of Strasbourg, depending not so much on the geography but on the history of the region.

One place we visited was Basel, where there’s a celebration going on in honour of the sixth centennial of the publication the translation of the New Testament by Erasmus of Rotterdam, who lived the latter part of his life in the Swiss city. Among the many quotes from the great scholar, I particularly liked one in which he says that he wants to be a citizen of the world, at home anywhere or, better still, nowhere.

One of the Erasmus quotations scattered around Basel

Now there’s a thought for the dividing world we live in.

We visited cousins in Basel, and were struck by the storks’ nest on the chimneys of the house opposite.

“The council sent people up to destroy the nest as soon as it was made, but the storks rebuilt it within three days. By the time the authorities sent back people, there were already eggs and it was too late.”

This reminded me of a story we were told in San Francisco’s Chinatown years ago.

When the Chinese community first arrived it was granted some fairly lousy, worthless land outside the city limits. But then San Francisco grew and had to spread all around, forcing the price and desirability of the Chinese area up.

In 1906 came the devastating earthquake and fire. Chinatown was destroyed. The whites of San Francisco saw a way of making something positive of the disaster. They summoned a meeting of the council to take back control of the Chinese district.

Alas, it took two weeks for the council to meet. And in that time the Chinese had completely rebuilt their homes and businesses and it was too late to drive them out.

Hence today’s Chinatown.

Just like the pair of storks we saw in Basel.

We also visited a village in deepest Alsace, in the wine country.

That’s Alsace, the great province of eastern France, not Elsaß, which was more than once a flourishing province of western Germany.

In between some of the vines, we found cherry trees rich in fruit, ridiculously late, because of the lousy weather this year. We weren’t complaining though, as we picked and ate handfuls of different varieties of glorious cherries at every tree we reached.

Joy on a country walk

In the local village, we visited the fountain which will, at the annual feast day in a couple of weeks’ time, be flowing with wine instead of water. The sign above the fountain informs the visitor that it celebrates the moment when, by decree of the royal court in Colmar, the people of the village were freed of the feudal requirement to pay a tax in wine, in 1897.

Royal decree? In 1897? When France was firmly republican? Well, Alsace was Elsaß then and anything but firmly French. Colmar was a provincial city of the German Empire.

The village has a massive Protestant church and an only slightly less massive Catholic one. It also boasts are well-restored synagogue, though no real Jewish community any more. Still, the building’s impressive.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews of the village were pretty poor (few of any community were particularly wealthy). So many of the boys and young men would set out for the ‘fifth voyage.’ Their parents would find them enough money to get to the French coast somewhere, where they’d take menial service in one of the great transatlantic liners. Five crossings would allow them to pay for their passage, and at the end of the fifth they would leave the ship in the States and set out to make their fortunes.

Many did, and sent back funds to support their families and also endow their home village with a good synagogue. Which stands there to this day, near the Protestant and Catholic churches, as a mute monument to a fine state of affairs when three great faiths were able to live side by side without tearing each other apart.

Erasmus I suspect would have approved. As do I. It was an arrangement that should attract a smile as fulsome as the French policeman gave us, after he’d finished ribbing us about the Brexit vote.

That was a good experience. Brexit hasn’t given me much else to smile about.

Countdown to War, Day 37. 3 August: Germany fighting Russia, Luxembourg, maybe France – and Switzerland?

One hundred years ago today, on Monday 3 August 1914, Martin and the other railwaymen in his crew would have found little to raise their spirits in the Manchester Guardian.

“German invasion of Switzerland reported”, they read.

The German army has invaded Switzerland and has occupied the Swiss station of Bale. As every tourist knows, Bale contains two stations, one German and one Swiss. Bale is now entirely in the hands of the Germany army.

“Every tourist knows?” scoffed Martin.

“Come, come, young man,” said the Cynic in a passable Southern accent, “surely you went through Bale when you did your grand tour?”

“Inexplicably,” replied Martin, “my Mum omitted to include Bale on my itinerary.”

Swiss and German border guards pose together in 1915
on the border between Basel, Switzerland and Lörrach, Germany
Switzerland was never invaded, contrary to the Guardian report

“Russians on German Soil” proclaimed an article on early clashes in the East.

Last night Russian patrols made an attack on the railway bridge over the Marthe... The attack was repulsed. Two Germans were slightly wounded. The Russian losses are not known.

In a leader entitled “On the Brink”, the paper again made the case for neutrality.

Saturday and Sunday were the fateful days of a century. On Saturday Germany declared war on Russia. Early the next morning, her troops invaded Luxemburg...

“Luxembourg?” a voice interrupted, “they declared war on Russia so they invaded Luxembourg?”

“Let him read,” came a chorus in reply.

