Class in the Kitchen
By BERYL SEATON
WHEN I heard that Mr. Shinwell had been quoted as saying with regret that his Government had not yet succeeded in establishing a classless society, I straightened up from the sink and laughed. It seemed such a vague, impossible dream, even for a politician. Yet I suppose they have done almost all that they could. How more can they level, or try to? Only this morning a foreman-electrician friend of ours, a man who serves on the same committee of a local philanthropic association as my husband, drove up to our door in a magnificent new car (L.E.B. of course) to discuss an item of the association's finance. When asked if he could contribute a little help, he shook his head regretfully. " You see, now that my boy's at the university, we haven't quite so much to spare as we used to."
This house is excellently placed for a social study. As in so many London districts, where slums and select neighbourhoods jostle each other in a manner incomprehensible to the outsider, we live on a frontier. Occupying the end house in the last road of one postal district, we use the shops, the cinemas, the buses, trains and taverns of the other—or could. On the one hand are the tall houses, with their big rooms, big windows, big gardens, of the upper middle classes ; on the other, the little Victorian rows of town cottages for the workers. I might shop with my charwoman, stand behind her in the fish queue, sit next to her at our local cinema ; the odd thing is that I never do. They say that • class, imposed by man, is administered by woman ; its seat is certainly the home. Mothers inculcate into their children ways of thought and behaviour which last them a lifetime and brand them for all that period as what they are. Or inculcate nothing and brand them just the same. My char, who comes three mornings a week and does indifferently jobs which I should enjoy doing well, has three children, a little older than my two. I pass on to her some of my old clothes (those v. hich I have no hope of selling), and she has twice brought some- thing for my baby—garments dispensed by an American charity, which were too small for her youngest by the time they reached him. N.B.—The clothes were of good quality ; I was grateful, and I paid her for them. She doesn't pay me for the clothes I give her, though she did offer, rather shyly, the first time.
I like my char. In fact, it is for her company, rather than her help with the work, that I keep her. And I think she must feel the same way about me, for my two shillings an hour wouldn't even pay for her cigarettes. (I don't smoke, neither does my husband, though we both used to enjoy it.) Almost every item in her budget—that is to say the money her husband gives her to spend—is far higher than mine. At Christmas the eldest girl got a walking-talking doll which cost over six pounds. In half-an-hour it was broken because " of course she 'ad to see what made it work." The boy was given a tricycle ; he could not learn to ride and has never used it. She has just bought a sailor-suit for the boy for £5 19s. It is one of those officer's affairs, with gold braid on the sleeves and an anchor badge on the cap. My son wears dungarees made out of his father's old grey flannels and a tweed overcoat laboriously contrived from a Harris skirt sent me by his grandmother. Perhaps Ivy didn't think much of this rig, for she brought me a photograph of her little chap in his sailor-suit and told me where she had bought it.
Not long ago Ivy and her husband decided to invest in a new bed. The one they eventually chose was internally sprung and cost over thirty pounds. I couldn't help laughing when she told me this, for our bed collapsed some time ago and is propped up with bricks until we can afford another.
Does this mean that in the fairly near future Ivy will have a home surpassing in comfort and luxury anything I can do? It does not, for barely a week after the new bed had arrived she came to me with dramatic face and outstretched hands to announce: "Me mattress is ruined! " It appeared that, for some unspecified reason connected with a snap decision to do up the bedroom, the mattress had had to be put on the floor. There, paint, tea and muddy footmarks had been ineradicably ground into the tapestry, and, after a wet Saturday afternoon spent bouncing up and down on it by the children, two springs had been found to be broken. I asked, thinking of the long months of hire-purchase, couldn't it be cleaned and mended? " Oh, no." said Ivy firmly.
Ivy and her friends " pay off " for almost all they buy, and the shillings and sixpences they have to collect and hand round to the various tradespeople each week must amount to a con- siderable sum. The shops in the district where she lives are full of glittering and expensive goods, badly made of atrocious materials, specially designed to catch this trade. Ivy fell for a shopping-bag, £2 5s. spread over a year, made of imitation crocodile skin (the imitation wouldn't have fooled a child of five), and was chagrined to see, the next time she went to the cash section of the shop, the same article offered for 8s. lid. down.
Their fixed budget, i.e. rent, rates, schooling, is of course much less than ours. Food is a query. They certainly live far less well than we do, partly because of Ivy's complete ignorance of cook- ing, but imagination and appetite come into it too. Her occa- sional flaring extravagances in such things as creamy shop-cakes and tinned fruit must bring her housekeeping expenses up to. and even beyond, my own. They have the same National Health doctor as we have, but they use him very differently. They know and love television stars whose names I have not even heard of. They never listen to the Third Programme.
As I have said, I like Ivy and I enjoy her company. In all our association together sve have never exchanged a single thought as equals or even contemporaries. We are of different species, as un-alike as, say. a mare and a cow ; nothing could ever make us tally. Her ideas, her aspirations. her aims, hopes and fears arc not mine ; they never will be. The gulf between us is as great, though perhaps not in the same way, as that which lay between our grandmothers. I should guess that the relationship between them would have been almost exactly the same.
Previous page
