that she’d ever again go into the boot room now she was taking Dr Kaufmann’s helpful pills. And I don’t think she ever did. And later it occurred to me just how very bad it was. Not us causing the flood or hiding the broken boxes, but that she’d never again think about them or remember them or wonder about them. Even though she’d loved them so very much.
The full impact of Mrs Lunt giving us up dawned on us gradually in that boot room, as did the full horror of doing laundry. Mishaps continued and it became very stressful. Many items of clothing came out ruined – hard and small or the wrong colouror matted, or twisted like lengths of ancient rope, discarded rags washed up on beaches.
Then there was the drying of it. The hanging it on the line for all to see or on the two wires strung across the boot room. The smell of it when we didn’t get to it in time or the weather was humid.
And then there was the ironing. It was dreadful how crumpled everything looked and how depressing the crumpledness was – it being such a sign. A thousand little creases, not a few deep and straight ironed-in lines, but the chaos of the crumple, like wayward microscopic worms shouting, ‘No one cares any more, make us wards of court.’
I decided one particularly crumpled day to ‘do’ the ironing: (
a
) I had to get rid of the creases for our ventures into public (school) and (
b
) I remembered the aroma of hot linen from Mrs Lunt’s daily ironing drifting around the house as a happy thing, and therefore I thought that in doing the ironing I’d be killing at least two birds.
‘Where’s the iron?’ I asked our mother.
‘The iron what?’ she yawned.
‘The actual iron, for ironing things with?’ I asked.
‘It’s gone awol,’ she said.
She often said things had gone awol and I was never sure what awol meant. I thought it meant ‘nipped out of a left-open gate’ because the thing that most often went awol was our Labrador. And her going awol meant she’d nipped out of a left-open gate.
I found the iron eventually in a big cupboard that wasn’t anyone’s business except the daily help’s. But since we had no help it became my business and my sister’s. It contained the iron and the ironing board and some soda crystals and buckets, brushes and a small mangle, folded tablecloths and other things of that sort.
Getting the ironing board up was a job in itself and I knew why Mrs Lunt, at the old house, had ironed a few items every day, including pants and tea towels, to legitimize the leaving up of the board. Doing it was awful too. Not as bad as the other aspects of the laundry but bad all the same. First of all, if the iron was hot enough to make any inroad on the creases it soon began sticking to the clothes. I melted a hole in a favourite nightie and made an iron-shaped brown mark on a T-shirt. I ironed a bit of my own exposed stomach and twice the iron fell to the floor and once a bit of it broke off as a result.
My sister came to look at me and said I was doing more harm than good. I mentioned the smell of hot linen and the sense of well-being and she said it smelled to her as if a blacksmith had gone berserk burning horse hooves and wasn’t at all pleasant.
My sister and I saw first-hand how utterly terrible housework was (laundry being particularly horrific) and that it was never-ending and tyrannical. We went to our mother and asked how she thought we might cope now she was semi-conscious much of the time. She explained that she herself was temperamentally unsuited to housework and laundry and always had been – even before the pills had kicked in. And hearing there was such a thing as temperamental unsuitability to it, we realized we were probably afflicted in the same way and felt a bit better about everything. Of course it’s a shaming thing to look back on, but there it was.
And all of a sudden we realized that Mrs Lunt was obviously suited to housework and saw her in a new light – as capable,
The full impact of Mrs Lunt giving us up dawned on us gradually in that boot room, as did the full horror of doing laundry. Mishaps continued and it became very stressful. Many items of clothing came out ruined – hard and small or the wrong colouror matted, or twisted like lengths of ancient rope, discarded rags washed up on beaches.
Then there was the drying of it. The hanging it on the line for all to see or on the two wires strung across the boot room. The smell of it when we didn’t get to it in time or the weather was humid.
And then there was the ironing. It was dreadful how crumpled everything looked and how depressing the crumpledness was – it being such a sign. A thousand little creases, not a few deep and straight ironed-in lines, but the chaos of the crumple, like wayward microscopic worms shouting, ‘No one cares any more, make us wards of court.’
I decided one particularly crumpled day to ‘do’ the ironing: (
a
) I had to get rid of the creases for our ventures into public (school) and (
b
) I remembered the aroma of hot linen from Mrs Lunt’s daily ironing drifting around the house as a happy thing, and therefore I thought that in doing the ironing I’d be killing at least two birds.
‘Where’s the iron?’ I asked our mother.
‘The iron what?’ she yawned.
‘The actual iron, for ironing things with?’ I asked.
‘It’s gone awol,’ she said.
She often said things had gone awol and I was never sure what awol meant. I thought it meant ‘nipped out of a left-open gate’ because the thing that most often went awol was our Labrador. And her going awol meant she’d nipped out of a left-open gate.
I found the iron eventually in a big cupboard that wasn’t anyone’s business except the daily help’s. But since we had no help it became my business and my sister’s. It contained the iron and the ironing board and some soda crystals and buckets, brushes and a small mangle, folded tablecloths and other things of that sort.
Getting the ironing board up was a job in itself and I knew why Mrs Lunt, at the old house, had ironed a few items every day, including pants and tea towels, to legitimize the leaving up of the board. Doing it was awful too. Not as bad as the other aspects of the laundry but bad all the same. First of all, if the iron was hot enough to make any inroad on the creases it soon began sticking to the clothes. I melted a hole in a favourite nightie and made an iron-shaped brown mark on a T-shirt. I ironed a bit of my own exposed stomach and twice the iron fell to the floor and once a bit of it broke off as a result.
My sister came to look at me and said I was doing more harm than good. I mentioned the smell of hot linen and the sense of well-being and she said it smelled to her as if a blacksmith had gone berserk burning horse hooves and wasn’t at all pleasant.
My sister and I saw first-hand how utterly terrible housework was (laundry being particularly horrific) and that it was never-ending and tyrannical. We went to our mother and asked how she thought we might cope now she was semi-conscious much of the time. She explained that she herself was temperamentally unsuited to housework and laundry and always had been – even before the pills had kicked in. And hearing there was such a thing as temperamental unsuitability to it, we realized we were probably afflicted in the same way and felt a bit better about everything. Of course it’s a shaming thing to look back on, but there it was.
And all of a sudden we realized that Mrs Lunt was obviously suited to housework and saw her in a new light – as capable,
Similar Books
