by Jilly Cooper
We drove round Norfolk on our honeymoon and I nearly sent my husband insane by exclaiming: ‘How lovely’, every time we passed a village church.
SEX
I’m not going into the intricacies of sexual initiation — there are numerous books on the subject — I would just plead for both parties to be patient, tolerant, appreciative and understanding. Temporary frigidity and impotence are not infrequent occurrences on honeymoon, and not to be taken too seriously.
Take things slowly, you’ve probably got a lifetime in front of you — all that matters at this stage is to get across strongly that you love each other, and you’re not sorry you are married.
DON’T WORRY if, unlike the girl in The Carpetbaggers who wanted to see nothing but ceilings on her honeymoon, you don’t feel like leaping on each other all the time. As I’ve already pointed out, you’re probably exhausted and in no condition for a sexual marathon.
Do take a red towel if you’re a virgin, or likely to have the Curse. It saves embarrassment over the sheets.
Even if you’ve been sleeping together for ages beforehand, and sex was stunning, don’t worry if it goes off for a bit, or feel convinced that it can only work in a clandestine setting. You haven’t been married before, and may just be having initial panic because the stable door is well and truly bolted.
One friend told me he was woken up in the middle of most nights of his honeymoon by his wife staggering groggily out of bed, groping for her clothes and muttering she must get home before her parents woke up.
Eases tensions
It’s a good idea to borrow someone’s cottage in the country for a honeymoon. It’s cheaper than a hotel, and you won’t be worried by the imagined chortlings of chambermaids and hallporters, and you can cook if you get bored.
Don’t worry if he/she doesn’t gaze into your eyes all the time and quote poetry. Most people don’t know enough poetry to last more than a quarter of an hour. A certain amount of alcohol is an excellent idea — it eases tension, breaks down inhibitions. Take the case of the girl in our office who on her arrival with her new husband at the hotel was presented with a bottle of champagne.
‘It was wonderful,’ she told us. ‘We shared a glass each night and made the bottle last the whole fortnight.’
WEDDING PRESENTS
Get your thank-you letters written before the wedding. Once the pre-wedding momentum has been lost, you’ll never get down to them.
Don’t beef too much about the presents your partner’s family or friends have given you, even if they are ghastly. No one likes to be reminded that they are related to, or acquainted with, people of execrable taste. Try and keep a list of who gave you what, so you can bring those cake forks out of hiding when Aunt Agatha comes to tea, and you won’t, as we did, give a particularly hideous vase back to the woman who gave it to us, when later she got married.
Setting up house
MOVING IN
AT BEST A nightmare — as Dorothy Parker said, the one dependable law of life is that everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.
When my parents moved into their first house, they arrived to find the electricians had all the floor boards up, the paint was wet in the kitchen, and there was an enormous pile of rubble in the garage surmounted by a one-horned, one-eyed stag.
Try therefore to get all major structural alterations done beforehand. Nothing is more depressing than trying to get a place straight with builders trooping in and out with muddy feet and demands for endless cups of tea. Even the smallest job will seem as though they’re building the pyramids.
Try to get shelves up beforehand; removal men unpack at a fantastic rate, and you’ll soon find every inch of floor space covered and nowhere to put anything. Don’t forget to get the gas and electricity connected. Buy plenty of light bulbs.
Make a plan where everything is going — or you’ll end up with the grand piano in the lavatory, the fridge in the bedroom, and two little removal men buckling under the sideboard while you have a ferocious argument where to put it.
Get some food in. You’ll be so busy, you won’t realise it’s past 5.30, and the shops are shut, and you’ll be so bankrupted tipping the removal men and rushing out to buy picture wire, screws, and plugs, you won’t have any money left to go out to dinner.
A bottle of whisky is an excellent soother of nerves — but don’t let the removal men get their hands on it, or you’ll have all your furniture chipped. A friend who had two particularly surly removal men made them a cup of tea and slipped two amphetamines into each mug. After that she had one of the jolliest moves imaginable.
How much to tip: about 10s a head — £1 if you’re feeling affluent.
Do measure the height of the rooms before you go out and buy furniture in a sale. We had a tallboy standing in the street for weeks, because we couldn’t get it through any of the doors.
If possible one of you should take a week off work (even if it is unpaid) to get things straight. Nothing is more demoralising than coming home late for the next month to face the chaos.
Try to get the kitchen and one other room habitable, then you can shut yourselves away from the debris when it becomes too much for you.
DO-IT-YOURSELF
One of the great myths of marriage — heavily fostered by television commercials of smiling young couples up ladders — is that home decorating is fun when you do it together.
It isn’t. It’s paralysingly boring and caused more rows in our marriage than anything else. Just remember that, like having a brace on your teeth as a child, it’s worth it later on.
Invariably one partner is more hamfisted than the other, and the trouble starts when the more dexterous one becomes irritated and starts bossing poor Hamfisted about. Hamfisted gets more and more sulky until a row breaks out.
