Connie & the Ironing Incident

 

I felt compelled to buy the flat iron I stumbled across in a local Auckland junk shop twenty years ago and that compulsion was mostly because it brought back a rush of childhood memories.    Those memories centred firstly around Tuesday mornings and secondly around my cousin Connie and her school blouse.

            Tuesdays were ironing days at our house for years and that was because Mondays were wash days and usually most items were dry enough for ironing by Tuesday morning.   We had two flat irons, one substantially bigger than the other and they were heated on top of the kitchen stove in winter when there would always be a fire and on the smallest gas ring in summer when there wasn’t.  Both were on permanent loan from Little Nanny, whose real name was Great Aunt Martha Irons, and she lived near the station in Northfleet.  She was very old indeed and no longer did any ironing despite her name.   My mother said this was because Biddy, the downstairs lodger did all that was necessary in the hope that she would inherit the Singer sewing machine and the Bristol Glass and God knows what else when Little Nanny died.   I thought the other reason might be that the old lady seemed to own only two dresses, both made of black bombazine and they appeared never to be washed so unlikely to need ironing.  I didn’t mention this because I knew that Biddy was not to be trusted and out for all she could lay her hands on.

            When I was very young I quite enjoyed watching the ironing process especially when water was splashed onto garments resulting in dramatic hissing and clouds of smoke.   My mother talked a lot about the day she would be able to do the job Properly with an electric iron like the one her sister Mag owned, a Morphy Richards.   I learned that when you owned an electric model there was never any need to heat it via coals or gas because all you had to do was remove the kitchen light bulb and plug it into the vacant socket which is of course quite different from what you do these days.

            We did our ironing on the kitchen table, spread with an old blanket to save the wooden surface but Aunt Mag had recently become the owner of a new-fangled ironing board that you could fold up and place against the scullery wall once you had completed the job.   She had come a very long way from the humble flat irons that reigned supreme every Tuesday morning at our house but then I knew that she was wrapped up in herself ever since her Harold got that promotion down at Vickers.  It was to be some years before we progressed to an electric iron and that happened shortly after my father had blotted his copy book via yet another fling with a Fancy Woman. His assertions that there would be no further transgressions came with a substantial gift of repentance in the form of an electric iron – a Sunbeam which my mother maintained was a far superior brand to Morphy-Richards.   He said that the electric iron had been invented much longer ago than we might have imagined, in America in 1882 by someone called Henry Seeley but I didn’t quite believe him because it seemed unlikely that something invented so long ago would have taken quite as long to infiltrate into the riverside towns of North Kent.  He then elaborated on what the Chinese had used to do their ironing which appeared to be with shallow iron pans filled with hot coals and that also seemed improbable.   Once he progressed into sharing everything he knew about ironing days in the seventeenth century with what he said were Sadirons I was barely listening.  

            In fact after we became an electrically ironing family I gave little thought to the process for several years, not until my cousin Connie was blown across their Waterdales kitchen and according to her, very nearly killed.   Aunt Lou said it was because she’d been ironing in bare feet on a wet floor that in itself was because all the boys had traipsed over it after school and she should have had more sense.   My mother thought it was because Lou herself had always been too bone idle to set to like any normal mother and do the family ironing herself preferably on a Tuesday morning.   If she had only got her arse into gear then her Connie would not have been put in that position in the first place and it stood to reason.   We were frequent visitors to the Waterdales cousins and I never enjoyed the visits because there seemed to be far too many sullen and aggressive boys in the family and an unbending patriarch who thought that you were a child until you got married and produced children of your own and that children should be seen and not heard especially if they were female.   His downtrodden wife seemed to have always been completely suppressed and suffered from a variety of nervous conditions such as thinking there was a golf ball in her throat obstructing her swallowing mechanism and being quite unable to breathe for long periods of time.    I was never able to ascertain what my mother gained conversationally out of drinking tea with her.

            At this stage we visited at least twice a week because there were many discussions to be had as to whether I would be allowed to join Connie at Wombwell Hall or whether it was a waste of time and money to have me go there at all.   It had apparently been a waste of time for Connie to go to the Grammar School when she passed the Eleven Plus examination because she was female and therefore unlikely to need to be educated for a career.  At least Wombwell Hall catered for the girl who was going to get married and have children.   There she could acquire all the skills needed for cooking, cleaning, sewing and perhaps even child rearing.   Connie was not generally consulted about her future and was quite sensibly affronted at the fact that her brothers had been thought worth the investment of Grammar School uniforms.  Had she been asked her opinion about the path to take at Wombwell Hall, she said, she would have chosen the Commercial Course and she urged me to do so if I wanted more from life than a Council House full of children in the Waterdales of the future.   I didn’t need a great deal of encouragement because I had already decided that somehow or other some aspect of my future would involve shorthand and typing even if only for short periods. 

When I discussed the mishap of the iron with her, Connie placed the blame firmly at the feet of her father, the formidable Uncle Walter, my father’s oldest brother, who she said was too mean to buy her more than one school blouse.   She was some weeks into her first term at Wombwell Hall and being enrolled in the domestic course cleanliness and tidiness was of prime importance.  She maintained that it was impossible to be as clean and tidy as required with only one cream cotton school blouse unless it was washed after school on a twice weekly basis.  All very well but if she was to wear it again the following day this meant ironing it whilst it was still wet regardless of the state of the kitchen floor.   That might have been perfectly safe with an old-fashioned flat iron but the plugged-into-the-light-socket electric variety was a completely different proposition and it was absolutely necessary to ensure dry floors and preferably to own rubber soled footwear.

Rather thrillingly we were present when Uncle Walter was confronted with the facts of his only daughter’s near-death experience.   Aunt Lou had already collapsed into a soggy, tearful heap when he demanded to know who was responsible but before he could begin to direct his tirade of allegations in her direction Connie herself stepped forward with very straight back and shoulders, shaking her halo of blonde hair defiantly and looking like I imagined Shaw’s teenage Saint Joan might have looked.   In astonishingly loud tones she ordered him to stop bullying her mother though I think she used the word Hounding.   She would not have been in the dangerous position of doing ironing on a wet floor she said, had he allowed the purchase of two school blouses rather than one in the first place.   In short, if he had not been so mean.  So if anyone was to blame it was him.  

I found myself holding my breath because I rather expected him to slap her face for impertinence and order her straight to bed with no tea but he didn’t.   He lowered his voice and asked how much an extra school blouse would cost.   Connie said thirty-five shillings and then pocketed the two pound notes he slid across the table.   At her request I went with her to the haberdashery shop in Perry Street that sold school blouses, white for Colyer Road and cream for Wombwell Hall and furthermore didn’t close until five thirty.  It turned out that a suitable one cost a mere twenty eight shillings and sixpence and when I asked her if her father would be pleased when she came back with so much change Connie said No because she wasn’t planning to give it to him.    My open-mouthed admiration did not go unnoticed because she added that you never knew when you might need some other item for school, like a pair of lisle stockings for instance.  She further explained that she really didn’t want to fight for everything and a girl who went to Wombwell Hall would want to be a credit to the school.

The following year when I started the Commercial course within a very short space of time I began to understand what she had meant.