THE PERFECT SCULLERY.
I was more than interested in the article "About Bathrooms" which appeared in the columns of Punch of March 31st last, because I too always smoke a pipe in a hot bath, to which I add the habit of reading, not books—they are too sacred to risk—but newspapers. I also frequently indulge in a further luxury at this time, a cup of coffee, which rests on the sponge and soap bridge between sips. Of course the soap sometimes falls into the coffee, and if this is undetected in time a slight frothing at the mouth occurs, but no really serious harm ensues.
I tried the effect of pictures round the bath—pictures with a shiver in them that made me pull the water up closer round my neck. But I found that they were being ruined by the steam, so I removed them and am now looking for some undraped but respectable statuettes that will give the same result.
I have not tried the rich rug stunt. The only rug we possess which might be so described is a Persian one, and is on our cat at present. When she has done with it I intend to spread it over the only part of the bathroom floor which is permanently dry. And, suffering as our bathroom does from that lack of space which the writer on bathrooms so justly laments, the "profound chair" is out of the question.
While his views on bathrooms are sound it seems evident to me that the writer of the Punch article lives in pre-war style—with servants. We don't. Our last maid left us to be a Waac and has not been seen since in the precincts of domestic servitude. I did hear something about her approaching marriage to a Colonel of Hussars, but don't know whether it came off or not.
It seems to me that what is chiefly wrong with houses, at any rate with our house, is the scullery. It is smaller than most bathrooms, and, though it is anything but bare, the furnishings of it are not intriguing to one who, like myself, spends therein such an undue proportion of the twenty-four hours.
Our present char comes three days a week, about eleven o'clock, has a look round with a duster in one hand till thirteen o'clock, then lunches and (probably) has a cigarette. She leaves at fifteen o'clock. This means that I help with the washing-up of the breakfast, tea and dinner things on char days, and of luncheon things as well on non-char days. My share of the task is generally the wiping. This is not such an engrossing occupation as to prevent one from thinking great thoughts at the same time, thoughts worthy to be committed to paper afterwards. Now, as a song-writer, I ask how can one get inspiration while gazing at a row of saucepans, a cullender, a bottle of metal paste, one ditto knife polish and a plate-rack?
If any room in the house should be luxuriously furnished it is the scullery. But what is even more important, I think, is that the whole game of scullerying should be revolutionised. The implements still in use are worthy of the Stone Age. The rules should be so framed that there should be little or no washing-up, in the ordinary acceptation of the term.
Let me put before you a pen-picture of the scullery of my dreams. A cosy pleasant room, the whole length of the house in fact, with a south aspect, full advantage of which is secured by a long window filled with leaded lights of opalescent glass (in order that the Hilary-Tompkins next door, who have two servants, may not grow too ribald). On the western wall is a rich mosaic depicting Hercules cleansing the Augean stable, and below this a fountain of clear limpid water, warmed to at least twenty over grease-proof, gushes forth and flows in a pellucid stream, between banks of marble, to the eastern end of the chamber. At the fountain head reclines Euphemia, my wife, arrayed and fructed proper, who leisurely drops the crockery into the stream. At the other end of the room, seated in a "profound chair" by the estuary, where the waters of the River Plate fall into the Sink Basin, behold me lazily watching the cups and platters as they glide gently down the rippling flood towards me, dexterously fishing out each fresh arrival and depositing it in a hot-air receptacle conveniently placed for its accommodation.
Such, I say, is the scullery of my dreams, in which the washing up of a nine-hole-course dinner would be as pleasant as a round of golf. No unsightly pots, pans, brooms, tins or other junk pollute the apartment; they are in the dream ante-chamber, to be hereinafter described or not, if the Editor sees fit. [Ed.—He does not see fit.]