Wet Washing Day

I've been waiting all week for a dry day, or at least one where it didn't look as if it was about to tipple down. This morning I arose at 7-ish to find Mr G had shoved some of the contents of the overflowing laundy basket into the machine. It's raining. What's the point? I thought of the rarely used tumble dryer in the garage, then remembered it had blown up last year and scorched my god-daughter's knickers!

Suddenly, I could hear my mother's exasperated voice in my mind, fuming, "Another wet washing day!" I had almost forgotten that, back in the 1950s and '60s, washing was only ever done once a week on a Monday. Monday was washing day. Everybody knew that. Whether it was raining or not, that's the day it got done, even if it hung around all week suspended from the kitchen ceiling from one of those Molly Maid drying racks, long johns flapping wetly in everyone's face.

Such was the rigid routine of those days. It was a class thing. Put your washing out on any other day and the neighbours would frown and label you as eccentric, at best: at worst, they would think you appallingly 'Non-U', persona non grata, a peasant, with an out of control, sloppy household at a time when households had to be 'run', as if they were military establishments.

Neither my mother nor her mother before her had such modern aids as tumble dryers. My mother did her washing in an old gas boiler and squashed it through a mangle, rather than having a washing machine with a spin cycle. She would then hang it on the line if it was not actually raining (oh, those frantic dashes home from park or shops at the first sign of a Monday raindrop!) or drape it on the Molly Maid if it was wet. Where we lived in Liverpool, in the North West, it rained a lot.

I can't remember when the rule of the Monday washing day began gradually eroding; it was probably when Women's Lib began in the '60s and women, rather than staying home keeping house and child-rearing, decided they'd rather go out to work instead. Launderettes sprang up. Suddenly, you could do your washing any day, morning or evening. What liberation from the wet washing day that was!

Yet, when I peg out my washing on a Friday or even (gasp, shock, horror!) a Sunday, I can still see a vision of those narrow-eyed neighbours, headscarves tied tightly over their pink hair rollers, shaking their heads and tutting. Bet you anything it will be sunny next Monday!