Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3827/Our National Guests
My wife attributes our success (so far) in the entertainment of Belgian Refugees solely to the fact that we have not, and never have had, a vestige of a committee. We all work along in the jolliest possible way, and we have no meetings, or agenda, or minutes, or co-opting of additional members, or remitting to executives or anything of that kind. We just bring along anything that we think will be useful. Some of us bring clothes and others butter or umbrellas, or French books, or razor-strops or cigarettes. Hepburn, the dairy farmer, keeps sending cart-loads of cabbages; old Miss Mackintosh at the Brae Foot sends threepence a week. And when we are short of anything we just stick up a notice to that effect in the village shop. I issued a call for jam yesterday and ever since it has rained pots and pots. We have three large families of Belgians and we have already got to the stage where the men are at work and the children at school—though no one really has the least idea what they do there.
But although I admit that it is magnificent to be without a committee—we escaped from that by the simple plan of getting the Belgians first and trusting to the goodwill of the Parish to take care of them afterwards—there are other important factors in our success. There is our extraordinary foresight—of course it was a pure fluke really—in obtaining among them a real Belgian policeman. You can have no idea what a fine sense of security that gives us in case anything goes wrong. We have already enjoyed his assistance in a variety of ways, and we have something still in reserve in the very unlikely event of being professionally called in—his uniform. When we put him into his uniform the effect will be tremendous.
Then again we have the advantage of being Scotch. I simply don't know how English country people are going to get on at all. Here we find that by talking with great emphasis in the very broadest Scotch—by simply calling soap sape and a church a kirk you can quite frequently bring it off and make yourself understood. I had a most exhilarating hour of mutual lucidity with the one that makes furniture in the carpenter's shop. It seemed to me that he called a saw a zog, which was surely quite good enough; and when he referred to a hammer as a hamer it might surely be said to be equivalent to calling a spade a spade.
Still the language difficulty remains, and the worst of it is that it gives an altogether unfair advantage—where all are so anxious to help—to the few select people in our neighbourhood who happen to be able, fortuitously, to talk French. They are—(1) Dr. Anderson, whose French is very good; (2) my wife, who is amazingly fluent in a crisis, though her constructions simply don't bear thinking of; (3) the school-master, who is weak; (4) the joiner, who is bad; (5) myself, who am awful. Several of our Refugees talk French.
Of course we all have pocket-dictionaries, but even they don't always help us out. I found my wife once engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand encounter with the one who does the cooking about some household necessity that was sadly lacking. She was completely baffled. It was pure stalemate, a deadlock. I pulled out my dictionary and suggested to the cook (by illuminative signs) that she should look it up and point to the English word. There was some rejoicing at this, and she at once called upon the collective wisdom of her whole family. At last they got it with much nodding of heads and exhibited the book, buttressed with an eager finger at the place. And we looked and read "A young goldfinch;" so you will see that that didn't help us much. It was only by the almost miraculous emergence of the word Fat in the course of their own private conversation shortly afterwards that light came to us.
That they are quite at a loss to understand the meaning of honey in the comb did not greatly surprise us—though it was rather queer—but the Parish is deeply distressed at their total ignorance of oatmeal. They are quite at sea there, and so far have only employed it for baiting a bird-trap: and that touches us closely, for the very foundation of our being in these parts is oatmeal. Even their beautiful devotion to vegetables of all sorts cannot, we feel, compensate for their attitude of negation towards this very staple of existence. There is a strong party among us bent on their conversion. We hope with all our hearts that they will be comfortable and contented among us till the day comes when they can return to their own country; and we feel that their exile will not have been entirely wasted if they have learned to appreciate the purpose fulfilled by porridge in the Divine Order of things.