My washing machine is slightly on the blink at the minute. The drying cycle keeps stopping every 20 minutes so you have to keep pushing the button again. And sometimes I forget that I need to do this so it can take hours to get a load dry. Plus, since having a second child my laundry pile has grown so fast! I’m washing every day and yet there’s still a full basket of towels, babygros and felt-tip covered school shirts pretty much all the time.
“Well, boo bloody hoo!” I can hear a 1930s housewife called Elsie saying to me, quite tetchily.
These were the days when you had to have an entire day a week to get your washing sorted – Tuesday is recommended as you’re clearing up after the weekend on a Monday. Soap flakes, blue to get the whites white, cracked hands and all, this is how to do it 1938-style, from Titbits Book of Wrinkles.
Not that they’re grumbling – this is a positive piece emphasising how things have got so much easier for the housewife these days. I dread to think how much harder it must have been before their “labour-savers” were developed. Although reading the piece I’m not entirely sure what they are – soap? A mangle? I remember my Grandma’s mangle, sat on the end of the worktop in her tiny kitchen in Morecambe. I was fascinated by it, and I wish I had it now. But, oh, my RSI-impaired wrist is aching just at the thought of all this effort…
