by Pip Granger
Her view was, ‘I have washing to do and a full-time job. If washing on a Sunday offends Him that much, let Him produce a bloody miracle so that my washing ends up washed, ironed and in the airing cupboard with no irreligious effort from me.’
Our washdays entirely depended on the weather and on Mother having a day off from teaching, and that was that. If it upset the holy, then so be it.
Peter and I had the job of sorting the washing into batches and, Sunday or not, God help us if we got it wrong and something shrinkable went in the hot wash or something runny went in with the whites. First to go into the big copper were the ‘delicates’ – dresses, shirts, that kind of thing; the water would not have boiled yet, and it was clean. Next, when the water was not far off boiling, the sheets and pillowcases went in. These were accompanied by a blue bag, to give them that prized, extra-clean, slightly blue look that was supposed to mimic fresh snow or ice. Lastly, when the heat was turned off under the boiler and the scummy water was cooling, Peter’s flannel shorts would go in, followed by his and my smelly, much-darned socks.
Mother’s stockings were washed by hand in the sink. They were far too precious to risk in the boiler. She had to wear nylons for work, even in hot, humid weather, and as they were both fragile and expensive, they were treated with extreme care. Woollens were also washed by hand, in soap flakes rather than washing powder, and so was anything made of silk, although there was precious little of that fabulous fabric in our house, not until rationing was over and we had some spare lolly, which wasn’t often. I was often set to do the hand-washing in the sink, if all it needed was a quick rinse; serious staining was left to Mother to sort out.
Every summer, the blankets got their annual wash. There was no point in doing them in the winter, because they wouldn’t dry, and anyway, while they were hanging about, they weren’t keeping us warm in bed. We didn’t have spares. They were also washed in the copper first, but the gas was turned off before the water could get too hot and thus turn our blankets into shrunken, felt doormats. Most of our blankets were thin, khaki, army jobs that Mother had bought for a song from a spiv flogging them from a suitcase in Romford market.
Mother’s biceps would bunch like a boxer’s in training when she gripped the wooden tongs to yank heavy, wet sheets – or even heavier wet blankets – into the deep wash-tub, and then into the butler’s sink for rinsing. Washday wasn’t for the weak and feeble: this was especially true on blanket days, but every washday was hard, physical work. As well as the heaving about of wet sheets, the plunging and turning of the dolly, and the endless rinses in the sink, there was all the hand-wringing to get some of the water out before each item was rinsed yet again, and then finally fed to the mangle. A 1950s woman, so used to all that wringing, had hands as strong as a navvy’s and could strangle a rhino – should the need ever arise – with no trouble at all.
Our ‘laundry’, or scullery, was tacked on at the back of the house and had a gas-fired copper, a sink, a large wash-tub, a formidable mangle, a central drain in the floor, washing lines for wet days and all the paraphernalia of washday, including the wooden tongs, buckets and a galvanized bath for moving big items between copper, washtub, sink and mangle. There were also bars of Sunlight Soap, a box of Tide washing powder, a store of Reckitt’s blue bags in an old jam jar, a box of Robin starch, a bottle of cloudy ammonia, some Vim scouring powder, a tin of Harpic, a tin of Brasso, some Penguin polishing cream and, for stubborn stains, a box of washing soda, all stored high up on shelves, out of reach of exploratory little fingers.
There was a large, walk-in cupboard with shelves on the back wall and some handy hooks arranged along each side. This cupboard was a treasure trove of useful things, like empty jam jars ready for the jam-making season, the Kilner jars that were used for preserving fruit, pickled onions, chutneys and piccalilli, and two preserving pans – one for chutneys, another for jams. A washboard hung from a hook, as did the dolly. A dolly was an implement with a long wooden shaft attached to a disc, which, in turn, had sort of arms sticking out of it. You plunged your dolly into the washtub and beat, stirred and generally agitated the washing to get the dirt out. It worked like the paddles of an old-fashioned washing machine, but was powered by a pair of strong arms rather than electricity. The big wooden tongs, the peg bag and a spare washing line (they were always breaking) were also hung on their own hooks. On the floor, under the shelves, was an extra bowl, several galvanized buckets and a washing basket. The tin bath hung on a hook on the back of the door.
