And my mind went to Archie and Horatio, and William. i thought of that lovely scene in the book where Horatio has a hissy-fit over the bad eggs and the jam. I thought, 'If I had M'man Kennedy here he could put away my groceries. He would not know what half the stuff was.(Brillo? Fruit Loops? ) Some things he would know-- eggs, butter, milk, onions. Probably oatmeal. Beer. The amount of garlic would scare a British sailor, and he would not know what to put in the fridge or what to shelve. Some things he would know, but would have been costly or exotic-- 5 lbs of sugar, coconut oil, avocados, aluminum foil...
Then I pushed my mind further back, and tried it with Marlowe. I decided hummus might actually make sense to him. (Pease porrige cold, so to speak,) i think they had something like bagels too, which seems weird.
White bread and soft bread were luxury items, for longer than we think. (My grandfather was born in 1889. He was the youngest of 9 boys, in a family of Connecticut dirt farmers. His mom made underwear out of canvas feed sacks, and he grew up hunting with a brown bess which they happened to have, not as an antique, but just because it had been handed on that long. He trapped and boiled up skunks to extract and sell the musk. I'm talking poor. Anyway, one day my mother asked him why he did not eat wheat bread, as it was better for him. He shook his head "Had enough of that" He said. "Ma's bread scratched all the way down.")
BTW, all the nine boys got scholarships to college. One became an epidemiologist. My grandfather was a metal chemist. Another one helped develop vacuum tubes. He actually has a wiki entry.
There was a girl too. She died young of TB. She probably stayed in the house too much. She would have been safer out with the guns and skunks.
