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My interest in domesticity was first inspired by our tall, large-boned Scottish housekeeper, always known to us as Mrs Forbes and to my mother as Dorothy. As a child I watched fascinated as she made crème caramel and Victoria sponges, and bustled round the kitchen. ‘Clear as you go’ was one of her mottoes; 'Don't put it down, put it away' was another, and I still mutter them today. In 1967, a university friend gave me a 1906 edition of Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management for my 21st birthday. It has been a constant companion ever since, and still sits considerably more plumply than a bible on my kitchen bookshelf. ‘The function of the Mistress of a House resemble those of the general of an army or the manager of a great business concern’ runs its first line, and there is still a postcard, a portrait of a splendidly plump Cardinal Wolsey inside it, with ‘Tina, with much love, Marcus’ scrawled on it. A deeply conservative bon viveur, he doubtless had hopes that I would start serving up jugged hare and making damson jelly for him at a time when women in the swing of things were burning their bras.
I did try the jugged hare and still make the damson jelly (though not for him), but it was the vision splendid of woman as boss, and the skilled and fulfilling life around the recipes that really caught my imagination. I browsed through lists of culinary utensils, read of the relative advantages of different makes of magnificently decorated cast-iron kitchen ranges. While Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan ranted against men, I was proud to be a housewife. Mrs Beeton’s women never had any trouble with men. They ruled the roost with a rod of iron sheathed in velvet, and were duly adored for it.
Mrs B’s sections on linen cupboards and the duties of the sewing maid were so seductive on the uses of lavender and the thrifty virtues of patchwork that instead of going to women’s groups, I began to collect sewing machines. Soon the house was bursting at the seams with them, ranging in size from a massive cobbler’s treadle to the tiny Moldacot, which screws onto a table edge. My knowledge of their inventors, the early cartels and Singer became encyclopedic. Eager to spread it, I contributed an article to Arts and Antiques Weekly in 1974. They asked for more, and I swotted up on early light fittings, carpet sweepers and bellows-driven vacuum-cleaners and kitchen collectables. A publisher expressed interest, and I cooked up a book. I called it Labour Saved, because in the course of my researches into the Journal of Domestic Appliances, The Sewing Machine Gazette and early runs of Good Housekeeping and Vogue, I had realised how much difference to women’s lives domestic appliances and electricity had made. And that all this had been intelligently appreciated in the successive editions of Mrs Beeton – all written by her husband Sam as she herself died soon after finishing her book.
The publisher went bust without producing my Labour Saved, but by then I had began having my four children and my attention had wandered from the chapters on domestic management in the great household bibles to those on the nursery. To my surprise, I realised how thoroughly sensible much of their advice was, in comparison to the gurus of our own day. For it soon became apparent that feminism was all very well as long as you were childfree, but after that you had to start a 24-hour commitment to the needs of your babies. I preferred such old adages: ‘plenty of love and plenty of old-fashioned neglect’. My children had afternoon naps – for my sake, not theirs.
I developed a theory that what we are told to do with our children is very much a reflection of the times we live in, and the prevailing social and psychological theories, and wrote a book to prove it. Dream Babies came out in 1983, again making liberal use of Mrs Beeton’s wisdoms on ‘a mother’s influence’ and ‘the children’s hour’. Then a new publisher was found for my first book, retitled Mangle to Microwave. I gradually turned me into a commentator on domestic and family matters, rolled on to tell people about things as they used to be on a regular basis. Naturally opinionated, I soon shifted to writing comment columns, and began a vast project, a history of twentieth century domesticity in Europe. It has never seen the light of day, but I did produce a brief digest called The Future of the Family.
All that long while, I was running against the grain of the times. Most of my friends were soaring up career ladders and complaining of glass ceilings. But now, thanks, I suspect, to soaring property prices, domesticity is big business, cooking is the new sex and ‘parenting’ (an odd, unsatisfactory neologism) a national issue. I now have a profitable line in holding forth on matters domestic. Two of my four daughters have now had children themselves, and I am planning to write a new update of Dream Babies enhanced by their twenty-first century viewpoints and experiences.
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