The Home Front meets Covid-19

-taff

When I used to do washing by hand I would  hook it round one of the taps on the bath or sink depending on how big it was and twist from the two ends in your hads to wring it. Less exhausting than holding and wringing.

[Deleted User]

That's it!  I remember watching Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn in one of their history re-enactment programmes tackling medieval laundry and they have a washing post in the garden.  A stout pole set into the earth so it's not going to move and you wrap the article round it, take each half of the article in a hand, twist them together tightly and it acts as a wringer! 

jinny

The bath taps i will do that with sheets tomorrow.  

I feel I'm hogging the thread somewhat with my laundry dilemma but appreciate greatly.
im running out of Yorkshire tea bags😫

monnagran

Don't apologise jinny, it has given us all something else to think about.  Look on the bright side  -  all that pummelling and wringing is giving your arm muscles a terrific work out.  Once you get a machine again your arms will return to flab.  Ask me how I  know.

jinny

Monnagran
ha ha ha. yes I've been sweating like a fat lass at a disco.   I can get away with saying that as i am a fat lass.  Oh at 70 i no longer care what i look like.   I do need to stop snacking tho back to IF 16/8.  

Every day i open my eyes n remember the situ.  First thing i do is say thank you for my continued good health and the food and shelter I receive every day. 

-taff

jinny said:

im running out of Yorkshire tea bags😫

Can't help with that! Although they are strong...use them twice? My parents used to like a pot of tea made with one strong teabag and one bag of earl grey. All the flavour and strong too.

jinny

i normally use yorkshire tea leaves in a pot but ran out before lockdown.  I am using them again tho.  I have a box of tetley i got on a shopping run last week but they arent YT😢

monnagran

jinny, we are sisters under the skin.  I too am well endowed with flesh and am also doing 16:8.  You have no idea how much I can eat in those 8 hours. Oh, and I'm 11 years older than you so vanity took its leave years ago.

Now I'm going to take a bit of issue with you basketcase. You said that women took great care to look well turned out and glamourous during the war, in spite of all the shortages.  Indeed they did.  They went to all sorts of extraordinary lengths to put their best face on and dress as smartly as possible WHEN THEY WENT OUT.  When they were at home they would not have dreamt of spoiling their good clothes by doing housework in them.  Their old, shapeless clothes were quite good enough for that, all covered up by the ubiquitous wrap around pinny, and their hair wrapped up in the headscarf, maybe with the curlers peeping coyly out.  You must have seen the pictures.
Everything was designed to put on a good show when you appeared in public, which you did.  In spite of the dangers, women weren't subjected to social isolation like we are.  I think if they were, the glamour and looking after their appearance would have disappeared pretty smartly.
Of course, they didn't have the cosmetics and vast array of shampoos, soaps and useful tools that we have.  However, whatever they could lay their hands on they treasured.  Even my mother, brought up with a good churchwoman's abhorrence of pride and vanity, had her 2 little pots of cream on her dressing table.  Ponds Cold Cream and Ponds Vanishing Cream.  The latter fascinated me, I rubbed it on various things, but nothing seemed to vanish.

The whole idea was that they should look their best when their menfolk came home on leave.  To be honest, I don't think my father would have noticed what my mother was wearing as long as she was safe.

thriftwizard

Basketcase - I haven't made any knickers yet! I'm still busy sorting my allotment out. Now there's another wartime thing - grow-your-own and Victory Gardens. I was born 13 years after WWII ended, but lived for the first few years of my life in a village which hadn't changed much since well before WWI; there were still a few heavy horses working on some of the steeper farms, where tractors overturning was a very real danger. Nearly all the farms were small & "mixed" - i.e. growing a little of everything. Very "inefficient" by modern standards, but there was always something to eat & something to sell. Every little village house had an allotment on the field behind the church, and most were well-used; some of those houses had no bathrooms, but an "outhouse" with a tin bath on the wall, opening into a covered yard with a larder at the other end, full of home-made cordials, jams & pickles. So growing stuff, foraging (the whole village used to take picnics & go blackberrying/nutting together up on the edge of the moor) & preserving feel very right to me, even to this day! I love sewing, but I love eating good food even more...

Great idea for a thread - thank you! 

basketcase

-taff said:

When I used to do washing by hand I would  hook it round one of the taps on the bath or sink depending on how big it was and twist from the two ends in your hads to wring it. Less exhausting than holding and wringing.

Hi taff.

I didn't wrap it round the taps, but I did twist the ends of stuff.  What my mother used to call wringing the washing, not my hands!