...and in the course of the day they are alleged to have crossed the French frontier at two points not specified. The war party in England will use these facts to work up feeling against Germany as the aggressor and the violator of international law...

A lot of heads nodded. The fact of German aggression was indeed hard to deny.

... but sober Englishmen, while grieving that Germany should have thought fit to take this frightful responsibility, will not let German military opinion of what is best for Germany affect their own judgement of what is best for England. Germany was not free to choose; whether war was to come depended not so much on what she did as on what Russia meant to do.

There was some sense in that. Germany faced specific threats.

With the genius and the brilliancy of France on the one flank and the overwhelming numbers of Russia of the other she felt herself fighting against odds for her very existence...

“There’s an assessment of French strength,” said the man with the paper.

The French army, taken as a whole, has two great assets – it has a great tradition to re-establish...

“Damn right,” a voice interrupted, “after getting the stuffing kicked out of them by the Germans last time.”

...and it has had some experience in its colonial wars. The military system of the French army disposes of twenty-one army corps and a large surplus of colonial troops...

The belief of the French General Staff is that its material both in men and equipment is slightly superior to that of the German army... The French General Staff... maintain that it is the duty of the army to find and definitely establish the path which the enemy proposes to follow, and then adjust your own strategic movement so that you turn your enemy’s momentum to your advantage by refusing him in front and turning his flanks.

“It sounds hopeless for the Germans,” agreed Martin, “their Austrian allies aren’t making much headway against Serbia. The Russians have massive numbers. And the French, on their own, are stronger than the Germans. It’ll all be manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, turning the enemy’s flank and all that, and Germany won’t last long. So why do the French need us?”

“It won’t be that easy,” said the man with the paper. “The French have one big flaw: they’re French.”

He read on.

France, as a nation, is subject to hysterics. It is only Latin after all.

German troops on patrol on French territory
in the early days of the war

“I keep saying,” came a voice from the back, “we may be joining the wrong side.”

“The paper still reckons neither side’s right for us.” 

He read on from the editorial.

The British Cabinet sat almost all day on Sunday discussing what the policy of this country ought to be. As we write we do not know what decision has been reached. But we are, if possible, more convinced than ever that duty and interest alike demand that this country should not make itself an accessory to the crime against reason and human happiness that is now beginning.

“What, with Germany on the rampage,” someone protested, “they still want us to stay out?”

The Guardian did.

The tide of public indignation against the suggestion that this country should take part in a general European war is rising fast.

The need for giving expression to that feeling is increasingly recognised, and an organisation has been set on foot to co-ordinate and strengthen the demands that Great Britain shall take no part in such a war unless she’s directly attacked.

“That’s right, isn’t it?” said Martin, “we’re facing ‘a crime against reason and human happiness’. Why do we have to get involved?”

“We don’t,” said the Cynic, “but you watch us. We will. We’ll all be accomplices of that crime. And people like us lot will also be the victims.”

Another article carried the headline “England’s Duty”:

It is felt that it is urgent to bring home to the public the importance of showing the strength of the feeling in favour of neutrality. In the absence of such expression the agitation now being maintained in powerful quarters in favour of England’s joining the war may be accepted by the Government and by foreign nations as the general view of the country.

“Exactly,” said Martin, “lots of people want to stay out. That counts.”

“Don’t talk soft,” scoffed the Cynic, “the decision’s been taken already. We’re going in. We’ll know in a day or two.”

“What do you mean? It would be a sad day for this country when a government can take us to war against the will of the majority.”

“Then get ready for sad days.”

There was a sudden burst of laughter from the man with the paper.

“Listen to this,” he called out.

Parliament reduced to plain English Food

The French cooks employed at the House of Commons have all responded to the call to arms. There will be “only plain English fare” on the menu in the dining-room till the end of this session.

“The suffering’s already started...” said Martin.

“Yes,” said the Cynic, “and MPs are going to be taking decisions in a bad mood on unsatisfied stomachs. That’s only going to make things worse.”

Training a good wife, catching a good husband

If you were a woman born in the Swiss canton of Argau at the turn of the twentieth century, the younger daughter of a master craftsman, career opportunities as you reached adulthood were limited. The heroine of today’s story is Emma Lina, who faced just this predicament.

Things were better for the elder sister, Bertha, who stood to inherit something. She lived a colourful life, including a long list of unsuitable lovers (but when was a lover suitable?) and adventures in every corner of the globe. And I mean every corner: she was someone made for the age of flight, catching planes to every imaginable destination.

In fact, she eventually became a little tired of Emma Lina’s stay-at-home prudence.

‘Some day, you’re just going to have to learn to get into a plane.’

‘A large metal thing suspended in thin air? Not on your Nelly.’