On sunny days, the mangle would be wheeled out into the yard, and the wet washing would follow in the bath and some buckets. Once each item had been fed through the big rubber-coated rollers of the mangle, sometimes several times, the flattened washing would be put into the washing basket and then pegged on the line to let the breeze and sunshine finish the job. Peter was chief mangler because he was taller and stronger, and could turn the mangle wheel more easily.
My main contribution was to dance about getting in the way, but I also did some of the pegging out, once the line was lowered for me, then hauled back up again when I was done. We had a wooden clothes prop with a fork at the business end. This raised the line even higher, to catch more wind and to keep large items from dragging on the ground. If something blew off the line, dragged in the dirt or was shat upon by birds, it was a disaster: it would have to be washed all over again. A broken washing line was an utter catastrophe.
I loved pegging out washing, I liked to be out in the air, listening to the birds, bees and the distant cries of children playing.
Winter washdays were even less fun than in the summertime. Sometimes the wet clothes froze stiff, and chilly fingers had to crack sleeves and sheets into shape to get them into the basket for bringing in. There was an airer fixed to the kitchen ceiling, which was pulled up and down with a pulley arrangement. It was meant for airing, but was also useful for drying stuff in a hurry in the relative warmth of the kitchen. The problem was, the ceiling wasn’t that high; once the airer was loaded, you could get slapped in the face by a cold, wet sheet, an errant shirt sleeve or a thick, woolly stocking as you moved around.
Sheets had to be arranged and rearranged on the airer, and dried in sections. This could be murder in the cold, damp depths of winter, especially if there were six sheets to be washed, dried, ironed and aired. Flannelette sheets were the worst, because they were so thick and heavy. They were bliss on one’s bed on a cold winter’s night, but hell in the tub on washday. That’s why we ‘topped and tailed ’em’. The bottom sheet would go into the wash, and the top sheet would take its place to last another week. That way, there were only three sheets for the wash each week.
Knickers, socks, stockings, woollens and vests were dried and aired on a clotheshorse that opened out into three sections to be placed in front of the fire. It worked fine, except that when it was loaded with washing, nobody got any heat from the fire. The combination of direct heat and damp washing also meant that the windows steamed up something awful and droplets of moisture even ran down the wallpaper. Hot, wet wool had a strong and distinctive smell that pervaded the atmosphere in our living room for a while even after it was dried and put away.
Our one labour-saving device was a vacuum cleaner, a sausage-shaped thing with a hose that plugged into one end of the sausage for suck, and the other end for blow. It was a Goblin, and it weighed a ton. Doing the stairs was the worst job, and much cursing and swearing ensued on stairs days. The hose, unlike the elephant’s trunk that it resembled, was not very flexible. It fought back, and bucked and jerked whenever it was in a tight spot.
Later, when I was about seven, as we moved up a bit in the world, we rented a larger, detached house in Wincanton Avenue, right on the very edge of the estate and with wide open, rather flat, countryside stretching out beyond the Bear pub. Every Saturday, a man with very strange ears came to call. His lugs had perfectly round, dangling lobes, as if someone had slipped large marbles into them. They would swing in a
light breeze like Christmas tree baubles, only not as pretty. Those gently swinging lobes could mesmerize the unwary. They certainly mesmerized me: I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
When she heard him ringing his bell, my mother would nip out to hail the man with the lobes, and he’d stop his lorry and trundle a washing machine down a ramp, across the pavement, up our garden path and into our kitchen. Coins would change hands, and we’d be the proud possessors of a washing machine for a whole morning or an afternoon. The big old copper was ancient history. It was the beginning of the New Elizabethan Age, and time for mod cons.
