Home life
Sucks to Mrs Beeton
Alice Thomas Ellis
There's a cobweb on our bedroom ceiling. Only one, I hasten to assure you. It hangs near a window and I get up late every morning because I like to lie in bed watching it drifting in the draught. Some- times it reminds me of the Queen Mother, its only purpose in life being to wave.
Each day I picture myself or — more likely — Alfred tackling it with a special cobweb-remover such as every good housewife used to keep in the broom cupboard together with her carpet-beater, feather duster and similar redundant domestic aids. Then when I get up I forget all about it. Mrs Beeton would be dis- gusted with me. She said bedrooms had to be swept every day, the windows opened and the bedclothes aired. You had to sprinkle damp tea-leaves on the carpet before sweeping it so the dust would adhere to them, and once a week you had to scrub the floorboards with hot water and soda. What a drag.
She assumed, of course, that all respect- able households included a maid or two, or at least a cook-general, but I don't think cooks-general ever ventured upstairs. They were too busy blacking the range and blowing it into life in preparation for the enormous breakfasts the Victorians re- quired before they faced the day. Then they had to cope with the butcher and the baker and the milkman, and render down the dripping so they could sell it as one of `cook's perks', and boil spotted dick for pudding after lunch while thinking about the Nesselrode for pudding after dinner. Cook had very little time for general housework, so I imagine the lady of the small household had to do it herself. At the same time she had to maintain a neat appearance and keep her temper. No lady was ever seen out of countenance, certain- ly not when the servants were around even if it was only cook.
You have to admire the Victorians a little bit, if only because they did all the housework without a vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner has changed the face of civilisation. I don't need a special thing with extending poles to get that cobweb. All I have to do, if I could only remember to do it, is point the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner at it, and whoosh — a pure and unsullied ceiling. The only thing you can't do with a Hoover is clean the bath or your teeth or the lavatory pan. Once upon a time before everybody had a Hoover the women's magazines used to devote column after column to tips on how to clean up the home. Now all they tell you is how to arrange the flowers — 'a discarded Wel- lington boot makes an amusing centre- piece, filled with autumn branches and fronds of Old Man's Beard' — or how to apply the latest eye make-up, avoid those tell-tale signs of ageing and achieve multiple orgasm.
The extraordinary thing is that although I cordially detest housework, even with a Hoover, I don't find the current magazines anything like as interesting as the old ones. I am fascinated to learn that a solution of boiled ivy leaves will take the shine out of the seat of your husband's pants; that a dash of methylated spirits in the washing water will put a shine on your windows; that potato water is excellent for cleaning carpets and rugs, and that if their colours have faded they can be freshened by sponging with a mixture of one part ox-gall to two parts water. Our carpets have to content themselves with a good hoovering since I can't imagine where one would now obtain ox-gall. From an ox, I suppose.
I am exercised about these questions at the moment because Alfred, the Hoover- wielder, has not arrived and I'm damned if I'm going to do it myself. Zelide's brother Micky tells me that Quentin Crisp has a theory about dust. If you leave it for four years it doesn't matter any more. It seems to stabilise itself and the quantity appears not to increase. Whereas if you keep hoovering it up it comes back and you have to do it again. Rather like answering letters — if you do, your correspondent does it again and you go into perpetual motion. I am just going to sit here watching the dust settle until Alfie appears, and when he does I think I'll tell him to ignore the cobweb. I like watching it floating about. It's restful. God save the Queen Mother.
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