Housework
On Saturday mornings after breakfast the senior boys and girls were required to do about an hour’s housework [ we also did a smaller amount of housework in the Study]. We might help in the kitchen, clearing up and washing up in the dining room/pantry, cleaning the floors, etc. Polishing the hall floor was a heavy task, involving a weighty implement known as a ‘dumper’, with which we applied Ronuk to the floor, and then put a cloth under the dumper to shine the floor.
Miss Hill was in charge in the pantry, and did the washing up in very hot water without rubber gloves. She always said that she had ‘asbestos hands’.
I think I spent more time doing housework in the kitchen than anywhere else. I enjoyed the work and the company. Diana Dee, the cook [who was Miss Leila’s adopted daughter], had a great sense of humour, which rubbed off on anyone else who worked there. Even Mrs Goodban, a rather dour older lady who came in from outside to work in the kitchen, was easy enough to get on with if you worked and behaved yourself.
One example of kitchen humour was a poem written in the style of Hiawatha [by one of the many students who would help out at Caldecott for a year or so at a time; I cannot remember his name]. It began “Then Diana, tall and stately, She the dropper of the sponge cakes”, and can be found in one of the Caldecott Heralds of the late 1950s. I remember also the time when, unusually, I confessed to ignorance about something, saying “I don’t know everything”. Diana immediately said “Can we have that in writing?”
Peeling potatoes was an interesting new experience, as Caldecott had an electric potato peeler. This was a floor-standing machine that looked rather like a large spin drier. The inside had an abrasive surface, which would peel the potatoes as they were spinning in the machine. I doubt that Lord Woolton would have approved. [Lord Woolton was the wartime Minister for Food, who encouraged people to eat potatoes with their skins, to help feed the country when food was scarce; I later heard about a Government campaign involving a jingle to the effect that “the sight of peelings hurts Lord Woolton’s feelings”].
When I was about seventeen, I became interested in making wine, and Diana allowed me to do so in the kitchen. I often had two or three demijohns bubbling away at the same time, and I suppose we all drank the finished product. Recalling this recently, I felt sure that my memory was playing tricks on me, and that I must surely have imagined it, but it is clear from something I wrote in the Herald at the time that it actually happened.
At the end of each term we would be given a housework report, read out by Miss Davies at Meeting. More often than not, mine was “thorough but slow”. However, I felt very proud on one occasion when a favourable report from the kitchen ended with a ‘special mention from Mrs Goodban’.