After breakfast, I sit with my tea next to an old fireplace in a renovated ancient cottage.
The small log burner under the chimney is redundant on a summer day. Once, I muse, there would have been an open fire for heating and cooking. A kettle and pot would have hung from trammel hooks over the flames, a small oven might have stood to the side.
It’s hard to imagine this tiny house with more than two people inside. Downstairs, there’s barely room for a table, two chairs, two armchairs, a dresser, a two burner hob, fridge (with microwave atop) and large sink. A large, low double bed fills the attic upstairs. A pleasant shower room has been built, adjoining the lower floor.
My husband and I, our laptops, tablets, phones, leads and books fill the place.
I sip tea, and scroll through reels on social media, musing. This cottage would have been home to a poor family once. Now it’s for holiday makers. Where I sat idle in an Ikea armchair, a woman would have bent, stirring the pot in the fireplace, sweating because even in August, food still needed to be prepared, a family still needed to be fed.
Surely she’d only have had a dresser, table and chairs. No armchairs, no labour-saving devices, no sink. Apart from the river, where was her water supply? A long early morning walk perhaps? Maybe she cared for an elderly relation who watched as she worked with children at her feet, a baby in her belly while a husband waited to be fed.
I scroll and come across a video.
Someone is reconstructing ‘mud cookies’ also called ‘bonbon tè’. I unmute my phone. It’s a Haitian famine recipe made of mineral-laden mud mixed with salt and a little fat then baked in the sun.
Appalled, I watch the maker taste them.
‘They’re so salty,’ she says. ‘They suck all the moisture out of your mouth.’
The fireplace rattles.
I look at it. Nothing is moving. But the noise is there.
Shaking myself, I scroll on and come across a thread about secrets. Some are appalling. Some need reporting. One says ‘My husband works all the hours but doesn’t make enough to feed us all. I pretend I’ve eaten when we have dinner. I don’t want to make him feel a failure. Sometimes I’ve had nothing to eat but toast and black coffee all day.’
How can it be that a woman in a developed country in 2025 is doing what women did a hundred years ago and more – try to survive on next to nothing so that her husband, children and dependent elders can eat?
The fireplace rattles again.
There is no wind to come down the chimney. There is no traffic on the narrow country road to vibrate the house.
There is just an old fireplace and the ghosts of women who stirred the pot in the fireplace beside me while their stomachs rumbled.
And they have not forgotten.
Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).
