Every year on 22 December – the day after the winter solstice – I would sit at breakfast, waiting for my father, a physics teacher, to open his paper, look at the date and declare that “as the days lengthen the cold strengthens.” So began my interest in old sayings and in science. If we were out together on a winter’s night he would look for a ring round the moon as a sign of “snow soon” and he often related how, as a child of the Edwardian era, he would be given on his birthday a maxim to follow for the year ahead such as “do your duty like a soldier and a man.”
The sayings in this book, collected in the years since my childhood (when we were allowed to have our hair washed only once a week and schools gave girls prizes for good deportment), relate closely to the business of everyday life, largely as it was lived before the days of modern conveniences, and how they relate to modern life and knowledge. They include advice on the practical necessities of cooking, gardening, keeping house and health, as well as proverbial wisdom concerning good behavior for children, adults, and life in general.
Many of the old adages that our grandparents believed in have since been proved true, although others, like putting butter on a burn, have been discredited. But it is probably no accident that many once-valuable items such as salt, eggs and silver recur in the old sayings, or that they have much to say about foretelling the weather. For in the days when most people made their living from the land, being in tune with nature could be vital to survival.
For the superstitious, there are dozens of old country sayings and traditions that relate to good luck, good health and finding a spouse, as well as to omens of disease, death and disaster. Almost everything was once invested with significance, from seeing a single magpie to the day of the week on which you did your washing or cut your nails.
In compiling this book I have used numerous sources old and new, but have drawn particularly on the 19th-century classic advice book Enquire Within, a bound-up collection of the magazine Home Chat for 1896, The Concise Household Encyclopedia of 1933 (discovered at a village fête) and, from America, The House and Home Practical Book, also from 1896. I have not, however, tested the old recipes included in the book, so they are used at your own risk.
Many thanks are due to the team at Rydon Publishing, and to my late husband, Donald, for his encouragement in the production of the original book. Together we spent many hours at secondhand bookshops and stalls at home, and in Boston and New York, as he helped me to unearth those invaluable nuggets of reference that have brought this book to life.
Ruth Binney
Dorchester, England, 2016