Cherry Rogers remembers her mum and nan on wash day …
Monday was washday. Tuesday ironing. Wednesday bedrooms. Thursday front room, which was only used at Christmas, so why it needed cleaning every week I don’t know – a quick dust and that would have been it, blinking freezing in there anyway! The only good thing was I could dust the piano and pretend to be Winnie Atwell, giving it a real good bash. Friday was living room – mats were taken outside to shake, hung up and had the living daylights bashed out of them. Lino round the sides of the mats was polished. The dusters were washed and knitwear and hand washing was done. Nothing was ever done on a Sunday as it was a day of rest – a walk round Tip and home via the Plough or down Fengate Drove and round Weeting in the afternoon. Chapel in the evening. Sunday tea, and if you were posh a tin of fruit with Nestle’s cream from a tin which you had to shake like the clappers to re-mix it and get it thick. My Dad always ate bread and butter with his and wanted me to, but no thank you.
Anyway, Monday was washday. We had a big scullery at Thetford Road with a ‘Dutch oven’ and a copper in it, but I don’t remember Mum using them. Dad kept tins of paint in the Dutch oven and Mum had a gas copper which you fitted on the side of the cooker. She didn’t use it much, just for the bath water because she went down to help Nana and they did the washing together. Nana lit the fire under the copper in the wash house and Mum brought her washing down from Thetford Road balanced on my bike in a wicker basket. She tried to ride with it a couple of times … with disastrous consequences. They filled the copper with buckets of water and got it boiling. Two tin baths were filled with water for rinsing and a small bath with Recketts blue bag to make the washing whiter and another small one with starch. Washing was sorted into piles – anything with stains was scrubbed with a bar of soap on the washboard, sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, tea towels and white terry towels all went in to boil. Sometimes towels were done separately, depending on the quantity of washing. They were poked and prodded with the copper stick – an old broom handle cut down a bit and boiled so much it was white at the end and frayed. When the whites came out the coloureds went in the hot water but were not boiled.
The mangle was wheeled forward, the wing nut tightened and linen was mangled. It was rinsed twice, put in blue bag and or starched, being mangled between each process. The last process was mangling two or three times tightening it up each time.
Washing was hung out, mangle rollers dried and loosened baths emptied. The water in the copper was used to scrub the wash house floor and the path between the wash house and the house. Then Mum wheeled her washing home to dry.
Below Nana with some dry washing, she doesn’t look very pleased. Background the land Newell’s sawmill was on next door.