The writer Katharine Whitehorn, late of ‘The Observer’ inter alia, wrote a classic, ‘Cooking in a Bedsitter.’ It certainly doesn’t sound classic to modern ears, and now it might be entitled ‘Cooking in a Studio Flat’, but it saved the culinary lives of girls living away from home for the first time, for their first foray into the world of paid employment. The other difference today would likely be not having the impracticality of sharing a bathroom at the other end of a badly lit landing. It’s very difficult to strain peas, cooked on a single gas ring in the hearth, when another tenant is having a bath or washing his socks in the communal washbasin.
In the 1960s, when I was a child and consequently exempt from the cares, and joys, of bedsit land, I would see images of women in magazines doing something with a single light bulb, reaching up to the ceiling on a rickety chair in order to ‘plug’ an iron into the light fitting. I never did understand the electrical connections required but the activity looked dangerous on many counts. Similarly a picture of a glass bottle of milk, paper stuffed in the neck to stop birds dipping their beaks in the ‘top of the milk’, showed it perched on a window ledge as there was no fridge in the room, nay in the building. Knickers would be hung on a piece of string over a communal bath and washing up would be in a bucket.
This is the problem when water is not on tap in your own room and there is nowhere to dry your washing or do your own dishes.
But odder than all of these Heath Robinson approaches to living in shared accommodation was the gas ring attached to the gas fire. It sat in the grate. Okay if you wanted to simply boil a kettle, filled from the washbasin in the ever-busy shared bathroom, but hopeless for cooking anything more exciting or nutritious than baked beans. Hence the need for Katharine Whitehorn’s timely publication.
She describes the difficulties of keeping butter from turning rancid in the days before mini fridges were commonplace. Her fail-safe recipes for casserole cooking meant a proper meal could be created in a room with no work surface, no food cupboard and a gas ring over which one crouched as if camping in a one-man tent in a wet field with a small, portable single gas canister. Cooking at floor level.
Almost sixty years later studio flats do not present the same problems. A sink unit, work surface, kitchen cupboards and cooker are positioned on one wall of the hip shared living, eating, sleeping space. No-one has to grab a torch at 2 a.m. to find their way along a dark hallway to the only available, shared W.C. Nowadays an ensuite shower room provides the privacy and convenience today’s tenants require.( Do I sound like an estate agent?). And washer-driers remove the need to hang wet hand-washed bras and knickers over a communal bath. They probably took days to dry as oftentimes said bathrooms wouldn’t be centrally heated. Not only was it a cold experience taking a bath in such primitive conditions, wet washing, hand-rung at best, had very little chance of drying in a permanently unheated room. The smell of damp must have been all-pervading.
Another method for drying washing was to hang clothes on a wooden airer in front of a single gas fire. The air would be full of steam. Living in a bedsit was, I guess, like living in a sauna.
We will be in Devon at the weekend for a big party in the country. Richard and I thought about booking an Airbnb room, with its own ensuite and attached mini kitchen. There on offer was a mini fridge, a microwave oven, toaster and plug-in induction hob, all resting on a practical wipe-down work surface. A fan operated in this Airbnb kitchen, presumably to ensure there would be no lingering cooking smells. There was a slimline dishwasher and a washer drier too. All squeezed into a small space with a range of cooking utensils, pots and pans in kitchen cupboards.
With all this on offer the bad old days of communal living are dead, it seems. We can cook, wash up, have our day wear and swimming gear washed and drying within minutes of being soiled. All done in the ensuite kitchen. A shower can be taken in perfect privacy in the ensuite wet room without our having to queue up or scurry in for a rapid bathe in the freezing cold, shared, temporarily vacant bathroom. All the time hoping there is still enough hot water to service the washing needs of all the residents.
Our long weekend in Devon will be bliss. Except we’ll be eating out and there will be no time for domestic chores such as washing out our socks. The standard ensuite shower room will be very welcome but I don’t think we’ll need the room for anything more than simply sleeping. We won’t need to cook or do our laundry. We could have booked a room with a shared bath and kitchen...
Which brings me back to Katharine Whitehorn. Her 1960s guide for the homesick has been re-scripted by Sue Teddern and her comic series was first aired on radio 4 in 2016. It’s a great little comedy. Funnier than living it back then, that’s for sure.
Aren’t we lucky?
No comments:
Post a Comment