Dampish sort of day…

It’s not unpleasant out there, but it’s grey and dampish and a bit blustery and each bluster seems to have a few spots of rain. An ideal writing day, with no excuse to venture out and be away from putting words on a page.

There are plenty of chores at home, though, and one is washing, which has built up over the last few days. If the rain keeps away then I could get clothes out on the line and they might dry enough to be ironed… on the other hand if I were desperate for clean laundry I could do the wash and then use the tumble drier or put the washing on a clothes horse near a radiator… I actually wouldn’t  use the drier unless I absolutely had to, and it’s rarely like that these days – different from when the children were at home and school uniform needed washing!

When I was a child my mum saw a great change in domestic technology; she had a washing machine fairly early on, before that it was hand washing, a boiler for whites and a mangle. The early washing machine, which I don’t remember very well, involved hoses and lots of mopping of water on the floor, and still the mangle – this was  in the days before the ubiquitous man-made fibres and textiles, so sheets, tablecloths and  towels would be 100% cotton or linen, there was no biological washing powder or liquid and only bleach to attack ‘stubborn stains’!  She may have had a separate spinner – not a spin-dryer, but just a smallish tub shaped machine to spin the clothes and get rid of more wet than a mangle could.

Then came the first twin tubs! What a revolution! No more clothes baskets of sopping laundry waiting to be processed before going out on the line; now the clean washing could be transferred straight into the spinner. Gradually washing machines became plumbed in, no more trailing hoses and cables, and changed from top loaders to front loaders  with a spin programme integrated into the wash cycle. My mum didn’t ever have a tumble drier, if washing was done it just had to be dried either out on the line or on clothes horses in the house, round the fire or later when we had radiators, in front of them. (in the early days of my childhood I remember socks and underwear drying hung above the stove with all four gas rings on before we went to school!)

I’m sure most people don’t even think about how women (mainly women) coped in the past with what is now a simple task, keeping clothes clean; now we have not only amazing, reliable and cheaper to run machines, but we have soap powder/detergent/liquid/gel/tablets to attack and target every specific cleaning issue and fabrics which virtually iron themselves. I’ve seen this change in my lifetime… I wonder what washing changes my children will see in theirs!