As my intelligent washing machine tells me that the load I have just put in will take 40 minutes, I reflect on something I have been reading and a conversation with my Italian online conversation class. The book is “Her Mother’s Daughter” by Marilyn French, a book I discovered on one of our many bookshelves and which I seem never to have read. Neither Phil nor I remember buying this book. Maybe some visitor left it behind. Maybe someone lent it to me and forgot about it. It tells the story of the lives of three generations of women from quite early in the 20th century onwards.
At one point one of the women, the middle one I think, describes her washing day: putting washing in a tub of water, which she had to heat beforehand, the rigmarole of adding “blue” to the white wash to make it extra bright ( I remember “Dolly Blue” used by my mother in ore-washing machine days), rinsing, putting the washing through the wringer, being careful not to trap fingers, and finally hanging it out to dry, keeping an eye on progress so that dry stuff could be brought in and more wet stuff hung out. Oh, boy! No wonder it took all day! And then, most of it had to be ironed, probably the next day. That’s why wealthy families had masses of servants!
Coincidentally, in the Italian class we had been doing work on the imperfect tense, the past tense used for continuous actions in the past, the “used to do” tense. Going through a what-has-changed-in-modern-life exercise, someone started to talk about washing day in the pre-washing machine era: washboards, dolly tubs, mangles and so on. It’s amazing how inventive your foreign language knowledge can be when you have to explain what such items were. Eventually our teacher-coordinator found pictures online to share with everyone. A bit of nostalgia for a lifestyle we don’t need to go back to, thank you very much!
Marilyn French has one of her women talk about being poor. They were poor, she recognised, because they had no car, because they had to scrimp and save, because they did not always eat the best food. However, she recognised also that they never went hungry; they might have wanted more or better, fancier food but they were never actually hungry. There is a difference!
And today I found an article about the effects of coronavirus on generation Z - 7- to 24-year olds apparently - and how they may be scarred for life by the times we are living through. Their education has been disrupted, youth unemployment is going crazy and Marcus Rashford is having to argue for children to continue to get free school meals during the half term holidays.
“The Trussel Trust has distributed up to 146% more children’s food parcels this year compared with 2019.”
“During the pandemic, there has been a rise in the use of foodbanks, especially among households with children.”
But it can’t all be blamed on the virus:
“The were already concerns among experts about generation Z before the pandemic. About 30% of children were already living in poverty, a figure that was predicted to increase.”
And there were 100,000 more children living in poverty in 2018-19 than the previous year.
So even before the pandemic, things were looking bad.
And I think it’s a lot harder to be poor nowadays with so much pressure to own stuff, to have the RIGHT stuff, the RIGHT clothes, and all the rest. So when the PM complains about not being able to manage on his large salary, as one of our local MPs has just commented about on the radio news, we must be ironically sympathetic - after all, he has even more standards to maintain.
The radio news has also told me that no agreement has yet been reached about the status of Greater Manchester in the coronavirus tiers. There was apparently a deadline for midday today but at 1.00 that deadline had come and gone. There seems to have been an extension of talks. It’s all coming down to money and poverty again. We shall wait and see.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment