When I spotted the first one, I didn't realise its significance. Tineola
Bisselliella is small, dull, and shuns light, so it isn't particularly
visible, which is more than can be said for the destruction its grubs wreak on garments
and furnishings. Since I
keep my clothes on an open rail in the room where I sleep, I wasn't happy about blasting them with
poisons. I opted for conservative treatment: constantly turning the clothes on
the rail and holding them in front of the window since the grubs drop away if
exposed to daylight.
As I shook out each garment, I recalled Chaucer's Wife of
Bath bragging that her lovely scarlet clothing suffered no moth damage because she
was forever out and about in it. When I
first met with Dame Alice I was a teenager studying for A-levels and read her statement as a sly joke, equating adultery
with good housewifery. Now I know that
wearing clothes outdoors, instead of folding them away in a chest, would indeed
have kept down the moths, as would cold weather. Our centrally heated houses with warm dark
wardrobes are Moth Paradise: one reason I knew nothing about clothes moths back
in 1972 was that we lacked the central heating and double glazing that extend
their breeding season. I find myself
wondering how well mediaeval people understood why frequently worn clothes got fewer moth holes in them. Did they notice the grubs falling away? They were undoubtedly interested in finding
solutions for such problems: the medical encyclopaedia Hortatus Sanitatis includes illustrations showing bed bugs and a
woman combing lice out of a young man's (or boy's?) hair.
 |
| Some terrifyingly large bed bugs and lice |
In fact grooming routines go back beyond the middle ages,
ancient history or even prehistory. They
are our inheritance from our primate ancestors.
Clean, Virginia Smith's
wonderful 'history of personal hygiene and purity', shows how the animal
behaviour knows as COBS (care of body surfaces) is the origin not only of such
human grooming as parasite removal but also of much more sophisticated procedures such as cleaning wounds and massaging painful limbs.
 |
| Monkey doctor and cat patient |
Back to my moths. It
wasn't until I was reading in bed and a moth swooped out from the
bedclothes that my skin began to crawl ― all right, it's a cliché, but an appropriate one. In the modern world, we conceive of 'personal
space' as a certain volume of air containing our own (clean, insect-free) body
and garments. Yet for centuries most of
our ancestors had virtually no personal space in our sense. Even royalty, who had more living room than most, had to share it with such democratic intruders as the clothes
moth, the flea, the louse and the bed bug. These were so much a part of everyday life
that John Donne's 'The Flea' takes it for
granted that his mistress will laugh rather than be insulted at the suggestion
that both poet and mistress are flea-bitten.
But I am a child of the twentieth century, a
post-Victorian. What I felt was anxiety (suppose the moths never went
away? The internet is full of horror
stories about people having to move house) and a flicker of irrational shame.
 |
A woman tormented by fleas
|
Perhaps it was the presence of bugs that enabled Donne to
think of fleas as comparative light-weights.
Even royalty had the occasional brush with the bed bug: two rival firms claimed
to be bug-destroyers to George III.
Queen
Victoria
also had an official bug-catcher, the attractively named Mr Tiffin, who claimed
to have found a bug in the bed of Princess Charlotte. Bugs give off a foul odour (this at least
warns people of their presence) and the
bites they inflict are agonizingly itchy.
Worst of all, they can walk upside-down, which means they can ambush
you. The British Museum warned in 1949: 'There
are well authenticated records of people isolating their beds by means of
saucers of paraffin placed under the legs so that the bugs could not climb up,
and retiring to rest with a pleasant feeling of having foiled their enemies,
only to be disturbed later in the night by bugs dropping from the ceiling.'
It's not surprising, then, that 'lousy' is one
of our older derogatory terms, dating back to the fourteenth century.
An unrelenting battle against these pests formed the background
to most human lives. Like the plague, a
disease carried by rat fleas, insect infestations peaked and dwindled according
to the season but never quite went away. At various periods women laboured to control infestations
by sweeping out soiled rushes, beating fabrics and 'shifting' linen as
frequently as their resources allowed.
Society developed polite strategies.