You understand that neither sister spoke English, so the expression ‘not on your Nelly’ is artistic licence by your humble narrator. But I’m sure there’s some equivalent in mid-twentieth century Swiss German dialect, and equally sure she used it.

Despite all that, Bertha convinced her eventually. Emma Lina caught a plane from Basel to Geneva – not a flight you can take any more – to see her youngest daughter there. As they approached their destination, the plane seemed to take an unconscionable time circling over Lake Geneva. A beautiful view, but it palls after a while. Still, the boredom turned out to be infinitely preferable to what it was replaced by.

‘We regret to announce,’ said the pilot over the public address system, ‘that we are unable to lower the undercarriage at the present time. We are therefore going to have to circle to burn off fuel and then force land at the airport. We regret any inconvenience caused.’

That last bit is probably artistic licence too.

They eventually belly landed on a foam-covered runway surrounded by fire engines and ambulances. Emma Lina immediately insisted that she would never fly again and, indeed, her family had better book her a railway trip back to Basel.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Bertha, ‘that kind of thing is just terribly bad luck. It’ll never happen again.’

Bertha must have been gifted with oratorical charm, or been a highly dominant personality, or perhaps both, because she persuaded Emma Lina to get back into a plane for the flight home.

They got to Basel and the pilot came on the public address system. ‘Terribly sorry, Emma Lina, it’s happened again. We can’t get the undercarriage down.’ I expect he really used other words to that effect, but that was the effect on Emma Lina.

Unfortunately, Basel airport is smaller than Geneva and couldn’t accommodate a belly landing, so they had to fly on to Amsterdam. Check the map: Basel is a lot closer to Geneva than to Amsterdam. There they put Emma Lina through a repeat of her previous landing: foam on the runway, fire engines, ambulances.

‘Never again,’ were her first words when her family, who’d been flown up to Amsterdam, met her at the gate. This time even Bertha saw the wisdom of buttoning it. The airline had offered the choice of a free flight back to Basel or rail tickets. They went by train.

Now rewind back to the years immediately after the First World War. What to do with this younger daughter with limited prospects, poor Emma Lina? Well, her parents sent her to housekeeping school in Basel. Here the young women learned the best way to dust, to iron, to make a nutritious and succulent evening meal, to keep household accounts, to look after kids and to warm slippers in front of the fire. The last bit may not actually have been on the curriculum.

‘If she does really well at that school, who knows?’ said her parents, ‘a prosperous farmer might like her enough to marry her.’

Every Saturday, the young women of the school ran a little café where the public could enjoy a cup of coffee and a slice of the cakes the inmates had baked. Obviously, all the eligible men of the district would be there, checking out the talent on show.

By ‘talent’, I mean, of course, ‘housekeeping talent’. Anyone who thought anything else please move immediately to the back of the class and write a hundred times ‘I will not think prurient thoughts while reading respectable family blogs.’

One such eligible bachelor was a young man who had recently been made French, by ‘réincorporation’ as the government put it, i.e. by their action in taking Alsace back from Germany. He was rattling a bit from the shrapnel still inside him and which would, ultimately, kill him; I presume, though I don’t know for sure, that it was French shrapnel, received while he was in a uniform of German grey rather than French blue. His brother hadn’t made it through the war at all.

He, Prosper Brugner, took a shine to Emma Lina. The results, in April 1921, are revealed by the photo below.

Prosper was no prosperous farmer. He was a craftsman who prospered by installing shutters in buildings. His sons would later set up a whole business in that trade.

Between them, Emma Lina and Prosper had a short but happy married life, which produced two daughters and three sons. Their elder daughter and second child was Jeannette. Her only child was Danielle, who went even further out on a limb than Bertha, and married an Englishman, in probably about the best coup I’ve ever managed to pull off in my life.

As for Emma Lina, her marriage ended far too soon, in 1947, when the shrapnel at last got the better of Prosper. She found herself another husband, though, by the simple expedient of going round the village and looking at the wood piles outside the houses of all the bachelors. She reasoned, correctly as it turned out, that a man with a large wood pile would know how to look after a house and the woman inside it. It didn’t matter at all to her that he was Jewish, a pleasing and refreshing freedom of racism in the face of pragmatic good sense.

When Danielle was reaching adulthood herself, her grandmother used to say to her regularly, ‘I wish the housekeeping school still existed and you could go there. Your mother’s taught you nothing.’

Don’t worry, Emma Lina, don’t worry. She’s learned. By dint of looking after me and three other boisterous males, she learned to stay calm in any situation, keep a house that is neither too tidy nor worryingly dirty, and cook some extraordinary meals.

You don’t have to go to a formal housekeeping school. The school of life can be just as effective.