Oughta be in a museum — we were!

by

Angharad.

In reading Erin’s trip down memory lane, it jogged my memory of a visit to the Welsh National History Museum at St Fagans, near Cardiff. I had my two children in tow who were probably about eight and six, my daughter being the elder.

We’d done the restaurant, so they were stuffed full of cottage pie and chips and fizzy drinks, when we started our exploration of the site, which is huge and full of reconstructed buildings which have been demolished brick by brick and rebuilt at the museum.

They have ancient farmhouses, where the family lived in one side of the entrance hall and the cattle, sheep and goats populated the other, the only barrier being a fence between them. I can only presume our ancestors had less of a sense of smell than we do today. The musty smell of the beaten earth floors was bad enough, so I had no desire to return to that period–probably eighteenth century.

They had a school, where it was noted children were punished for using their left hands for writing, at one point having a board tied to the offending sinister limb. My children were suitably appalled as were they when it was also noted the children were punished for speaking Welsh–their native tongue–and the English wonder why there is such joy when Wales beat them at rugby.

After visiting the smithy, a woollen mill and a tannery, we ended up in a row of cottages, either farm worker’s or miner’s dwellings, each furnished and equipped in a period of the twentieth century.

I was born in December 1952, so my formative years were in the fifties, but much of the household items we had were much older, especially when we lived at my grandmother’s house for the first four years of my life.

I could identify the radio–a large thing with the names of places like Hilversum, which considering I didn’t go to London until I was seventeen, seemed incredibly exotic. The radio stood about four feet tall and was in a beautiful inlaid, wooden cabinet and while the aerial meant reception was variable, when the large speakers did receive something to blast out, the noise had a wonderful tone, resonating with the cabinet.

I could recall, Oxo cubes and blue bags, we didn’t use the former but others did, and everyone used the blue bag for rinsing their whites, which had probably been boiled to get them clean.

My mother had a wringer, for squeezing the clothes after washing to get the water out. It was one stage up from a mangle, and lighter to use. We graduated to a single tub washing machine, a top loader which had an electric wringer on the top, when we moved to our own house between my fourth and fifth birthdays.

My kids couldn’t get over how retro the technology had been, valve radios and televisions which were huge by comparison to the modern ones, and we’re talking mid to late 1980’s.

We had a kitchen cabinet, a thing with a pull down flap on the top which provided a work surface, with storage cupboards above and below this. I can still remember what we kept in ours, cereals and dried fruit in the lower section, cups and saucers in the top. How my mother always seemed puzzled that the raisins, sultanas and currants evaporated shows how they can turn a blind eye to anything–though I have to plead guilty to stealing my share of the sweetmeats.

The sink in the kitchen of this cottage at the museum was a stone one–or a large, thick porcelain one to be exact–my Nana had one, which was end on to the user, a wooden draining board over which tin had been laid and was beginning to break up when we lived there. The taps were half way up the tiled wall, and too high for my little puddies to use.

Being a house which had been built in the 1920s, it had a bathroom, so my kids were horrified to see the outside loo attached to the houses at the museum, and sheets of newspaper hanging on a hook for the earth closet toilet. “Doesn’t it flush?” they kept asking, and then laughing. In all honesty, I’d never used one, having been blessed by living in a house with internal toilets and bathrooms, but the generation before me had.

We didn’t have fridge at first, so pointing out the meat safe–a metal cupboard with fine mesh sides–made them gasp. I also pointed out the slate shelf in the larder, which helped keep milk and eggs cool.

They couldn’t believe how small the screen was on a black and white television, apparently my parents had one in time to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, at six months old, I don’t recall the event, but I had a teaspoon and a silver crown coin–worth five shillings. My younger brother purloined it when he left home–he didn’t have one not being born until 1955–and he simply took anything of mine he fancied often without telling me.

Westminster chiming mantel clocks were a common feature back then, I have one now, although it currently doesn’t work. My kids seemed to think they were old fashioned compared to modern digital ones, although they could both tell the time, I think the one at Nana’s would have confused them with its Latin numerals. My mother’s was one with Arabic numerals and I can still remember lying on the lounge floor listening to its reassuring tick.

I pointed out the range with hobs for boiling kettles–my Nana had one in her dining room, though not one for cooking. However, it had to be black-leaded with Zebu polish, and it shone when she’d finished. I had the pleasure of lighting the fire there and doing the grate for her when I was a kid–aged about ten, she died when I was eleven and I still miss her.

When we lived with her, I had quite a collection of handbags and used to scuff around the house in any shoes which were accessible, especially my mother’s high heels. According to my aunt, Nana observed that even in those days, ‘this child should be a girl’. I wished she’d told me, it might have saved me many years of working things out for myself.
So after pointing out so many of the things which were exhibited in these houses, my children decided I should have been one myself, hence the title of this piece.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Fagans_National_History_Museum