My husband is a great deal more adept than I am at decorating, but even so it was always a case of Wreck-it-Yourself. Our first attempts at wallpapering out-crazied the Crazy Gang. We lost our tempers, the measure and the scissors. I had bought enough paper to do two rooms (wildly expensive at eight guineas a roll) but we had to scrap so much we only managed three quarters of one room. Finally, when we stood back to admire our wrinkled uneven labours, we found we had papered the cat to the wall like the Canterville Ghost.
Our wrinkled, uneven labour
A FEW POINTS TO REMEMBER
Buy cheap wallpaper for your first attempts.
When you strip wallpaper and come to a layer of silver paper, leave it alone, or you’ll find you’ve stripped off the damp course, and any paper subsequently put on the wall will turn green.
PAINTING
Do remember to put dust sheets down when you’re painting or you’ll get shortsighted aunts commenting on the attractive speckled border round the walls.
If you’re doing the landing and the hall, don’t as we did start painting the landing scarlet, and the hall indigo — it never entered our heads that the colours would have to meet somewhere, in this case halfway up the stairs. The result is horrible.
Go to a showroom where you can see the paint you choose in large quantities. That colour that looks so subtle on the shade card can spread to vast deserts of ghastliness once it gets up on the wall.
Don’t mix paints unless you’re an expert: they always come out sickly ice-cream shades.
Never get friends to help. Even your own pathetic attempts will be better than theirs. We let a girlfriend, who claimed she found painting therapeutic, loose on one of the spare rooms. When we looked in a quarter of an hour later, there were terracotta flames of paint licking a foot high over the virgin white ceiling I had painted the day before. None of our cries of ‘Steady on’ or ‘I say’ could halt her. The whole room had to be painted again.
Tell your wife before you paint a shelf or she’ll bustle in five minutes later and replace everything you removed. You are bound to have a row about who didn’t wash the brushes last time.
If you run out of paint, do remember
the name and brand before you chuck the tin away. We had to buy five different shades of orange before we hit on the right one again.
Lots of praise is essential. Say well done even if it isn’t, people get inordinately proud of the four square foot of wall they’ve just painted.
MISCELLANEOUS
Curtains were another disaster zone — in an attempt to make them not too short, I made them miles too long, so they trailed on the floor like a child dressing up in its mother’s clothes. And of course there wasn’t enough material left over for the pelmets.
Don’t be fooled by do-it-yourself tiling kits: they’re easy enough until you have to round a corner or meet a natural hazard like a light switch.
TRADITIONAL ROLE OF HUSBAND AND WIFE
Traditionally the husband is the more practical and mechanically minded member of the partnership. But if he’s the kind who hits the electricity main every time he knocks a nail in and puts up shelves at 10°, and his wife is the practical type who got a distinction for carpentry at school, she shouldn’t hesitate to take over. As my husband remarked, here was one sphere in which he wouldn’t have minded having his masculinity undermined.
Running the house
HOUSEKEEPING
A MAJOR PROBLEM for the newly married wife, particularly if she is holding down a nine-to-five job. Before she was married she blued her wages on clothes and took her washing home to Mother every weekend. Now, suddenly, she must be housekeeper, cook, hostess, laundress, seamstress, beguiling companion, glamour girl, assistant breadwinner and willing bedfellow all in one.
What she must remember when she gets home exhausted from the office to be faced with a mountain of washing up in the sink, the dinner to be cooked, the bed to be made, the flat to be cleaned, a pile of shirts to be ironed, and her husband in a playful mood, is that where marriage is concerned, CHEERFULNESS, SEXUAL ENTHUSIASM, AND GOOD COOKING are far nearer to Godliness than cleanliness about the house.
As long as the flat is kept tidy — men hate living in a muddle — meals are regular, and their wives are in good spirits, husbands won’t notice a few cobwebs.
If you amuse a man in bed, he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it.
RESENTMENT
If a wife feels resentful that she is slaving away, while her husband comes home and flops down in front of the television until dinner is ready, she must remember that it isn’t all roses for him either.
He has given up his much prized bachelor status for marriage and he probably expects, like his father before him, to come home every night to a gleaming home, a happy wife, and a delicious dinner. Instead he finds a tearful, fractious shrew, and he forgets that his mother looked after his father so well because she didn’t have to go out to work.
TOLERANCE
Tolerance is essential on both sides. If the wife is working, the husband must be prepared to give her a hand. Equally, it’s up to the wife to ask when she needs help, and not scurry round with set face like someone out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. As men hate seeing their wives slaving, one of the solutions is for the wife to get her housework done when her husband isn’t around.
That housekeeping whizz-kid Mrs Beeton suggests getting up early, and I managed to persuade most of my employers to let me work from eight-thirty to four-thirty. Eight-thirty sounds horrendous, but once you’re used to it, it’s much the same as nine-thirty. You miss the rush-hour traffic both ways, you have a nice quiet hour in the office before anyone else gets in to ring your mother or make a shopping list (no one knows whether you got in exactly at eight-thirty anyway) and you get home at least an hour before your husband so you have time to get the dinner on, tidy up and welcome him home.
Another solution is to encourage your husband to have at least one night out a week with the boys, then you have a few hours to catch up.
