My Grandma Hughes’ neighbour Mrs Tiveney smashed all her crockery one day. It took her nearly half an hour to get through it all because she was a woman of means and many dinner sets. Armed with the poker she chased the last bowl as it rolled around the kitchen, yelling ‘Coom ‘ere, you boogger, Ah’ll bloody get you yet!’ In the 1920s there were no television gurus, no therapists for such as her: only Fr Finn the choleric little parish priest who felt himself to be above his company, God forgive him.
In those days Gorton, Manchester, was full of little brick terraces on narrow streets dotted with pubs that were an obstacle course for the returning worker. Woe betide the family whose dad liked to shout the bar with his week’s wage. A woman could be the wife of a high earner and still have little to put on her prized dishes. So Mrs Tiveney cracked, along with her crockery, and her family drank from tin cans and ate from the saucepans for months after. Neighbours might offer replacements if they dared, but in vain; the Tiveneys were almost as proud as the Hugheses.
I was tempted to follow her example the other day when I was faced with an unusually horrible washing up. (O spoilt 21st century bitch that I am! Mrs Tiveney’s wildest dreams could not encompass the legal equality, the educational opportunity, the mass entertainment, the household appliances, the medical advances, the comfortable runners, the aromatherapy and the Mars bars that are routinely available to me and my whinging ilk.) I glared at the pile of messy saucepans and yearned suddenly to live with vampires, whose culinary needs are simple, with no washing-up required afterwards. This, despite the fact that I’m very disappointed in the latest series of Angel, the Buffy spin-off that began so promisingly. It’s finished now in the US and the last episode will be seen here soon. But it’s not the great loss to TV that it should have been. Joss Whedon’s great feminist-spiritual project degenerated into a clunky, blokey soap with all the strong and likeable female characters written off. Pity: we need a strong female voice again in the world, when even the ABC radio’s Life Matters led up to Mother’s Day last month with a ‘Father’s Week’, in which we were told repeatedly how inadequate women were as single parents