A passage from Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger Family series illustrates
how radically domestic comfort changed during the nineteenth century and into
the twentieth.
In the middle of the
night Edwin kept watch over Auntie Hamps, who was asleep. He sat in a
rocking-chair, with his back to the window and the right side of his face to
the glow of the fire. The fire was as effective as the size and form of the
grate would allow; it burnt richly red; but its influence did not seem to
extend beyond a radius of four feet outwards from its centre.
The terrible damp
chill of the Five Towns winter hung in the bedroom like an invisible miasma. He
could feel the cold from the window, which was nevertheless shut, through the
shawl with which he had closed the interstices of the back of the chair, and,
though he had another thick shawl over his knees, the whole of his left side
felt the creeping attack of the insidious miasma.
A thermometer which he
had found and which lay on the night-table five yards from the fire registered
only fifty-two degrees. His expelled breath showed in the air. It was as if he
were fighting with all resources against frigidity, and barely holding his own.
Half a century earlier
such a room had represented comfort; in some details, as for instance in its
bed, it represented luxury; and in half a century Auntie Hamps had learnt
nothing from the material progress of civilisation but the use of the hot-water
bag; her vanished and forgotten parents would have looked askance at the
enervating luxuriousness of her hot-water bag — unknown even to the crude wistful
boy Edwin on the mantelpiece. And Auntie Hamps herself was wont as it were to
atone for it by using the still tepid water therefrom for her morning toilet
instead of having truly hot water brought up from the kitchen.
Edwin thought: “Are we
happier for these changes brought about by the mysterious force of evolution?”
And answered very emphatically: “Yes, we are.” He would not for anything have
gone back to the austerities of his boyhood.
Arnold Bennett – These Twain (1916)
Would I go back to the austerities of my own boyhood in the
fifties? No central heating and ice on the inside of the bedroom windows every winter? No but as a youngster I was used to it and knew nothing else. Strange thought, but I must have been considerably more hardy than I am now. Drawing on the windows by scratching the ice off was fun.
8 comments:
I have mixed feelings about the austerities of the 50s. Cold houses and relatively poor medical care were not too pleasant. On the other hand being in a community where most people knew one another and looked out for neighbours meant a level of childhood freedom and lack of worry that has been completely lost. In many ways we have traded so many important things for trivia and shiny stuff.
Comfort and the lack of it are strange, and hard to pin down. I certainly don't remember being uncomfortable with no central heating and an outside toilet, and what must have been a restricted and boring diet. These things only emerge as discomforts in the long view, where one learns to reflect. We either compare them with how things are now, or we compare them with our neighbours and what we think we deserve. At the time, we just got on with it.
I agree with Woodsy about the poor medical care. Being ill or old must have been ghastly. My children have been saved by modern medicine. We have much to be grateful for.
I remember chilblains.
It was the height of luxury to go and stay with granny, especially if you were the only visitor. Mostly, it was the undivided attention. She had a daily help for the housework and also FEATHER BEDS on which she applied a warming pan, full,of hot embers from the fire and you were then tucked in snugly. Then you were warned ( with a bit of a secret smile) "Be good or BONEY WILL GET YOU". I didn't know who Boney was but thought it a good idea to avoid his acquaintance. Hitler was hardly cold in his suicide grave and Marshal Stalin still murdering his millions but it was the late Emperor of the French who was summoned to keep order. Later, I wondered whether my cousins and I were the last children in England to be quieted in this way
Grandmother was born in Hanley in 1876, she recommended Arnold Bennett as an author to read.
Woodsy - I have mixed feelings too, for similar reasons.
Sam - yes the medical care aspect looms large when it comes to weighing up the past. Cold houses killed people too. Yet as you say, comfort and the lack of it are strange and hard to pin down.
Anon - I remember them too. Never get them now.
Edward - crikey you probably were the last children in England to be quieted by the spectre of Boney. Very nineteenth century I'd say.
Demetrius - Bennett is well worth reading even today. Lots of interesting detail and a real flavour of the times.
I am sure granny used the words which had been said to her, As mentioned, they were said with a sort of secret smile which grown-ups sometimes used and children did not entirely understand.
Whilst the house was in urban Derby, it was rather like a farmhouse. There were stables where my grandfather had kept his wagons and
draft horses. There were also hens. Our mill was a few hundred yards down the road. Granny used to have card parties on Saturday
nights when relatives would come from a few miles out of town. If the party was going very well, she would sneak into the hall and turn
the grandfather clock back half an hour - no more - people had to get home and be up in time for milking in the
morning. Perhaps there was also a residual prohibition on playing cards on Sundays, although I don't recall mention of it.
Her three surviving unmarried sisters lived just across the road in one of those all- female households, so well described in Cranford or
Jane Austen.
Edward - it sounds idyllic but I suppose at the time it was merely everyday life. My mother loved a family game of cards and I'm sure that came from her childhood when people amused themselves.
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