6. Housework
It was the Community’s proud boast that it did all its own housework, without employing the expected local army of maids and mops. Leaving aside the catering, this was practically true. The caring and teaching staff would dedicate a certain amount of time after breakfast to supervision of the sweeping, polishing, dusting and tidying of the areas under their responsibility. This might seem beyond the job description of people employed as carers or teachers, but such considerations hardly existed when the Community was created and, miraculously, they still did not in the 1960s. Assisting the staff were the children themselves: the juniors between breakfast and going to school, the seniors on Saturday mornings. This is where the job descriptions became blurred, since the carers and teachers were not simply slaving away to cut costs but were training the children to go out into life knowing how to sweep and polish floors, dust furniture, wipe dishes and so on. This was another of those occasions where community spirit was fostered by assigning the children, on a termly basis, not to their own department but to one of the others. A further opportunity to get to know staff beyond those who had direct responsibility for them, as well as to learn different tasks. A popular assignment was the garden, though Major Clark drove his charges hard. Wiping plates could be dull, especially if you dried thirty or so only to be told harshly they were still wet. Floors in the house were almost all of wood and were made to shine with a daily application of Ronuk polish. You applied this in carefully measured quantities – woe betide anyone who put too much on – and spread it with a cloth and a “dumper”. Some electric polishers were available for the final sheen, but for a really smooth finish you needed to put a new cloth under the dumper and push it back and forth energetically, following the direction of the floorboards.
Staff who opted out were rare. Miss Travers, rather than muck in with the rest, preferred to make good use of the dividends from her stocks and shares by employing a local lady. Mr. Marshall, after taking over the Colt House, realized that the best efforts he could coax from those under his charge would be equivalent to living in a junk shop after an earthquake and likewise enlisted local aid.
The seriousness with which housework was taken was emphasized by the compilation of “Housework Reports” on each of us. These were read out at Meeting by Miss Dave with a solemnity second only to the Charter itself. Various staff amused themselves by composing reports that ostentatiously implied more than they said – “Can be a very cheerful companion”, “Able and sometimes willing”, “Needs to be encouraged” and the like. Miss Dave read these to a background of suppressed sniggers as we imagined what lay behind them. Miss Leila never saw the funny side. Miss Dave’s enigmatic smile suggested she had some suspicion, though if things got out of hand we were severely admonished that it was “no laughing matter”. When all is said and done, housework sent us out into the world with some notion of how to keep a home in order.