Reflections and Nightmares- Irene A Waters (writer and memoirist)

© irene waters 2016

Times Past is a monthly prompt challenge that I hope will give us social insights into the way the world has changed between not only generations but also between geographical location. The prompt can be responded to in any form you enjoy – prose, poetry, flash, photographs, sketches or any other form you choose. You may like to use a combination of the two. I will also add a series of questions for those that would like to join in but don’t know where to start.

Heading your response please put what generation you belong to, your country and whether you lived in a rural or city environment at the time of your story.

The first prompt in the series proved my pre conceived ideas to be incorrect. The prompt The first time I remember eating in a restaurant in the evening had 11 responses and all found it was rare in their childhood to eat out. Some wonderful stories were told that gave an insight back into the lives of the one Silent Generation, 9 Baby Boomers and 2 Gen X. Surprisingly it was the Baby Boomers who were later eating out than the other generations with the average age 10.5. The numbers though are certainly not statistically significant. Many of the baby boomers mentioned that they had to be on their very best behaviour as did the one silent generation. Perhaps Gen X had a little more freedom to be themselves. The numbers were for the baby Boomers equally spread between UK and USA with 1 Australian and also equally spread as far as country and city. Gen X were both rural – one in the UK and the other USA. Perhaps if some Gen X city children had participated we may have found that they were more inclined to eat out. Thanks to Grandmama. Sherri, Judy, Deborah, Geoff, Anne, Jules, Jeanne, Christine, Charli, and Lisa.

The Generations that I think may possibly be blogging:

Greatest Generation

G I Generation: 1901 – 1924 Experienced WWII in adulthood.

Silent Generation 1925 – 1945 Experience WWII in childhood

Baby Boomers

Boom Generation/Hippie 1946 -1964 Space Exploration/ first counter culture

Generation X 

Baby Busters 1965 -1980 Experienced Vietnam War/Cold War

MTV or Boomerang Generation 1975 – 1985 Rise of Mass Media/end cold war

Generation Y

Echo Boom/Generation McGuire 1978-1990 Rise of the Information Age/ Internet/War on Terror/Rising Gas and Food Prices

Generation Z

New Silent Generation 1995- 2009 Never experience pre Internet/dot com bubble/ Digital globalisation

Generation Alpha

No sub name as yet but possibly the school or materialistic generation 2010 – These are predicted to study longer and be more concerned with material possessions.

My belief is that our location and the generation into which we were born see very different experiences of growing up as we relook at Times Past. I hope you’ll join in. Put a link to your post and I will add it in my post so that it is easy to read others experiences. Lets get started.

Prompt No 2. First memories of wash day. Was it a ritual in your house. Did you have to play a part. What kind of washing machine did you have? Was it the sole province of the women of the household? What was the style of your clothes line? Any memories of doing the laundry you care to share. I am sure that we are going to find some differences both geographically and generational with this one. Help me prove myself right or show that I am wrong by joining in.

© irene waters 2016 A Hills Hoist Clothesline

Generation Baby Boomer Country Australia: Rural Age 6 -11

I have to admit I remember little about washing. I don’t know whether Mum had a regular day for doing it or not. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did as most things were set to a routine when I was growing up. I do however remember three things about laundry very clearly.

The first was my Grandmother’s mode of washing, which was different to ours as my Mum always had an automatic machine (in my memory). When we visited Grandma in Sydney I used to love her washing day which definitely was on a routine day every week. She had a copper in which water was boiled and she dropped all the items into this very hot water. She let them soak for a bit then with a well worn pole which had the pattina of a well-used wooden spoon, she rotated the clothes. Items that were stained such as shirt collars she would soap up and rub up and down a board which was the same type of wood as the pole. After emptying the water she would put the clothes in the laundry tub in cold water, agitate them around to get the suds off and then, if I had been good, she would allow me to feed them through the two rollers to squeeze every last drop of water out.

The second laundry memory was at my other Grandma’s house also in Sydney. All the cousins were staying including a baby. Sneaking into the laundry in a game of hide and seek we discovered a row of buckets filled with nappies and the most incredibly slimy water I have ever felt in my life.

The only task I had to do with regard to the laundry was ironing the hankies and the pillowslips. This was normally done on a weekend night. My mother would sprinkle water over all the clean clothes and roll them up damp in readiness for ironing. There were no steam irons then and the water was designed to take the creases out of the clothes. I hated having to do the ironing. It was a boring thankless task that seemed to never end. Now I do as little ironing as possible.

The clothes line I do remember. Not for hanging the wet clothes on but because of it acting as a merry-go-round. We used to stand on our tip-toes in order to reach the ban and then we would run until eventually our speed was such that we could bend our knees, taking our feet off the ground and fly around using the momentum we had generated. Nearly everyone had a Hills Hoist clothesline when we were growing up.  I can remember being jealous of the odd farmer that still had two strands of wire strung between two posts  and I was definitely jealous of the odd person who covered their Hills Hoist to give them a huge umbrella. Huge umbrellas had not yet been invented.

I’m looking forward to your memories of the laundry.

The Silent Generation

rural

in comments  http://www.stilltheluckyfew.com/

Baby Boomers

rural USA

in comments  Sharon Bonin-Pratt

rural England

Washed Up

rural England

The torture of Wash days Past

rural USA

A Pouch Full of Clothespins

city NY USA

Past Times 2: Women’s Work : Easy Breezy? (2.5 f)

city Australia

https://christinejrandall.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/times-past-laundry/

city Northern England

http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/1/post/2016/02/memory-memoir-and-fiction-again-a-daughter-your-age-washday-blues.html

rural England

Laundry: Women’s Work?

Gen X

rural USA

Times Past: Mystery of Laundry

rural England

Times Past: Wash Day Dander