DAILY WOMEN
Or you can employ a daily woman. If you get a good one, hang on to her, she’s worth her weight in bullion. Generally, alas, dailies start off marvellously and then after a few weeks the standard goes down and so does the level of the gin. My husband came home once and found ours asleep in our bed with the electric blanket and the wireless on.
Asleep in our bed
If I have a good daily, I find I spend far more time than before tidying up before she comes, and if I get a bad one, I spend hours tidying up after her, so my husband won’t grumble about throwing money away and force me to sack her.
Dailies also have an irritating habit of not turning up the day your mother-in-law is coming to stay, or the time you’re relying on them to tidy up before a large dinner party.
But to return to housework. Remember that the dust you flick away today will have drifted back into place tomorrow. Once when I was rabbitting on about the dirtiness of my house, a girlfriend, whose house is none too clean either, told me I was suffering from the bourgeois syndrome: namely, obsessive worrying over spit and polish. It worked like a charm. I didn’t do any housework for at least a fortnight.
A FEW QUICK POINTERS
Have lots of cushions to hide things under when guests arrive, and plump them a great deal. The woman who has the tidiest house in London has huge arm muscles from plumping.
Huge arm muscles
Closing untidy desks, straightening papers, putting books back vertically instead of horizontally and records back in their sleeves, picking things off the floor: all make a room look better quicker than dusting or hoovering.
Empty ashtrays, clear dirty glasses into the kitchen, open windows at night, or the place will smell like a bar parlour in the morning.
Get a decent hoover, or you’ll be like a girlfriend who grumbled to her husband that she was quite exhausted from hoovering all day.
He looked around and said: ‘I wish you’d do some hoovering in our house instead then.’
Don’t hoover under his feet — it’s grounds for divorce. If your kitchen is a pigsty, don’t have a glass door, or a hatch through which inquisitive guests can peer.
Don’t use all the dusters for polishing silver or shoes, of you’ll have to hare round before dinner parties dusting furniture with the front of your dress like I do.
LAUNDRY
If you can possibly afford it during the first six months, send your husband’s shirts to the laundry; one of the things that nearly broke my back when I was first married was washing and ironing seven shirts a week. Do encourage your husband to buy dark shirts for the office, so he can wear them for at least two days.
If you wash at home, don’t, as I always do, put in far too much soap powder and spend the next two hours rinsing.
If you wash at the launderette, remember to put your half-crown into the machine, or you’ll come back forty minutes later to find your clothes still unwashed. Be careful not to put anything that runs into the machine. When we were first married I left in a red silk handkerchief. My husband’s shirts came out streaked like the dawn, he wore cyclamen underpants for weeks and claimed he was the only member of his rugger fifteen with a rose pink jockstrap.
If you have a spin dryer, remember to put a bowl under the waste pipe or you’ll have the kitchen awash every time. Drying is a problem in a small flat: one of the most useful presents we had was a Hawkins Hi-Dri (cost about £9), which will dry all your washing in about six hours and can be folded away afterwards.
Husbands are not amused by singe marks. They can be removed with peroxide, and in an emergency use talcum powder. Always put ironing away when you’ve finished — either the cat is bound to come and sit on it, or it looks so badly ironed it gets mistaken for dirty laundry and washed again.
The ideal, of course, is to send everything to the laundry. Unfortunately our laundry is notorious for not getting things back on time (we’ve got very used to the rough male kiss of blankets) and for ‘losing’ things.
CLEANING
Try to keep all cleaning tickets in one place. We always lose them, and at this moment, half our wardrobe is sittin
g in various cleaners all over London, soon no doubt to be sold second-hand.
FOOD
I got the sack from my first job after I was married because I spent all morning on the telephone apologising to my husband for the row we’d had on the bus, and all afternoon reading recipe books.
Cooking well and cooking cheaply is a major problem for the young wife. Before she was married she probably invited her fiancé to dinner from time to time and blued half her wages on double cream and brandy to go with the fillet steak and the shellfish, so that he is under the illusion that she is a marvellous cook. Now she is married she will find cooking exciting meals every evening and not overtaxing her imagination and the family budget extremely difficult.
Don’t, however, be seduced into buying things that are cheap if they repel you. I once bought a black pudding, because I was told it was inexpensive and nourishing. It lay like a long black slug in the fridge for three weeks, finally turned green, died and was committed to the dustbin.
Ring the changes: however much he raves over your fish pie, he won’t want it twice a week for the next fifty years.
Buy in bulk if you and your husband have self-control: we find bulk buying never does anything but increase our bulk. The joint that is bought on Saturday never graduates into cold meat and later shepherd’s pie. It is always wolfed in one sitting. Once we made a big casserole to last a week. It took eight hours to cook, stank the whole block of flats out, and went bad the following day.
Buy in bulk
Leave long-cooking dishes to the weekend. Nothing irks a man more than having to wait until midnight to eat. Do take the stew off the gas before you start making love.
Never hide things — you won’t remember where you put them. I hid some potted shrimps once and discovered them a month later after we’d had the floor boards up.