Memories of Childhood
by John Appleby

~ 14 ~

One day was set aside for baking the bread and cakes for the week, and the kitchen would soon be filled with the sweet smells of yeast and spices and fruit. The old kitchen table would creak as my mother kneaded the bread dough, then, when proved, the tins were filled and put to rise, covered with a clean towel on the fender. My reward for watching the tempting ingredients into fruit cake, Granny loaf (raisin bread), or sponge cake, was the treat of scraping the coatings from the empty mixing bowls. When the bread had cooled, the loaves were stored in a knee-high eathenware barrel with a butter-coloured glazed interior, enclosed by a wooden lid and kept in the pantry under the staircase.

Mondays spelled misery. My mother would be in no mood for pleasantries as she ferried boiling water from the copper, out to the wooden posstub in in the lean-to "backend". I was sometimes given the job of dicing wafer-thin slivers of toilet soap to be added to the wastub. The load of washing had to be pounded in soapy water with the poss stick, then unloaded, run through the big wood rollers of the mangle, rinsed , mangled again and hung out on a long line. This was a rope which would be produced every washday and secured on to hooks on the walls, and running the length of our back yard. The accumulation of a week's clothing and bedlinen took many hours of hard work, and scratch meals were the order of the day. In winter the house would reek of steam and yellow soap. All the whites were rinsed in water tinted with Reckitts blue, a little muslin bag with a block of indigo blue stuff in it, resulting in a whiter wash. Thereafter, in winter the kitchen would be festooned with hanging garments and airing on a clothes horse in front of the fire. Only in summer, when we could get outside, was washday tolerable for us children, but we gave little heed to the fact that our mother had to slave that day and subsequent days.

© 2003 John Appleby, New Zealand

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