Very far east / by C. Winifred Lechmere Clift ; with preface by Albert A. Head.

  • Clift, C. Winifred Lechmere.
Date:
[pref. 1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Very far east / by C. Winifred Lechmere Clift ; with preface by Albert A. Head. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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The room on the right would serve as bedroom, the little room at the back as dining-room. Then came a second little courtyard leading to four tumbledown rooms with mud walls, evidently the servants’ quarters. Lastly, a third narrow courtyard in an unspeakable state of filth and then an open shed, blackened with smoke and soot— the kitchen ! I stood and looked around and thought of the wise and sound advice on “ house-hunting,” which one reads nowa- days in many excellent periodicals. Fortunately life in a Chinese house is so primitively simple, that perhaps one escapes some of the dangers of a modern English house. For example, letters from England have been telling of a household, where one after another had to retire to bed with a painful sore throat and no one could explain the reason, until it was discovered that some workmen, in laying pipes to connect the house with a new water supply, had pierced a drainage pipe, and the bad gas had been steadily escaping into the house ! In China we don’t have drains, and our water supply has to be carried in buckets from the river. So the house is taken—the bargain money paid down, and we have set to work to clean and scrub and wash and scour ! The first thing was to tear down the household gods ”— grinning, gaudy figures in many colours pasted on to the doors. Then down came the incense stick stands, and these went the way of the gods. And then we began in real earnest; my ambition was to have it all ready by the time my husband came back. The ceiling was simply the tiled roof, and these tiles we swept with long bamboos. Showers of dust descended, which made me appreciate my white turban, and the old Chinese cotton coat I had donned. The earth floors were swept and then we set about removing the “ pious papers,” with which the walls were adorned, to “ bring good luck.”