After my college days the thwarted artist, but qualified teacher, met and married the farm worker.

With our first baby on the way my husband and I moved out to the country. We were about to live the dream. The fresh air and wonderful views would be great and our lack of finances would not be a problem as the job came with a tied house. Neither of us had any money. I had lived on a grant whilst in college and my husband had no savings. We were both looking forward to it. I had this idyllic picture in my head and couldn’t wait to get there. If only I had known then that it would be the start of a life of incessant cleaning! The countryside not only smells bad but it is covered in mud and muck which finds its way daily into the home.

We arrived with all our worldly goods in the back of a tarmac wagon, yes, a tarmac wagon, covered in tarmac but fortunately he did put down a plastic sheet before putting in our furniture; four broken chairs, two mattresses with springs sticking out, the double bed stead, an electric fire and a harmonium. Well what else do you need? Actually a table would have been good and much more use than a harmonium .The neighbours’ curtains were twitching as we pulled up but that was a good thing because they saw how little we had and soon rallied round with a wardrobe, two chests of drawers, a bed settee, two armchairs and an old carpet. I still did not have a table but we used the top of the harmonium to eat off as neither of us played it; well it was broken anyway and didn’t work.(We later patched it up and repaired it, and sold it)

The tied house, being part of the wage, meant that we had very little cash. Back then employers would not consider a pregnant woman for a job and said so openly. It was fortunate, as it happened, because I had severe anaemia and was not very well so just getting the house ready, and fit to live in, was exhausting enough. The house had been empty and derelict for long time. Through the broken windows it had stood open to the elements. Our landlord, the farmer, had installed a bathroom and new windows, but the interior was in a state and uninhabitable as it was .So it was up to us. We didn’t question it or challenge it. We just accepted it. We were glad to have a house, a job and money for food .So the cleaning began. There were 13 layers of blackened wallpaper to be removed and some of them looked as if they had been hand-painted. I think the original wallpapers were as old as the house itself. They were probably worthy of b being in a museum but I had a schedule to keep and just ripped them off as fast as I could.

I was very excited. Here was the blank canvas I needed for my creativity, a whole house, now with bare walls, where I could go mad with colour and express myself. On the plus side I didn’t have to move lots of furniture to get to work but on the downside I didn’t have any money for materials.

I bought some odd rolls of wallpaper which were being sold off cheaply, and as long as the colour was similar, that was good enough for me .I didn’t mind if the patterns didn’t match, the more patterns the better I thought. I was in Heaven. My colour schemes and designs were legendary. 6 different green wallpapers in the long back bedroom! Well that was going to be the nursery and I figured the baby wouldn’t’ notice. Each room became work of art. The frustrated artist in me went wild. I chose a bright flame red entrance hall which led to lime green for the stairs and then Navy and yellow for our bed room.(. Well I didn’t want to be kept awake all night by the brightness of the décor).. The bathroom was very 60s-brightly coloured wildly patterned psychedelic paper and, for the kitchen, I chose bright blue and orange. When I was at school an art teacher once told me that orange and blue do not go together but I thought otherwise .I loved the combination. I painted and decorated incessantly. I now felt I had well and truly won the battle against the dirt and grime in the fabric of the house, it was just the daily cleaning I now had to do.

The Insecurity of living in a tied house gave me sleepless nights. I got up very early every morning to light the fire and make breakfast for my husband. I was rubbish at building and starting a fire but I was frightened because I thought that if he was late into work we could lose the roof over our heads and he just didn’t seem able to wake up at six each day. It was February and the real fire was the only heating in the house. 

I was trying to be the traditional good little house wife. I wasn’t prepared for it and didn’t have a clue what I was doing but I tried very hard and learnt very fast and eventually, not only mastered the art of lighting a fire but I also learnt how to make stew and dumplings, - food of the gods and hard-working farm workers, in my attempts to be the domestic goddess that I thought my husband wanted. I remember that I was actually offended that he wouldn’t let me iron his trousers. He allowed me to iron his shirts, but not the sleeves because he rolled those up for work. Well it made sense really because he usually came home splattered in cow muck. Not the type of job where you need pressed shirt and trousers. What madness comes over us that make us want to become domestic goddesses? The nest building I could understand because I was pregnant but why would I want to wait on my husband, hand and foot? Proudly press his clothes that would be covered in mud and muck before the day was out. Strange what love can do? I guess I was paying homage. At that time he was a God to me.

