“You know how you can tell, who wears the
trousers, the husband or the wife?”
It was my
granddad asking. My brother and I were sitting in the horse-drawn cart. My
granddad owned a small farmstead – nothing much, just a few cows, some pigs,
two work horses and just enough land to support a family.
To make a
bit of extra money he collected milk from the nearby farms every morning to
deliver it to the dairy in town. The farmers placed their cans at the roadside
and he came along with his horse-drawn cart to pick it up.
He did it
very early in the morning, and when we were on holiday we were sometimes
allowed to come along. We were woken by our mother, and were of course very
excited. I still recall the smell of horses and the sound of hoofs on the
road.
This year I
must have been about eight years old. My granddad, who was generally not very
talkative, must have felt that he ought to impart some of the wisdom gained in
a long and simple life in an environment that no longer held any surprises for
him to me and my brother. We were approaching a small farm, when he asked the
question. “How do you tell, who’s in
charge?”.
We didn’t
know, of course. “Well” he said, “first you look at the leaves of the trees or
at a flag or something to determine the direction of the wind. Then you look at
the smoke coming out of the chimney. If the smoke goes in the direction of the
wind, it means that the wife is in command, if the smoke goes in the opposite
direction, it means that the husband wears the trousers.
No comments :
Post a Comment