In these days of so-called equality and parity of esteem, the class struggle continues. That aristocratic doyenne of home-making Kirstie Allsopp, declares that having a washing-machine installed in one’s kitchen is not only unhygienic, but ‘rather’ common.
How relieved I am not to have committed the ultimate social solecism. My washing-machine’s not in the kitchen – only because there isn’t the room for it. Public opinion, (ignoring Kirstie’s perfectly valid reasoning that it’s not ideal to have dirty clothes lying around in an area where food’s being prepared,) has rushed to condemn her as an absolute snob. That’s as may be – but not everyone has the option of a separate space for laundry. Flat and apartment dwellers are permanently deprived. Reasonably-priced houses are reasonably priced because corners are cut on space. Space for living, space for storage, space is our new ‘must have’ – but space comes at a hefty premium.
I was reared in a middling-sized Victorian terrace house that had a big black range with a pulley-line hanging over it, dominating its smallish kitchen and a founderingly cold flag-floored scullery, so tiny that my father christened it ‘the witness box’. It contained a cooker, a Belfast sink, a mangle, upper and lower cupboards and a metal food cabinet with perforated sides. In the narrow gap between, food preparation, cooking and washing often happened simultaneously and nobody died of anything contagious.
Our family’s upward mobility was a gradual process. With technological advance we acquired, piecemeal, a Willis heater, a washing machine, a spin-dryer and a fridge. My mother often remarked with some bitterness that she only got these appliances when she no longer needed them – her family all reared, her constitution already weakened and her looks ravaged by a lifetime’s wrestling with the weight of wet woollen Witney blankets and her abiding obsession with germ-free surfaces.
My own first married home (also a Victorian terrace) had a galley-style kitchen with, beyond it, a dark and Dickensian slate-shelved pantry which we never did anything with, apart from storage. When we built our new house I got a utility room. Just as well, because when we fitted the kitchen someone who shall be nameless miscalculated the measurements, so it went in there with a spare sink-unit and shelving.
The point of a utility room is to confine all laundry products and processes, all household cleaning agents and equipment to one well-ordered area. That is the theory. You mustn’t leap to imagining me in a starched pinny like little Hannah Housewife at the ironing-board, happily pressing and folding, while listening to ‘The Archers’ on the radio. I iron only in a clothing crisis, in the kitchen with the telly on to stop myself dying of boredom. I just load the washing-machine, unload it and hang things in the garage (where mother’s pulley-line is now installed) or the conservatory, which is speedier for emergency undies.
Meanwhile, over nearly 30 years, the utility room has become a repository for items that need mending, unidentifiable bits of things dis-assembled that were never re-assembled, a halfway-house for things destined to be put in the garage (six feet away through an internal door) but never made it; spare crockery and glassware, flower vases, jam-jars, cake tins and casserole dishes; a gigantic bouquet of large plastic bags stuffed to bursting with smaller plastic bags, useful boxes for posting presents, light bulbs, torches, power-cut candles, a gas camping stove I can’t operate, wellingtons, nearly-functioning umbrellas and the small feeder bins for the big outdoor bins.
Above all, it’s become the graveyard where impetuously acquired electrical goods and gadgets go to die. Bought in haste and hope and used a handful of times – the chicken brick, the toasted sandwich-maker, the slow cooker; three coffee percolators, the omelette maker, the spiraliser and an embarrassing number of gimmicky corkscrews only the cheapest of which works adequately – all relegated to the sad little museum of premature obsolescence, a monument to good intentions, never realised.
No wonder the Loving Spouse christened it ‘the futility room’.
