my Washday blues
When Maura Naylor moved to a Scottish fishing village, she had some hard lessons to learn...
We recently downsized to live in a retirement complex and bliss, it has a laundry! In 1961, we lived in a bedsit in a fishing village in the north of Scotland and it was fine until I was told that I wasn’t allowed to wash our clothes in the tiny kitchen. Where then? “We wash in the yard, lassie!” my landlady, Mrs B, said. She was a tall, taciturn 80-year old, who wore floorlength black dresses. She led me through the yard to an outhouse and pointed to a huge stone edifice which was, “the boiler”. Out there? In January? “But isn’t there a launderette?” I asked hopefully. She gave me a scornful look. “It’s noo a guide lassie that canna wash her man’s clothes! We dae oor washing on a Monday, ye’ll dae yours on a Tuesday.” My husband and I had already incurred her disapproval. We sometimes collected driftwood from the beach for our bedsit fire, only to be told not to do that by Mrs B. “It’s only poor folk that collect the wood frae the beach,” she said sternly. “Ye’ve tae buy bundles of wood from the shop!” Tuesday morning sleet was falling. I went downstairs in the dark at 8am as instructed and knocked on Mrs B’s door. I was wearing a coat, scarf and sheepskin gloves. She wore her dress and a shawl and gazed at my attire. “Soft, ye southerners are,” she said. She pushed aside the wooden cover of the boiler and instructed me to trudge back and forth to the two huge sinks until I had enough water to fill the bowl in its middle. “Noo then lassie, ye’ve tae light the fire underneath the boiler. Awa’ tae the bunker.” I was quite good at lighting fires so I gathered sticks and coal and set it going. Mrs B vanished. I went back upstairs to wait for the water to boil but when I came down again, the fire had gone out. This happened twice more, so I knocked on Mrs B’s door. “Rags ye need!” she said. “If the wind’s noo in the right direction ye need rags.” She came back with a torn bundle and I shoved them gratefully between the coals. When the water was deemed to be “on its way” she reappeared and gave me a small scoop to transfer some of the warm water from the boiler into the first of the two deep sinks. The second had to be filled with cold water for rinsing. “Dinna empty the boiler right oot,” Mrs B warned, “or it’ll blow. It happened to one poor women ye ken. Away through the roof she went.” I wasn’t tall enough to reach into the sink, so a wooden rack was found for me to stand on and a massive rubber apron tied around me on top of my coat. She took away my gloves and gave me a large metal ridged board and a block of soap. “Now ye scrub, lassie!” I dipped and lathered and rubbed on the board in the hot sink, then plunged it all into the cold sink. Mrs B perversely propped the outhouse door open with a brick, allowing in a force nine gale. “Ye’ll no be able to see when the lid’s off the boiler,” she explained. By midday we were enveloped in a pea-souper. I blundered around with dripping clothes from the cold sink, depositing them into the bubbling boiler.
‘I wasn’t tall enough to reach into the sink, so a wooden rack was found for me to stand on’
“Noo ye leave them 20 minutes.” said Mrs B. When the whites and coloureds had been boiled separately, there was more rinsing before they were put through the giant mangle. It took all my strength to put one sheet through and Mrs B raised her eyes to heaven. Eventually I lifted the heavy wicker washing basket and made for the door. “Noo in the yard,” Mrs B called. “Ye hang ye’re clothes on the beach.”
‘At 4pm I went out in the darkness to bring the washing in – damp, stiff and smelling of salt’
On the beach! I was flabbergasted. Apparently, most of the neighbours smoked fish in their back yards, so my washing would be covered with black smuts. “Ye’ll need this,” she said, tossing me a coil of rope. “For the line.” I took the basket and the rope through the passageway, out across the road and onto the beach. There were tall iron poles sticking up from the pebbles with hooks at the top that were impossible to reach without a chair, so I went back upstairs for one. Huge waves were crashing onto the shore and the wind lashed my hair as I struggled on the wobbly chair to tie the rope. Pegging the clothes was a nightmare as I imagined fisher folk peering critically through their net curtains to see if I hung things up the right way. Should socks hang by their toes or tops? Shirts by the shoulders or tails? Sheets flapped wildly, threatening to take off for Norway. But at last it was done. Or so I thought... I took the chair and basket back and Mrs B shot out of her door. “There’s the ashes to rake out noo lassie and the water to empty.” The ashes had to go in the bin and all the water laboriously scooped out and tossed onto the floor, which then had to be cleaned with a stiff broom. Finally, fetching more water, the yard had to be brushed and washed down. It was 2pm before I got upstairs for some soup and then I kept looking out of the window to see if the pegs would hold. At 4pm I went down in the darkness, taking the chair back and forth to dismantle the line and bring in the washing – damp, stiff and smelling of salt. Then I started ironing. My husband came home at 5pm. “What have you been doing with yourself all day?” he said jovially. I gazed at him, exhausted, “The washing!” I said.