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.
Thanks Jean, very amusing
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