We used to have tea at six. By four Mother had generally finished the housework, and between four and six she used to have a quiet cup of tea and “read her paper,” as she called it. As a matter of fact she didn’t often read the newspaper except on Sundays. The weekday papers only had the day’s news, and it was only occasionally that there was a murder. But the editors of the Sunday papers had grasped that people don’t really mind whether their murders are up to date and when there was no new murder on hand they’d hash up an old one, sometimes going as far back as Dr. Palmer and Mrs. Manning. I think Mother thought of the world outside Lower Binfield chiefly as a place where murders were committed. Murders had a terrible fascination for her, because, as she often said, she just didn’t know how people could be so wicked. Cutting their wives’ throats, burying their fathers under cement floors, throwing babies down wells! How anyone could do such things! The Jack the Ripper scare had happened about the time when Father and Mother were married, and the big wooden shutters we used to draw over the shop windows every night dated from then. Shutters for shop windows were going out, most of the shops in the High Street didn’t have them, but Mother felt safer behind them. All along, she said, she’d had a dreadful feeling that Jack the Ripper was hiding in Lower Binfield. The Crippen case—but that was years later, when I was almost grown up—upset her badly. I can hear her voice now. “Cutting his poor wife up and burying her in the coal cellar! The idea! What I’d do to that man if I got hold of him!” And curiously enough, when she thought of the dreadful wickedness of that little American doctor who dismembered his wife (and made a very neat job of it by talcing all the bones out and chucking the head into the sea, if I remember rightly) the tears actually came into her eyes.

But what she mostly read on weekdays was Hilda’s Home Companion. In those days it was part of the regular furnishing of any home like ours, ana as a matter of fact it still exists, though it’s been a bit crowded out by the more streamlined women’s papers that have come up since the war. I had a look at a copy only the other day. It’s changed, but less than most things. There are still the same enormous serial stories that go on for six months (and it all comes right in the end with orange blossoms to follow), and the same Household Hints, and the same ads for sewing machines and remedies for bad legs. It’s chiefly the print and the illustrations that have changed. In those days the heroine had to look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder. Mother was a slow reader and believed in getting her threepenny-worth out of Hilda’s Home Companion. Sitting in the old yellow armchair beside the hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, she’d work her way steadily from cover to cover, right through the serial, the two short stories, the Household Hints, the ads for Zam-Buk and the answers to correspondents. Hilda’s Home Companion generally lasted her the week out, and some weeks she didn’t even finish it. Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the buzzing of the bluebottles on summer afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at about a quarter to six she’d wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the mantelpiece and then get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never late.