Boys were taught to sweep off their hats as a sign of respect while taking care
to conceal the interior of the hat, where lice might be lurking (but what
happened if the nits were clearly visible on your hair?). Our ancestors' predilections for hats,
bonnets and caps make sense in terms of cold houses, fear of 'chills', notions
of modesty (in the case of women's hair) and a dislike of tanned faces. Headgear might also serve, however, as a
barrier against lice. Despite the horror
stories about nests of wildlife in high hair (not necessarily apocryphal ― see
below) the extremely high styles were only popular for a comparatively brief
period during the eighteenth century. In
contrast, it's been suggested that the eighteenth-century
male habit of wearing a wig over a shaven head might be an effective strategy against
lice, especially if both head and wig were scrupulously cared for.
 |
| Bottle for hair or wig powder |
In a different context, decorative cutting and peeling of
fruits rendered them more attractive and advertised the culinary expertise of
the household but was also a way, in an age before pesticides, of checking that
nothing nasty was concealed beneath the skin and ensuring no guest would find
'the only thing worse than a worm', namely half a worm.
How did it feel to know that creatures lurked everywhere, often
in intimate contact with one's body or even inside it? Weevils in the flour and the cheese, woodworm
in the wainscot, cockroaches beneath the rug, rats and mice in the loft and the
kitchen, silverfish in the cupboards, fleas in clothing and furnishings, bugs
in beds, spiders everywhere. Herbs were
used to discourage or expel worms within the gut, but what of those worms which
were thought to cause toothache? How
maddening to go about in the belief that worms were steadily boring into one's
teeth. The dividing line between self
and world was fragile and permeable.
Nowadays we understand that even the cleanest bodies are
colonised, though not quite in the same way as our ancestors did. We are used to the idea of yeasts in the
body, of 'good bugs' in yoghurt. It
seems that the distinctive scent of human fingertips is created by
microorganisms which colonise the sweat glands there; when I first discovered
this, I felt queasy but there was no reflex of conditioned shame. Similarly,
the man who wrote to the London Magazine in 1768 about seeing the coiffeur
'open his aunt's head' (dismantle her elaborate pomaded hairstyle, after she
had worn it for over two months) seems to have found the vermin within
repellent but not particularly shameful. Nor did the hairdresser appear at all
embarrassed. 'When the comb was applied
to the natural hair, I observed swarms of animalculas running about in the
utmost consternation and in different directions, upon which I put my chair a
little further from the table and asked the operator whether that numerous
swarm did not from time to time send out colonies to other parts of the body?
He assured me that it could not; for that the quantity of powder and pomatum
formed a glutinous matter, which like lime twigs to birds, caught and clogged
the little natives and prevented their migration.'
Personally I'd find it easier to confess to petty theft than
to 'swarms of animalculas' in my hair.
But then, I'm from a generation for whom verminous infestations carried
a powerful stigma but were a very real possibility. Until 1962 I lived in what was considered a
slum, a Victorian terrace long since demolished. The combination of urban and industrial grime
with the conviction that 'cleanliness is next to godliness' meant that a dirty
house was shameful (women would ostentatiously scrub their front steps) yet the
houses were difficult to keep clear of vermin.
Rats were the biggest fear. To
discourage them, tins that had held fish or meat were burned in the fire to
remove all food traces and only then put in the bin. As far as I'm aware we didn't have rats, but we
did have mice and cockroaches. My father
worried in case I put my fingers into the mouse traps. My mother (who would be horrified if she knew
I was writing this) came downstairs each morning, stepped onto the carpet and
shuddered as a crackle informed her that she had just crushed a cockroach. She saw these insects as a badge of shame and bitterly resented the woman next door who (she believed) was
causing the infestation by lack of cleanliness. 'Then they come in here!' she moaned. For all I
know, the woman next door cherished a similar resentment against my mother. The defining emotions were shame and disgust. One of the worst things you could say about
anyone was that their house 'had to be fumigated' (uttered in a shocked
whisper). It was like saying they were
damned.
Nowadays people call Rentokil without embarrassment, seeing infestation as a force of nature rather
than a sign of depravity. I'm glad that pointless shame is a thing of the past and I agree that while Donne could turn a flea bite to a weapon of seduction, a body spotted with itchy blotches would be death to eroticism for a modern reader. Yet I like to see the presence of lice, fleas and worse in historical fiction, along with the human responses to them. They were, after all, like the poor: always with us.
