IN THE HOUSE WHERE I WAS BORN, and in one or two rented places, was a clothes- hoist; sign of a wet climate, and general dampness. Rising damp, falling damp, general dampness.
Out, out, damp spot!
The clothes-hoist; superior to, but more unsightly than the clothes-horse, which could be hidden when not in use (but always was).
I have the clothes-hoist to thank for our emigration to sunny, hot, frightening Australia.
The year was 1968. The previous two or three years had been gloomily miserable. Constant cloud, rain, drizzle; I could go on: the North of England has a fine vocabulary of bad weather, more than Inuit for snow. But I had childhood memories of blue summer skies, yellow beaches of hot sand. And crystal winters of glittering frost, and snow dryly squeaking under foot. Where had that England gone?
We had had no summer for three years. Holidays planned and wrecked by rain. !968 was also planned: Cornwall, Polperro of childhood paradise; but we never went. We knew the cold July rain would never stop, and it didn’t. So I spent my hard-earned free weeks at home with the family and the clothes-hoist.
We did every holiday thing we could in the first week. Everything that could be done with three children in the pissing horizontal rain. And it wasn’t fun, just wet, cold work. I could have at least been earning wages.
It could have been worse. We could have rented a house without a kitchen-fire and clothes-hoist. Our fire, that ‘holiday’, burned night and day, and the clothes- hoist was always full to sagging with wet gear: wet blankets we wished had never got washed in the first place, wet sheets, towels, clothes, clothes, clothes. Nothing in the place was dry.
Shoes ranged around the small hearth, steaming. Shoes in cupboards with green mould; shoes that looked like new green suede but weren’t. Leather jackets like corpses of limp moss.
It took nearly three days to dry one blanket: never again, but one of the children had had an accident. The fire roared, the house warmed, the socks dried by the hundred. The old hoist became an efficient production-line, a purpose in life, a family activity, the focus of heat and warmth and dry clothing. A kitchen of glow and comfort.
THE CLOTHES-HOIST was well-made and efficient. It hung from the high ceiling on ropes to two pulleys, attached to two shapely cast-iron hangers through which the wooden rails ran. There were seven rails in two tiers, which together could support a tremendous amount of wet washing. It could be raised to the ceiling or lowered to floor-level, but when full was a struggle to lift, and no doubt there were accidents, and washing in the flames.
Never has such a small, practical device been so useful and comforting. What could we possibly have done without it? (The days before domestic electric clothes-dryers……..but where’s the comfort in sitting around a clothes-dryer?) Our half-cottage was on the cusp of modernity, hence the hoist, a throwback to recent primitive days, but the village was and is ancient. Picturesque and far from vertical.
There were, in years long ago, in tropical Brisbane, weeks of steaming wet rain, when the old clothes-hoist over a wood-stove would have been hi-tech luxury…….but the honourable height-adjustable Hills hoist was unknown in England. You win some, you lose some.
So, sitting in the laundry-steam on our summer holiday, under a sopping proscenium-arch of undies, watching the cold rain beat against the kitchen window, and the clear water run down the gutter to the stream below, we read of Australia, and jobs, and sunny days, and work done wearing shorts and big hats. Hats to keep the sun off! Why, we wondered? Who would want to keep the sun off?
It took a year to organise, once the decision was made, and, as if to confirm that decision it rained and rained until the day we left, and the boat crossed the Equator, and the sun finally shone, and the sky was blue.
AND NOW. THE SUN STILL SHINES. BUT THERE’S NO PLEASING SOME PEOPLE.
Queensland November, 2019, bushfires and never-ending drought.