Chapter 9
Domestic Bliss

Looking back from the comfort of a modern home, it is difficult to realise the drudgery that was entailed in running a family house over seventy years ago.  Small wonder that our mothers stayed at home to do the housework; even if jobs had been available, there would have been precious little time for both the home and a career.

Woman’s place may have been in the home, but she was entitled to some assistance from the rest of the family.  At ‘Beaumont’ (our family house – built in 1926), the day began with Father lighting the kitchen fire in the ‘Bungalow’ range. This was a great advance on the antiquated ranges to be found towering from floor to ceiling in the old cottages, but it was still a formidable monster by modern standards.  The range consisted of an open grate with an ash-pan underneath and an oven alongside.  Above the grate and the oven was a useful recess where food could be kept warm or, by lifting circular lids, food could be heated from the flue gases.  It was also a favourite place for Timmy (the cat) to have a nap.  Behind the grate was a boiler for the domestic hot water, and the whole thing was controlled by dampers which allowed the heat to circulate around the back-boiler and the oven.

Lighting the fire involved riddling the residue of yesterday’s fire to shake the ashes into the pan whilst leaving the cinders, which could be burned again.  Then newspapers, made into a pyramid by rolling pages round a knitting-needle and knotting them in an ingenious way, were used as the core of the new fire.  Carefully selected small pieces of coal were stacked around this pyramid, and a ‘taper’ – a long thin candle – was used to reach its heart to start the fire.  Then the ashes could be removed to the dustbin.  Until the dining-room fire was lit on a winter’s afternoon, the kitchen fire was the sole source of warmth in the house.  In the summer there was no escape from its heat.

Once a week, the flues had to be cleaned by opening trap-doors, lids and flaps so that a long-handled brush could be inserted, and the soot swept down to the lowest point for removal.  Then grate-polish (we were past the ‘black lead’ era at ‘Beaumont’) was applied, and the black enamel and bright steel buffed to a shine.

Apart from a gas-ring in the scullery, the kitchen fire was our only means of cooking for many years.  A hinged rack could be lowered over the fire to support two pans, and another pan could be simmering on the hob.  The oven, its temperature controlled by sheer experience, baked all the cakes, roasted the meat, cooked the pies – yes, and made bread, too.  The stoking of the fire required considerable skill; putting a shovelful of coal on a low fire could cause a drop in temperature sufficient to ruin a batch of loaves.

Our coal-shed was conveniently situated outside the back door, and a full bucket of coal always stood ready just inside the scullery.  Older houses often had their coal stored in the cellar or in an outhouse some distance from the house proper.  One of my regular chores when cycling to school at New Mills was to call on my ageing grandparents in Gibb Lane to fill three buckets of coal to see them through the day.  Dad’s ‘twists’ of newspaper obviated the need for firewood, but many of my friends had the chopping of ‘chips’ from logs or old boxes as their daily task.

With the fire lit, shoes had to be cleaned – another task for my father, who cleaned the whole family’s shoes as long as May (my sister) and I lived at ‘Beaumont’.  There was a stiff brush for removing the dust and dried mud, a smaller brush for spreading the polish, a soft brush for producing a shine, and a velvet cloth for a final gloss.  So we came downstairs in a morning to a glowing fire and a row of gleaming shoes.

If it was Monday, there was the washing to be done.  Washday meant wet floors, steam everywhere, and scratch meals.  A few years ago, a colleague of mine with whom I was sharing an indifferent meal in a restaurant looked at his plate and said “Proper washday dinner!”  He, too, remembered when there was little time for elaborate cooking on Mondays.  There was always some cold meat from Sunday’s roast, but only boiled potatoes – which are no child’s favourite.

After the fire had been kindled on a Monday, the gas boiler had to be lit.  This was a modern aid to laundry, greatly superior to the ‘coppers’ to be found in the older houses.  These were deep metal bowls in a brick enclosure, under which a fire had to be maintained to heat the water, which was ladled out as required.

The equipment for washday reads like a catalogue from a torture chamber: mangle, tub, posser, dolly, washboard, rack and maiden.  We needed a scullery to house the more cumbersome of these items; some of our friends even had a separate ’wash-house’.

When it was hot enough, water from the boiler was transferred to the tub, and the clothes were agitated by means of a wooden ‘dolly’ resembling a five-legged stool with a long handle.  Since this handle also had two arms sticking out, the dolly was a favourite plaything.  Known as ‘Joe’, he had a face drawn in with crayons, and (when not in use) he was usually dressed in our own clothes above the waist.  Five legs were more than we could cope with! Other laundresses used a ‘posser’ – a sort of inverted copper colander on a stick.  Stubborn dirt called for the ’washboard’ – a wooden frame supporting a sheet of corrugated metal against which the soiled clothes could be vigorously scrubbed – later to be known only as a rhythm instrument in ‘skiffle groups’.

The clean clothes were then lifted up from the tub to the great rollers of the mangle, which were turned by hand through a train of massive cog-wheels.  Periodically, the tub was trundled outside to be emptied before it was refilled with hot, clean water from the boiler.  Shirt collars and cuffs had to be starched in a gooey liquid made from white granules out of a box with the picture of a robin on the label.