*
Even though she worked full time, Mother was responsible for all the cooking, cleaning and most of the shopping, because, in the 1950s, real men did not sully their hands with such domestic stuff. I can never recall Father doing anything that could even remotely be described as housework. Occasionally, he did a little light shopping, but usually only if it was something he wanted. As he always had champagne tastes, he’d buy the odd spot of caviar for himself – we didn’t eat it – at Fortnum and Mason, expensive cheeses and salamis from one of the many delicatessens in Soho, or some Cuban cigars if they were available, but he rarely schlepped boring stuff like potatoes, cabbages and carrots home from the shops.
I now know that Father, even before he finally left us, repaid Mother for providing our only steady income and seeing to all the domestic chores by regularly betraying her with other women and stealing her housekeeping money to spend on his bits of sly, as well as gambling and drinking it away. No wonder the poor woman was bitter and depressed.
Looking back, I wonder how much help, if any, she got from her parents. The trouble was, the convention was for the man of the house to see to money stuff and the woman to do the domestic things, so I suspect that our profoundly conventional grandfather took the hard line, and refused to give financial aid because he would see it as Father’s job. And anyway, he saw Father as a wastrel who would simply ‘throw good money after bad’.
Grandma did slip her daughter the odd few pounds as and when she could, and tried to offer sanctuary when she realized it was necessary, but, once again, I think Grandad made visits very difficult for all concerned: he didn’t like young children much, and anyway, he believed that Mother had made her bed by marrying a ne’er-do-well like Father, so now she had just better lie in it. I suspect, too, that Mother was ashamed of her situation, and kept the knowledge of the vast majority of her misery away from her parents. After all, most women who feel trapped in abusive marriages keep the secret out of a sense of shame.
‘I liked your father,’ Grandma told me once when I was old enough to talk to in a ‘woman to woman’ way. ‘He was a real charmer. He could be very kind, too, although he was an awful husband to your mother, I knew that. Your grandfather wasn’t very sympathetic. He thought she’d brought it all on herself, you see. But as I told him when he grumbled at me giving her money from time to time, “It’s not just Joan I worry about, Bob, it’s those poor children. You can’t tell me that they brought it all on themselves. They didn’t ask to be born, after all.” That’s what I’d tell him, but he didn’t like it, just the same. And he never liked you coming to stay, not until you’d grown up a bit. I think he was ashamed. You were such scruffy children; down at heel, if you know what I mean. At least Peter was a sturdy child, but you were such a skinny, tiny scrap of a thing that you looked half-starved.’
I probably was, indeed, half-starved, because eating at home had become so frightening that I often only pretended to eat, while in fact, I hid my food in my hanky. Later, I’d drop it in the dustbin. When Mother’s back was turned, or she’d blacked out from too much booze, I’d sneak some bread and Marmite, some broken biscuits or fruit or any other grub I could be sure she hadn’t poisoned. I didn’t like to tell Grandma that, though; she would have been hurt that I could possibly have ever believed that her daughter was hell bent on murdering me. Like most unhappy families, we had our secrets, and I learned very early that I had to keep them.
10
Happy Families
‘What the fuck is my son doing running wild in the streets with his arse hanging out of his trousers?’ Father demanded, red in the face and with his eyes ‘sticking out like dogs’ bollocks’, as my mother so graphically described them.
He had arrived at our house to be greeted by the sight of my brother playing in the streets and looking as if he’d been dragged through, not just the one hedge, but several acres of them.
‘He’s probably searching under rocks for his fucking father,’ Mother yelled back, drink in one hand, fag in the other.
Neither realized that I was cowering on the grubby stairs, fingers in my ears, trying to blot out the sound of their argument. I had heard Father’s uneven gait on the path and, after looking out the window to check that it was indeed his car that was parked at the kerb, had run out of my bedroom, where I had been reading, to greet him.
I had finally learned to read all in a rush, largely because I had been bored witless with the adventures – if they could be called that – of the dreary brother and sister team, Janet and John. I wanted to get on to the Wide Range Readers, which had proper adventure stories rather than the tedious daily doings of a pair of middle-class kids whose well-ordered lives bore absolutely no resemblance to my own.
