Diamonds at Dinner Read Free Page A

fresh one has to be popped in, I remember just how awkward and time consuming it was just to get the lamps working in those long-ago days and nights.
    From the front room, come with me to the kitchen. With no electricity there was, of course, no fridge (let alone a freezer): no one – neither rich nor poor – had anything that would be recognised as a fridge until after the Great War. The earliest models were nothing but wooden cabinets with ice slowly melting in the top. Then, in the 1920s, came the first true fridges, which generated cold by compressing gases, just as ours dotoday. The catch was that the original refrigerants were toxic – and, of course, they were so expensive that only the very few could afford them. Since electricity was also a rarity in houses, some companies tried out gas-powered fridges, marketing them as ‘modern marvels of the age’. But they, too, cost a small fortune; the vast majority of the population wouldn’t own a refrigerator until the early 1960s.
    Instead, we had a larder. This was a narrow room off the kitchen with a big stone shelf. Because the larder was on an outside wall, with a rectangular hole covered with a perforated iron plate, the stone shelf stayed cold and perishable food was placed on it to keep fresh. Of course, it wouldn’t last long, so Mum would go shopping almost every day – and in the days before supermarkets or convenience stores that meant a lengthy trek, with me, Joan and Jim in tow, around the butchers, the bakers and (for all I can remember) the candlestick makers.
    There was, of course, another reason why this rather basic system worked: the house was, invariably, cold. Today I don’t think there’s a home in the country that doesn’t have some kind of central heating but back then it was completely unthinkable. Why? Because we didn’t have any hot water.
    The kitchen sink did have a tap – and in that, unlike many, we were fortunate. But the only way of heatingwater was in big pans on the copper boiler in the corner of the kitchen, which was heated by a coal fire. This, of course, had another implication: getting washed. All of us grew up with a morning and night-time wash in a bowl of cold water – even in the bitterest of winters. The only time we’d see hot water for washing was on a Friday night when Mum would unhook the big copper bath from the toilet wall, put it in front of the coal fire in the living room and fill it up with panful after panful, ladled one by one from the boiler. As the eldest, I’d get to go first, followed by Joan and then Jim – poor Jim; he always got the coldest and dirtiest bath! And that would be that for another week: Mum would hang the bath back in the toilet and we’d be back to a quick lick and a promise in cold water, morning and night.
    Now, the toilet. It possibly won’t surprise you to know that this wasn’t in the house. At the end of the yard there was a little brick shed and inside was a very basic loo. Whatever the weather, whatever the time of day, if we needed to go, we’d have to nip out the back door and scuttle into the outside privy. And in winter we’d definitely scuttle quickly: there was no heating in the toilet – I’m not even sure there was a light: why would there be when there was no heating in the house itself, other than the coal fire? So we didn’t linger longer than was absolutely necessary.
    In case you think we were unusual or deprived in this – don’t! Most of the population of Britain in those days had an outside toilet and this persisted well into the 1950s. Certainly nobody we knew had a nice warm loo in their house. That was just the way life was back then. But we did have something special in the house –
    something not many other people of our class had. In the front room we had a piano. It was one of those old upright ones that you used to see in pubs in those days. And Mum and Dad were keen that I learned to play: from a very young age I was sent to have lessons