Rage Against the Washing Machine

I have come to the conclusion that the more clothes one has the more one has to wash. Thinking back to my childhood and remembering my mum scrubbing my dad's detachable collars with Sunlight soap (he later detached himself from the family unit circa 1966 and for years I felt like detaching his head from his shoulders but that is another story for another time) and standing out in the back yard feeding stuff through the mangle the drips going into a bucket underneath. I also remember playing ships in the big Monarch Laundry box which sat at the top of the stairs along the landing the laundry box was for sheets and pillowcases the big stuff that went to the laundry once every 2 weeks but when empty it was my own little ship for sailing the seven seas of wry.

I remember the lid it had a big lion on it Monarch - king of the jungle. I also remember years later working with women who had worked in the laundries and their tales of the sights and smells of what they had to load out of those boxes into the huge boilers - not for the squeamish. Of course my memories are all about the ship and the wonderful starched, pressed and folded bedlinen that the box held on return and of course the little pressed on laundry tag in pink or blue with a number that made sure we didn't end up with anyone else's sheets on our beds.

Even though we had a wonderful garden full of fruit bushes and vegetables and a big long washing line, thinking back it would have been impossible for my mum to have washed sheets by hand and got them out on the line. We came up in the world when she got a Baby Burco Boiler - a galvanised contraption that did what it said on the tin and boiled up gallons of soapy water in which our clothes were put in and agitated by my agitated mother with a stick which became bleached white from years of being dipped into the bubbling cauldron. Whites first - no such thing in those days of having separate washes for whites and coloureds; the soapy water was used until it became a thick grey froth. This was the waste not want not generation that and the fact that my mum needed muscles like Charles Atlas to drag the water filled contraption to the back door to empty it - still it was a step up from boiling stuff on the gas cooker and washing in the now ever so trendy Belfast sink.

You know, I used to think we were poor until I realised that some folks didn't have indoor WC's or a bath in their houses. What suprised me more was when twenty years later I was visiting people in homes that still had no inside toilet, bath and in many cases no running hot water - just a gas geyser over an old brown sink - this started my long relationship with social housing when I began working in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Belfast where the awful conditions that people lived in were often compounded by being burnt out of their previous homes and handing over "key money" to unscrupulous private landlords for substandard housing. It was wonderful to see old women who had struggled to raise their families in cold and harsh conditions moving in to new warm and comfortable homes but it was also sad to see so many of them dying often within months of the move many from chest and heart conditions from a lifetime of making do.

Anyway, after my dad and his detatchable collars flew our coop (I was 10 and never knew until years later that this collar stud had taken off with a much younger woman and had swiftly moved to drip dry and trousers without turnips - she certainly suckered him dry as she was pregnant at the time with her other lover's child and had needed a quick getaway from her husband an army cook with a red hot temper) things got better before they got worse; this was 1966 in NI and to be left, abandoned was not the norm and there was no distinction between the sinned against and the sinners in fatherless houses.

Still my Aunt she of the white hair and white powdered face and blood red lipstick (like a Geisha without the side activities) took pity and bought my mum a Hoover single tub with a mangle on top - we had arrived and this little magic box served us very well until we branched out to a Servis twin tub - yes it was second hand and yes the drum shuddered and it danced across the floor but it could do the sheets and pillowcases and spin dry them at 600 rpm that little rubber disc being all important in ensuring that the sheets didn't jump out like a KKK convention all over the kitchen floor. Progress? I am not sure as it was extra washing and drying and ironing and of course the ship was returned to the laundry and I sailed no more on the landing. Anyway, I was comfort eating by that time and my stern end was getting to big for the boat and I was all washed up.

Now back to my own beautiful launderette. :o)p