‘I want to read one of those,’ I told my teacher and pointed at the Wide Range Readers.
‘But you can’t, your reading isn’t good enough yet,’ she replied, as she reached for the hated Janet and John.
‘Yes it is,’ I answered boldly.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I can read them,’ I insisted.
This argument went on for some time, but I remained stubborn. I had made up my mind that I was not going to read about those ghastly children ever again. I wanted to read about Eskimos, Red Indians and Swiss maids who yodelled. I dug my toes in deep and refused point-blank to even glance at the book. After all, I was a Soho veteran, a seasoned smuggler and the daughter of an ace storyteller: I was used to much meatier stuff than the mealy-mouthed Janet and John, who would have bored themselves to death if they’d had to read their own books over and over again. In the end, my teacher relented with a sigh and told me to pick a book, any book, and to read it to her. I did as she asked and, to her utter astonishment, I read it pretty well. At first, she was convinced that I had memorized the story, having overheard other children reading it aloud. She picked out another, more difficult book, and I read a story from that too. We kept this up until I had read her the last story in the last, and hardest, of the series.
Mother was summoned to the school.
‘Something peculiar has happened,’ my teacher informed her.
‘I know she’s a funny little tyke,’ my mother acknowledged cautiously, ‘she always has been. But she’s not normally naughty, as you know. What’s she done?’
‘Oh nothing bad, just something odd. I’ve never come across it before in all my teaching years.’ The teacher paused. ‘She’s learned to read – apparently overnight. One day she was illiterate, and the next, she could read!’
‘Are you sure?’ Mother was as bewildered as my teacher.
‘Certain. Watch.’ My teacher plopped a reader in front of me and instructed me to read for my mother. I read. Mother was duly impressed. As I recall, she bought me the first book of my very own and enrolled me at the library, as rewards for my success. From that moment on, I never looked back when it came to reading. I read everything I could lay my hands on.
It was as if I had had the tools for the task, but had not been using them until sheer boredom and frustration had made me open the toolbox.
So, there I was on that weekend morning, sitting among the dust bunnies on the stairs, and torn between wanting to see my father and resentment at being dragged away from Black Beauty just to listen to my parents yelling at each other. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to relax with my book while they were at it, and the fear
that I would be discovered if I moved kept me rooted to the spot. I wasn’t sure whether Mother had started drinking early, or simply hadn’t stopped from the night before. Either way, her temper was uncertain. This was why I was holed up in my room out of sight and, I hoped, out of mind. It never did to catch the attention of a well-oiled Mother. So, when I heard the sound of the limping cavalry coming up the path, I rushed to meet him, but stopped dead at the top of the stairs as hostilities broke out.
I longed to make a run for it, and head for the peace and safety of Dog Rose Camp, but they were standing toe to toe in the hallway and blocking any possible way out through the front door or the back. I finally had the nerve to shuffle backwards on my bum along the landing a bit, so that I couldn’t see them, nor they me – but I could still hear them.
By this time, we were seeing a fair bit of him and his lover, Gaby. Peter and I were often at their Soho flat during weekends and the school holidays. When Father was in funds, we would decamp to the South of France for a chunk of the long summer break. Between times, he would occasionally visit us, usually bearing expensive toys, despite the fact that sometimes he had not paid our maintenance for weeks. Gaby also sent things for us. She was a gifted needlewoman and once she knitted me a gorgeous dress, with knitted scarlet dots around the neck, hem and cuffs. I loved that dress.
I heard Mother go to the door to see who, if anyone, was waiting for Father in the car, but there was no one. He had come alone. Mother told me, when I was grown up, that for a few years after he left, Father had been unable to make up his mind between his two women. There was also the suggestion that, at one point, he had three on the go: Gaby, herself and a well-known popular singer of the day. As he had arrived unannounced and alone on this particular visit, Mother was pretty sure what he was after.