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ON a roll: Mangles like this one at Quarry Bank Mill were once the standard way of washing clothes.
Ewbanks, mangles and my old Uncle Arthur’s bunions!
Vic Barlow12/ 4/2006
MRS B went to Leek last Saturday and returned with a wooden Ewbank carpet sweeper bought from a junk shop.
My Auntie Alice had one when I was a toddler. They were manufactured in Accrington, Lancashire and were extremely popular in the 1950s, before everyone owned a vacuum cleaner.
I think that Ewbank was the only 'modern' device Auntie Alice ever had.
It started me thinking of all the other household items that surrounded me as a child. I seem to recall my gran having a dolly tub in which she did the laundry.
The tin barrel was filled with hot soapy water and the clothes swished around with a wonderful device she called a 'pauncher', which looked rather like a wooden dinner plate on a brush stale.
Collars, cuffs and any item in need of deep cleansing were transferred to the scrubbing board where gran's gnarled fingers rubbed them up and down the corrugated surface.
My favourite device was the mangle, a masterpiece of industrial engineering. No home was complete without this multi-roller work of genius.
Many were the things a small boy could put through the mangle: plasticine, sticks of Spanish, tin cans, even the odd gold fish.
My gran never covered her kitchen table with a cloth, preferring to scrub its worn wooden surface with hot water and a block of soap. (Would that have been carbolic?)
Before we owned a fridge, everything perishable went into the meat-safe kept on a stone shelf within a small dark pantry. The meat-safe was of rabbit-hutch construction with a fine wire mesh grill in the door. Butter, cheese, ham and chicken all went in the meat-safe.
My gran would put whatever was left of the Sunday joint between two dinner plates pressed down with an old flat iron. To this day I have no idea why she did this. If you do, let me know.
My mother worked as a cleaner in a large hospital and maintained the same standard of hygiene at home. Carpets were hung over the washing line and thrashed mercilessly with an exotic wicker carpet-beater in the shape of a three-leafed clover.
Any surface not drenched in Lanry was wiped down with DDT or Dettol. No germ ever made it past our front door.
After a delivery of nutty slack my job was to shovel it into the coal shed. My granddad lit the fire with a skill honed over decades.
He seemed to know precisely how much firewood was required to add to the ball of rolled up newspaper nestling in the grate.
Four pieces were too little; six - too many. He had a collection of coloured wooden 'spells' on the mantelpiece about 6ins long, which he used to spread the flames. Watching him on a cold winter evening was a magical experience.
I remember gran boiling the kettle on her grate and a coal-fired oven which she black-leaded with gusto every Thursday morning.
She often made toast over the fire with a three-pronged fork and would allow me to hold it providing I covered my hand with a tea towel.
The trick was to dangle the bread over the hottest embers without burning it or (even worse) dropping the bread into the fire.
Auntie Alice took me everywhere with the exception of Whitehead's, the store where she went to be measured for corsets. Although not yet familiar with the female anatomy I knew somehow it was a 'woman' thing.
Bunions were a big talking point in our family especially after Christmas lunch when everyone lost their inhibitions and compared deformities. Uncle Arthur's bunions were so huge he had to slit the side of his shoes for comfort.
You'd have thought he'd be embarrassed but quite the opposite. Over the years his bunions had guaranteed free drinks in any pub he cared to display them
It was easy to tell if my gran was tuned in to the radio, she was stone deaf and always had the volume turned up full blast.
You could hear it from the bus stop at the bottom of the street. She'd sit in the dark with her ear cupped against a wireless the size of a GPO phone box listening to Wilfred Pickles while my granddad puffed away on a pipeful of Thick Twist. I loved that smell.
When I grew of age my granddad introduced me to malt whisky and sometimes we'd sit by the fire sipping Scotch while he reminisced about his youth.
Then I'd Ewbank the carpet for him and head off home.
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16/04/2006 at 13:04