Free Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) by Robert Graves Page B

great-grandmother’s favourite recipe. I found that it was a general rule for men to address the Goddess with an adoration compounded of love and fear, whereas women addressed her familiarly as a friend, colleague or mistress, according to their estate.
    See-a-Bird told me that education after the age of eight was the affair of the estates to which the children belonged. By then it was usually clear from the child’s performance and preferences whether he was to continue in the estate into which he had been born; though some children developed unexpected powers or inclinations some years later when they had already been provisionally accepted as working members of a particular estate. It was a practical education outside the schoolhouse, the children being free – within the limits of custom, which exacted a very high standard of good manners from them – to wander through the villages and observe all that was going on in field, workshop, office or kitchen, and acquaint themselves with their neighbours for miles around. This freedom was conceded only for a few hours a day; the rest of the time they picked up, orally, the traditions of their estates and ran errands, or helped their parents or guardians. At puberty they were apprenticed to a trade or, if they belonged to the magicians’ or recorders’ estates, taught to read or write. (The captains, the commons and the servants were forbidden by custom to do either and both the magicians and recorders were strictly limited in their use of writing.) At sixteen or so they were free to start their love life, and when fully grown to travel or engage in wars, becoming full citizens. When they had ‘more white hairs than coloured’ they could become elders if they pleased and were then treated with peculiar respect; they were emancipated from custom while in their club-houses but required to behave, elsewhere, with appropriate dignity and reserve.
    As we walked home, I asked See-a-Bird: ‘What year are we in?’
    ‘The year before leap-year.’
    ‘Yes, but what’s the date?’
    The Interpreter intervened. He explained to See-a-Bird that in my age we counted the years publicly and celebrated every first of January with a postmortem on the Old Year and speculations on the New.
    ‘Here we have no public date,’ See-a-Bird told me. ‘The Chief Recorder keeps a count of years in the archives, but it isn’t published and nobody but he and his assistants could calculate how many have elapsed since the foundation of New Crete. We also consider it highly improper to mention anyone’s age or to count the number of years that he has held office or been married. In the same way we make no record of hours and minutes, as I believe you do with clocks and watches. We observe the phases of the moon; we distinguish morning from afternoon and afternoon from evening; we keep the days of the week; we mark the passage of the seasons; and the two parts of our double year end with the first full moon after the longest day and the first full moon after the shortest day. But time in an absolute sense was abolished on the same occasion on which it was agreed to abolish money; for the poet Vives pleaded passionately:
Since Time is money,
Time must be destroyed:
His sickle and hour-glass
Are in pawn to evil.
Nimuë, save us with your bow again.’
     
    ‘Then at what time do children go to school in the morning?’
‘When the bell rings.’
‘And when does it ring?’
‘When the first three children have arrived.’
‘And how long do you boil an egg?’
‘Until the sand’s run out of the egg-glass.’

Chapter VI
Erica
    That same day, which was a Sunday, an alarming and quite inexplicable event happened, just before I had lunch with See-a-Bird and Sally.
    It was a vegetarian meal, by the way: I found to my chagrin that custom forbade magicians to eat either meat or fish – only fresh cheese and an occasional egg, and no spices or pickles or even onions. No wonder they were so