I grew up in a home where having someone to teach you the basics of do-it-yourself was never on the table. My father had the ethos of “getting a man in” if anything needed doing, and fortunately for everyone, the income to make it generally possible. When he disappeared over the hills and my mother remarried, husband number two had the ethos of complaining to the council if anything needed doing. Fortunately for everyone it was an era when they often did step in and fix things. But for me, growing up, having a role model who could teach me certain basic necessities – like wiring a plug for example – was conspicuously absent.
Today of course you would just go on YouTube and have someone
show you how they made a mess of it, but such options didn’t exist when I left
home, ultimately married and had a home of my own to fix.
So enter – Womancraft. The very title sounds politically incorrect
today. But this was a monthly magazine for women which endeavoured to teach
them all the things their father’s didn’t about homemaking. You had smartly dressed women, make-up deftly
in place, wielding a plasterer’s trowel on the cover, or smiling seductively
while unblocking a drain. Painting, decorating, paper-hanging, plumbing, building
walls, and installing basic electrics – nothing was now beyond the modern woman
– conditioned of course by two world wars when they had very effectively taken
over the stereotyped working roles of men on the home front.
I could of course have bought a book or three or visited the
library. But most guides there assumed you knew certain basics. In many areas for
me that was an assumption too far. So Womancraft it was.
It was a revelation. It had easy pictures. It had easy step
by step diagrams, it had text designed for – I’d better not say a woman – but certainly
this particular clueless man. And with a trusty helper of a wife by my side –
who also had a father who had taken to the hills, but who had knuckled down and
learned things long before me – we managed.
Our first house – in reality, what has been our own house –
had not been lived in for over three years when we bought it for a song. The
roof had partly disintegrated, but the last occupants had thoughtfully put old
carpets in the loft space to minimise the downpour. The garden was full of
rubble from failed D-I-Y exploits of yesteryear. As you may guess there was no
such thing as a mortgage to worry about, but for the initials stages, we camped
there. But gradually, very gradually, room by room and ceiling by ceiling, we
turned it into a home. I spent a summer holiday helping someone who really was
handy dig out the foundations for his house extension, and in return he
installed our basic central heating. That and a new roof made all the
difference.
So we muddled on, and eventually got civilised, and raised a
family, and the area full of coalmines changed into one of country parks, and
now you just need the old photographs to remind you how bad it really once was.
But a key ingredient to our initial survival was – Womancraft.
So what happened to the magazine? It got absorbed into the
ultimate stereotype – sewing and knitting. Those were never going to be part of
my CV, but the other things proved essential.
As noted above, today we might click on YouTube. And today,
we often don’t fix things, we just replace them. But I have a nostalgic twinge
when I think of that magazine. I even went on eBay to consider buying an old
copy for the sake of nostalgia.
But I resisted.
