At the word “food” of course everyone was all attention, and we made ourselves into a Privy Council, and they appointed me Food Controller, because it would give them the right to do all the grumbling. But the matter was not quite as much of a joke as they thought. For so long they had been accustomed to a pantry stocked with bottles and tins and stores of all descriptions (and Virginia once remarked that to read the labels alone—if you had lost the tin-opener—was quite as good as a seven-course meal at a fashionable restaurant), that they forgot things were not like that now! In the dairy, too (which we use as a larder), it was the usual pre-war thing to see large open jam tarts in deep dishes, with a fancy trellis work over the top of the jam, and large pies with lovely water-lilies, made from the scraps of paste, on top, and spicy brown cakes, with a delicious odour, standing on the stone slabs—Abigail being a capital hand at pastry and cakes. The dairy is built on the north side, close under the hill, and the great stone wall that keeps the hill from tumbling down on top of the dairy is packed with hart’s-tongue and the British maiden-hair fern, and rosettes of the pretty little scaly spleenwort, and lacy tufts of wall rue, and practically every other kind of fern that loves damp shade and the English climate. And ivy runs over the lot right up to the top, where wild roses and honeysuckle and blackberry ramp about in the sunshine, and often peep down to see how it fares with their comrades in the cool ravine below. The long fronds of the fern wave in at the dairy window, and the ivy sends out little fingers, catching hold wherever it can, and creeping in, very much at home, through the wire-netting that does duty for a window. My guests always like to go into the dairy to see the wonderful array of ferns; but I sometimes suspect it is also to gaze on the appetizing-looking things that appeal irresistibly to all who have spent an hour or two in our hungry air! But war had made a considerable difference alike to pantry and store-cupboard and larder, and we had to trust to the promise of Miss Jarvis, the lady at the village shop—and one of the most valuable members of the community—that we should not actually starve! As the stocks had been used, they had not been replenished. Cinnamon buns, lemon-curd cheese cakes, fruit cakes with a nice crack in the top, were no longer piled up in the larder. No home-cured ham, sewn up in white muslin, hung from the big hook in the kitchen ceiling. No large, dried, golden-coloured vegetable marrows hung up beside it for winter use. We had plenty of potatoes, fortunately (and never had we valued potatoes as we did this year!), and we had the usual “remains” that are in the larder, when the butcher has not called for a few days and a family lives from hand to mouth, as one has had to do recently, lest one should be suspected of hoarding!