Nooks and Corners / being the companion volume to 'From Kitchen to Garret'

by J. E. Panton

likely to stay with us and that she is to be trusted not to make hay with it.

Our artist has made a sketch of ‘an ideal kitchen’ from Mr. Faulkner Armitage’s designs, which I hope will some day be the kitchen of the future. Here the dresser and mantel-piece arrangement provide for all the necessary pots and pans, while the furniture is as simple as it is pretty, and in consequence has an artistic effect which is really charming.

This furniture is stained malachite green or russet brown, whichever is preferred; with the green furniture, the tiled paper on the wall, which is much nicer to live with than mere colour-wash and is quite as clean, as it can be wiped over with a damp duster quite easily, should be red and white, and the paint a dark shade of red; with the brown, the paper should be blue and white, and the paint a good blue, and all along the wall on the floor should be a two-inch band of wood; this keeps the chairs away from the wall; but if the base of the wall becomes shabby a dado of oilcloth can always be added with a real dado rail; this keeps a wall tidy for years, and can always be washed, and finally painted over should the pattern crack or become in any measure worn and untidy. The ordinary boarded kitchen should be covered entirely with a good, well-seasoned linoleum, and a square of carpet lined with a thin American cloth should be given to the cook to place down on Sundays, or after the worst of the work is over; this gives a finished and furnished look to the room, and adds a great deal to the comfort of the maids. A stone floor should be painted with Hoskyn’s Ben Trovato red, and some rugs laid down at all times, as this is very bad to stand upon. I had linoleum laid all over the only stone floor I ever possessed, and that answered excellently; it was put down so that it adhered to the stone in some manner, and lasted a very great many years in excellent condition; but should anyone object to this I can also recommend a square of Treloar’s cocoa-nut matting, bound all round with a wide binding; but this should be rolled back for cooking, as grease adheres to it dreadfully and soon makes it shabby.

The kitchen windows are always rather a trouble to arrange, as generally they are basement windows, and muslin so soon gets out of order with the steam and general mess; but if the cook takes pride in her windows and likes to wash her curtains herself there is no reason why she should not have the same kind of white curtains that there are in the bedrooms; but let all come from the top of the window, half-blinds being dreadful, and looking worse, in my opinion, than no blinds at all. In windows on a level with the garden or street one must have obscured glass, either cathedral or ribbed glass. This, of course, is rather hard on the maids, who are not thus able to look out, but it cannot be helped: it is impossible for the kitchen to be so much in evidence as it otherwise would be, and no muslin is as effective a screen as the obscured glass is.

There should always be inside bars and shutters to any basement or ground-floor windows, and nothing should be kept downstairs which can possibly or in any way tempt the prowling burglar. All silver should be taken upstairs to the master’s room, and there should be a small dog loose downstairs; a dog frightens a thief dreadfully, as he is quite as much afraid of his bark as ever he is of his bite.

The basement in a London house is often a dreadful possession, as there are so many places where a thief could conceal himself in the daytime. No doors, then, should ever be left unbolted; and the master should, furthermore, make a practice of going round the very last thing at night to see that all is safe, or else there can be no security at all. Sometimes the servants may descend again and hold unholy revels; sometimes an open or unguarded door leaves access to the place; and an unexpected visit from a tramp may alarm us as much as would a professional visit from a burglar. We cannot impress this on our servants too often, and we impress it on them a thousand times more forcibly than we otherwise should when they see our nightly patrol, and know we have supplemented their bolts with a visit of inspection. Then the door at the top of the stairs should be bolted, barred, and locked, and the key removed. This should be given into the care of the butler if there be one, or into the safe keeping of the cook; and we may retire to rest feeling safe that even if the tramp comes, or the thief is in hiding below, he will remain in the lower regions, and can do nothing worse than have a feast in the larder or break a few panes of glass in his efforts to escape.

It will seem to my readers that one has to take endless trouble, to see perpetually about endless trifles, as long as we are householders, and have the management of a family on our hands. Yet once started on good lines, and matters are not so difficult as they appear; still, of course, no life of great responsibility—indeed, no life at all—can ever be entirely happy and entirely easy. Those who have least to do become bored and tired by mere inactivity; those who have most, wearing out instead of rusting out.

All comes to an end some day; there is no doubt about that. Strive as we may, death waits for us all, and our carefully trained household falls apart and drifts away; our furniture wears out, our carefully amassed hoards are turned over and parted among our successors; some one else takes our house, and obliterates with his personality the last traces of ours; and if we have refused to do our work, or let things slide, we shall speedily be forgotten; but if we have honestly done our work, what of it? Our maids carry on our good lessons elsewhere; our hoards make someone else happy, and the example we have set bears fruit a hundredfold, and someone is always happier, some household better for the work we have done. No matter, then, if we have fallen out of the ranks, tired out; we have done our work, and so can retire gracefully, being quite sure that none of our trouble is wasted, and that not one of us has toiled in vain.