Next I decided to make some curtains. I felt that we really needed some. Parking the tractor in front of the kitchen window had worked quite well in obscuring our lunchtime love making but I began to think that the neighbours knew what we were up to when the tractor was parked like that! Also I thought that the woman opposite might be able to see into our bedroom as strangely she always seemed to wash her bedroom windows on Sunday mornings which was our time for a “lay in”. I guess that if we could see her then she must be able to see us, elevated as we were on our two mattresses. (We needed two in order to cushion the springs that were protruding.) As. I could not afford lush thick curtain material. I bought dress material, purple and pink with bright orange flowers. I loved it. It certainly added to the décor. In fact I loved it so much that I covered the bed settee with it as well. The bed settee had come out of a derelict caravan and I had to scrub it several times before I finally managed to get rid of the smell of Cats.

Unbelievably I was proud of my achievements inside the house and as summer approached I started to plan my outdoor work of art .I would create a wonderful garden. We were told to take as much of the field as we wanted for our garden so we did. Firstly we planted a lawn, then a shrubbery and finally a vegetable garden. The lawn grew well and I surrounded it with flowers. (My baby’s first word was “flower “)The shrubbery was a great play space but the vegetables weren’t as successful. We shared a dream of the good life, self-sufficiency, working the land, building our own house and doing it all together. The reality was that my husband constantly worked overtime without any extra pay and had no energy or time to follow our dream .The local people, seeing my efforts, kept offering me plants, usually flowers and roses, so the vegetable patch turned into a beautiful flowerbed. It may not be oil on canvas but to me it was Picture perfect.

I missed my college friends, my family and my husband who worked crazy long hours. I was nicknamed “the grass widow” because he spent so many hours cutting the grass on the farm to make silage. I think he felt he had to work extra hard to keep the roof over our heads too. With no TV or telephone I felt very isolated and alone but was kept very busy with all my domestic chores .I would sing along to an old valve set radio which I plugged into a light socket .Communications were slow back then. Without a phone it was all done by letter so visits were few and far between as it took a long time to arrange. For example, my mother was supposed to be helping with my homebirth. Yes a homebirth for my first child because my GP forgot to book me into maternity home but that’s another story. To get in touch with my mother we had to go to the only lady on the road who had a phone and ring my uncle, who also had phone, and then he would drive to my mother’s and give her the message. After a couple of trips he finally found her in and, by the time she got the message the baby had already been born! Mañana. 

I had never lived in the country before and I was like a fish out of water. Life was so much slower in the country. I soon made friends with other young mums and we shared experiences, recipes, baby clothes and gossip. My kitchen was often crammed with mums and babies and I decided that I wanted to start a playgroup/nursery. Here was a job I could do whilst looking after my own family. However it wasn’t to be. Not long after my daughter was born I discovered I was pregnant again. So having progressed from heifer to cow I was now to be a real fully fledged old cow. Apparently in farming terms a cow that is in calf is a heifer but after a second calf she becomes a real cow. I could certainly relate to that. I felt I was just one step away from living in a muddy field! I began to feel I was losing the battle against the muck.

life was hard with no washing machine for the daily nappies and the large double sheets and the muddy and smelly farm clothes. I had neither energy to spare nor time to be starting a career. Much more importantly it was time to get a washing machine. I wanted one of the new type automatic washing machines like the farmer’s wife had but I got an old second-hand tub with a mangle instead. However I was grateful as it was so much easier than washing by hand with all the blisters that gave me and definitely better than trying to transport my washing by pram to the nearest launderette a mile away. 

We lived round the seasons but whatever the season there was always lots of dirty work on the farm. I was very glad to have a washing machine. Prevention is better than cure or so I thought so I tried to minimise muck and mud coming into the house and bringing the smell of the farm with it. I got him a mud proof cagoule to wear at work thinking he could remove it when he got home and that he would be lovely and clean underneath. Of course it didn’t work. He didn’t wear it. When I asked him where it was he didn’t know. He said he got too hot to wear it at work .I went down to the farm to look for it and found it underneath a tractor wheel, ground into the mud. In desperation I contacted my sister who always knew what to do, or so it seemed to me. She suggested that I run a bath and when he came in from work to tell him that the bath was run and Tea would be ready after he finished his bath. What a good idea. Surely that would work! I hated the farm smells and the dried cow muck that would actually drop off his clothes and out of his hair and into his food. But this was another good idea that hit the dust. He wasn’t going to go for it. He just slumped onto the settee exhausted waiting for his tea. The bath that I had run was left to go cold. I realised it was always going to be a battle, me against the dirt so I started planning my assault. I may not be able to win with my husband but there must be something else where I could do battle and win? My daughter was now crawling. Our floor was composition with a painting of red Cardinal the traditional flooring for farm cottages but it rubbed off onto her clothes constantly and I had to change her clothes several times a day. Even More washing! I decided that it was high Time to get some lino. The romantic idea of clean living in the country was fading rapidly, if not already wiped out with all the scrubbing and cleaning I was doing daily.