If it was fine, the clothes were hung out to dry on a line running from a post in one corner of the garden to the tall wireless pole in the other.  (Wireless, indeed!  What a misnomer!  There were fifty yards of wire running across the garden to conduct the waves from the ether into the set.)  Sometimes there would be a frantic shout: “The line’s broken!”, and Mother would dash out to rescue her clean linen from the muddy lawn and to repair the frayed rope.

If it was wet day, the whole house seemed to be full of damp clothes, airing on the ‘rack’ suspended from the kitchen ceiling or on the ‘maiden’ in front of the dining-room fire, and draped over the huge fire-guard in the kitchen.  The maiden was another plaything; turned on its side, it could be opened out and covered with a tablecloth to make a tent.  ‘Maiden’ is, I believe, a north-country word.  In the south-east it is a ‘clothes-horse’, whilst in Devon they speak picturesquely of a ‘winter-hedge’.  A minister friend of ours was once, with his wife and children, inspecting a manse in Devon which they were to occupy.  Seeing a cupboard under the stairs, the minister’s wife exclaimed: “I can keep the maiden in there.”  The local lady who was showing them round looked somewhat surprised, if not shocked.  In Devon, a ‘maiden’ meant a little girl!

Ironing was the final washday chore.  Again, Mother had a modern aid in the shape of a gas iron – a clumsy box containing a Bunsen burner would be a fair description.  Our neighbour Mrs Sigley had a charcoal iron, which needed constant work with bellows to keep it hot.  My maternal grandmother used an old flat iron, heated against the bars of the fire and polished on an old cloth before being pressed on to the clean clothes.  Another type of iron contained metal slabs, heated in the fire, then lifted out, red hot, with the poker.

There was no electricity in the village until 1935, and so electric irons, cookers and fires had to remain pictures in the catalogues for many years to come.  Refrigerators, freezers and washing-machines had not even come on the market.  Electric light was the greatest boon when the power eventually reached Mellor.  We had previously used gas to light the house, and although the incandescent mantles were a great advance on the naked “bat’s wing” flame to be found in my grandmother’s scullery, gaslight was a terrible inconvenience, especially for a child.  One had to stand on a chair, turn on the gas and strike a match – all in darkness – in order to illuminate the room.  The dangers involved were enormous, and there was always the possibility that the match would touch the fragile mantle and shatter it into white, dusty fragments.

So we went to bed by candlelight, each with his or her own candlestick, blowing it out when we were safely in bed.  Later we progressed to ‘flashlights’ (battery-powered torches), but these were often misused for secretly reading under the bedclothes.  No heated bedrooms, then, although most had diminutive fireplaces.  These were lit only in cases of illness, and were not really worth the cost of their installation.  And yet, as late as 1950, when my wife and I moved into our new house in Townscliffe Lane, we had a fireplace in each bedroom.

Neither were there any electric blankets, nor even, for many people, hot water bottles.  Often the bed was warmed by a common brick, heated in the oven and wrapped in an old piece of flannel.  A hot brick would retain its heat most effectively through a winter’s night, but a sudden movement could cause a badly-stubbed toe.

Friday was baking day.  A great fire was built up to heat the oven, so the kitchen was overheated to start with.  Mother baked a large quantity of food every week – apple pies, jam tarts, currant buns and her standard ‘cut-and-come-again’ fruit cake, the recipe for which has been handed down from generation to generation.  That cake has sustained me through many a long morning between breakfast and lunchtime, has been the crowning glory of my tea, and a complement to my evening cocoa.  I owe a lot to that cake.

Bread-making was always a fascinating exercise for the spectator.  Mother always put the pancheon – the earthenware bowl in which the process took place – on the floor so that she could put all her weight behind the kneading of the dough.  Then it was marked with the sign of the cross (“To keep the Devil away” I was told), covered with a cloth, and put in the recess above the oven to rise.  The cross actually allowed the surface of the dough to split and stretch more easily as the mass expanded.

Then lumps of dough were put into the loaf tins, and balls of it were made into muffins.  There is no smell to compare with that of freshly-baked bread, and no taste like that of a slice from the new loaf, spread thickly with farm butter and home-made jam.

Since there were no refrigerators or freezers, a house needed a pantry.  And a pantry needed a cold slab of stone as shelf for keeping things cool.  The meat would be covered with a wire-mesh cage to keep the flies away, and the milk-jug had its own little net cover, weighted down with beads round the edge.  Bread was kept in a large earthenware crock with a wooden lid.

With so much dust in the house from the open fires, the place took a lot of keeping clean.  Electric vacuum cleaners were still unknown to us, and the humble ‘Ewbank’ carpet-sweeper was in constant use.  A primitive vacuum cleaner (the ‘Star’), consisting of a hand-operated bellows and a nozzle, was available, but it never seemed very popular.  Certainly ours rarely emerged from the broom-cupboard.

Once a year, the carpets were taken outside, thrown over the clothes-line, and beaten with a wickerwork paddle.  This was tedious, dusty work, and we were all expected to ‘have a whack’.  The annual ritual of spring-cleaning upset the whole household.  While the carpets were up, floors were scrubbed, curtains taken down and washed, and heavy furniture was moved so that the hidden cobwebs could be destroyed, the whole event being preceded by the visit of the chimney-sweep.

But at last the house returned to normal, and the weekly routine of washday to baking-day went smoothly on once more.