FROM THE ARCHIVES:As the ESB began its final phase of rural electrification in the early 1960s, Elizabeth Leslie described the days before electricity was universally available. – JOE JOYCE
WHEN WE visited rural relatives in our young days we entered another world and, although it was a delightful world for a child, it was completely lacking in romance for the people who lived in it. We thought it great fun to go to bed by candlelight and to make sculptures of candlegrease, but the adults weren’t so enchanted.
Filling the oil lamp wasn’t a very pleasant task and nobody could like the smell of paraffin or be overly enthusiastic about the occasional frightening flare of flame in the lamp. Going outside was an adventure, with bicycle lamps lighting the path, but emphasising the surrounding darkness as it threatened to close in and engulf us.
There were no doubts about going to the pump for water, for as far as we were concerned that was fun, and we enjoyed carrying cans that slopped over into our shoes, and we relished the hard tinny taste of the water. However, looking back on it, we must have been utterly blind to our aunts’ fatigue as they struggled along with huge bucketsful, sometimes balancing them on a bicycle’s handlebars.
We did not greatly care for going to the well and we hung back at a safe distance while a grand-aunt dipped her buckets in and swung them easily out again. Naturally it never dawned on us that this was no work for an old woman, nor that it would ever be any other way in the country as long as we lived.
As far as wash-day was concerned, it was fun to see the huge wooden tub being tipped over and the sudsy contents running away down the drain, but adult nerves were obviously strained, and aching backs affected tempers so that in the end we suffered too unless we had the wit to disappear before the end of the operation. Whatever about washing, it was obvious that ironing was a complicated business.
There always seemed to be mounds of clothes, clean, fresh-smelling and full of earwigs from the bushes where they had been drying, all waiting there to be sprinkled and “smoothed”. The box-iron was the implement used and this involved having a good coal fire, glowing redly and with plenty of heart. In this were heated the metal heaters, one at a time, one heating while the other was in use. When it was white-hot it was lifted out with a special tongs, and with great care transferred to the innards of the box iron, the little shutter at the back was closed down, and ironing started at once.
Everybody had to stand back while this went on, and youthful innocence would have been better served if the operator had curbed her tongue! Inevitably some smuts drifted down on to the clean clothes and, inevitably too, a man of the house would come in and complain: “What have yez done to the fire?” before the women turned on him a fury and he comprehended what was going on.
http://url.ie/c83c