My parents lived through the war. To be honest, I suspect many of the good folk of New Earswick, where my mum spent her childhood, did quite a bit of practising beforehand. A Quaker village without a pub or even a fish and chip shop for a Friday night treat is not the place to look for hedonistic abandonment to consumption. Most of the inhabitants worked at Rowntree’s, which had built the model village on Quaker principles. The entire population was teetotal, apart from cheery Phyllis next door to my granny, who was always particularly cheery if you caught her between sherry time and bedtime – sherry time being before the main meal of the day, about noon. Everybody else drank Robinsons barley water and chirruped “My Drink Is Water Bright, from the Crystal Spring” whenever an unwary visitor asked for anything stronger.
When my mum was six, she managed to contract whooping cough, scarlet fever and rheumatic fever at the same time. Anybody who met her later in life would recognise this as a characteristically rational decision to get all the major illnesses over early. The downside was that Mum nearly died. Her mother’s hair went white overnight, even though she was not yet 30, and she lost her appetite, which didn’t help with the nursing. The village doctor, who seems to have had a broader remit than his modern counterparts, prescribed her Guinness: a bottle a night to build up her strength. As this was medicine, Granny obediently held her nose and drank, until she realised she was getting a taste for it. Horrified, she poured the rest down the sink, and never touched another drop in her life. Even the sherry for my parents’ wedding reception had to be delivered straight to the village hall: she wouldn’t have it under her roof.
The four fundamental precepts of Quakerism are equality, truth, simplicity and peace. My mother took to the first two with enthusiasm and natural talent. She rejected all hierarchies, obstreperously refused to fill in the space on any form asking for a title, and took a positive pleasure in honestly expressing her opinions, solicited or not. Gambling seemed to come under the heading of dishonesty, which made for awkwardness at the school Christmas fete when I had to explain that I couldn’t help on the tombola and I didn’t want any raffle tickets, because Quakers Don’t Gamble.
Her attitude to peace was borrowed from Einstein and Gandhi, who focused on the bigger picture in the wider world: she bravely volunteered to watch for bombs as a conscientious objector in the war, and worked tirelessly for various charities and good causes. But on the home front, the chords of domestic harmony were rarely in tune.
Simplicity, in the form of minimal materialism, was Mother’s milk. Literally. When I was a child, every kitchen window held a jam jar crammed with rancid silver milk bottle tops, destined for Guide Dogs for the Blind. Nobody knew what the dogs did with them, but we all collected them anyway.
My mother didn’t stop there. The paper from butter packets was kept for greasing cake tins. The thicker paper from cereal packets was kept for sandwiches. No piece of string, however minuscule, was ever thrown away.
All this was explained away by the privations of rationing, but really, it had more to do with those Quaker principles. I don’t go to Quaker meeting, but by the time I had my own family, I’d discovered climate change. So I do everything she did, only more so. Even she didn’t go to the shops with an assortment of used bags for her groceries.
Of course, the crucial difference is that her motivation was the dogma of a rather joyless religion, whereas mine is the glorious fight to preserve the ecosystem for generations of baby turtles yet unborn. But an impartial observer might conclude that we’re both just recycling jam jars, saving rubber bands, and putting the wrapping paper back in the drawer for next Christmas.
