As soon as she came in from the garden, Peter came and took the book out of her hands and presented her with a cloth to tie round her waist instead. Then he led her to the kitchen, where the mysterious and horrible process began. Peter thrust another cloth into her hands. “You wipe and I’ll wash,” he said, lifting the steaming saucepan off the fire and pouring half the hot water on the soapflakes sprinkled in the sink. He heaved up a bucket of cold water from the pump and poured half of that in the sink too.
“Why are you doing that?” Charmain asked.
“So as not to get scalded,” Peter replied, plunging knives and forks into his mixture and following those with a stack of plates. “Don’t you know anything?”
“No,” Charmain said. She thought irritably that not one of the many books she had read had so much as mentioned washing dishes, let alone explained how you did it.
DWJ, out to rectify this. <3 <3 <3
I love House of Many Ways so much for bringing this point up — you can’t know how to do a thing, no matter how basic, if you have never been asked to do it and nobody has ever told or shown you how to do it. I feel for Charmain. It is very unpleasant not to know things.