Doing the Laundry

The “mangle” would eat your hands if you weren’t careful.

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Kitchen

I wasn’t going to do this, but today it came to me.  I’ve always been jealous of those who had warm cozy grandmothers who taught them how to cook – or mothers for that matter.  My grandmother was far from cozy.  “Pass the sandwiches to your father, child,” she would say in a sonorous tone, even though the plate of sandwiches was right by my father’s hand and I had to walk around the table to get to it. I thought that was silly.  But her kitchen was warm and cozy and I enjoyed the hours I spent there when I lived with her for a while when I was ten.

My mother’s first kitchen, on the other hand, didn’t have room for me apparently since I was always being shooed away.  Her second kitchen, though, I loved.  There were three parts to it.  A scullery, where the dishes were washed and stored, the main room in which we could eat and sit and do homework, and the outhouse-like addition where the laundry was done.  

This was a tiny space, but large enough for a metal sink, a ‘copper’ laundry boiler, and a powered clothes wringer, or mangle. On Mondays this room would be filled with piles of clothes, and steam, as the loads went through the various stages before being carried out a back door to the washing lines to dry.  Tuesday and Wednesday chores followed as predicted in the nursery rhyme:  Wash on Monday, Mend on Tuesday, Iron on Wednesday.    

On Mondays excessive amounts of steam would pour forth from a copper boiler in which everything was washed.  After being boiled the items were fed through a mangle with wooden rollers through which you would have to feed the clothes.  It often required several passes to get them ready to hang.  You had to be very careful to feed items in straight or they would start going round the rollers again and get all tied up.  Your fingers could get caught trying to get things out too, as I know from painful memory. 

It usually took all day to get the clothes through the boiler and the mangle, so the laundry would be set aside overnight.  Tuesday was drying day, weather permitting.  The lines were hung across a utility yard at the back of the house, and lifted higher with a clothes prop, an 8-10 foot pole with a Y joint at one end to feed under the line and lift it so that the sheets didn’t drag on the ground.  Keeping an eye on the weather was a standard activity on drying Tuesdays.   At the end of the day (or when it started to rain) it would be all brought indoors, folded and put away or put in the airing cupboard (I’ve never understood why US homes don’t have airing cupboards– they are so useful, even if you do have a tumble dryer).  

Then came Wednesday, ironing day.  While I certainly saw flat irons in use in the neighboring farmhouses, I think Mum always had an electric iron, and probably one with thermostatic controls, even when we were small.   But what I loved most about ironing Wednesdays was listening to the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, a program which began in 1946 and continues to this day.

By the time the laundry was ironed, folded and put way, it was time to turn to cleaning house.