Suburban Residences, and How to Circumvent Them

by J. E. Panton

CHAPTER III
KITCHEN AND BASEMENTS

If the conquest of the hall be difficult, the siege of the kitchen and servants’ quarters generally is one that will carry dread even to the stoutest heart. For as a rule the suburban builder sinks to his lowest depths of villainy here, and either gives a damp and wandering basement wherein no servant will remain more than her month, or a regular cupboard where the stove leaves scarcely room for anything else, and where the heat from that, and the draughts from the doors and windows, are enough to ruin the constitution of any ordinary woman. The basement kitchen is the worst of all, because it marks a class of house that has seen better days, and is rapidly deteriorating. Therefore if one has to choose between two houses, one of which has no basement, and another which has, one should at once select the basementless one. There are sure to be cellars below the house, which will keep it dry. One doesn’t even in the suburbs often come across a house, the boards of which are pushed out of place by enterprising mushrooms growing in the soil beneath, and ambitious of appearing in fresh air and among the haunts of men.

If, however, the basement cannot be avoided, we must rise to the occasion and do the very best we can in the matter. And first of all we must see that it is really dry, and that its comfort is assured by the presence of a dry area and the proper amount of ventilation, and absence of damp. If this cannot be assured, the house must be given up. Far better put up with a small dining-room and a dull drawing-room, for both of these drawbacks can be easily remedied, but for a damp bad kitchen there can be no cure, and should we weakly give in to it, we can never be happy or comfortable in the least in our domestic arrangements, be very sure of that.

If, however, we find that the basement is capable of amendment, our first endeavours must be to make it as cheerful as possible, and to get as much light and air into it as possible too. I have only once had to ‘wrastle’ with one on my own account, and that I made as bearable as circumstances would permit, by enlarging a window and having one of Chappius’ reflectors so arranged that as much sunshine came in as was obtainable, while I had one of the three doors closed entirely, and made an enormous scullery and washhouse species of abode, into a nice little scullery and a rather decent room in which the maids could sit and have their meals and do their needlework. Oh, I do hope some day to hear of a real and bona-fide revolt against the regulation suburban accommodation for the unfortunate maids, for, until this takes place, I am quite sure the servant question will remain a very burning one.

I am writing now more especially for those householders who have from £500 to £1000 a year to spend, and who have two or four maids, according to their means and the size of their families, and who ought to be able to find the kitchen arrangements comprised in a square block, consisting of kitchen, scullery, parlour-maid’s pantry, with good, deep cupboards for glass and china, and a pretty little sitting-room where the domestics could have a few at least of the amenities of life. The bedrooms could be above, as could the sanitary arrangements, which are all too often placed either in the cellar part of the house or close to the larder, or, in fact, anywhere where they ought not to be. Now suppose we find the ordinary box of a pantry, slip of a kitchen and scullery and larder, how should we best circumvent this arrangement, I wonder? Well, first we can tackle the landlord, who, if he have money at all: and an impecunious landlord is a deadly and desperate thing to possess, and should be most carefully avoided: will be glad to do as we want for an extra rent at the rate of 5 per cent on whatever outlay he can make. We should get him to build out a servant’s sitting-room, and enlarge the pantry and scullery, and to put above the erection a servant’s bath and lavatory arrangement. This could be done for about £100 and the extra £5 on the rent would hardly be felt, while the comfort obtained thereby would far and away compensate for the outlay. If the landlord be obdurate, the only thing to do is to buy for ourselves one of Humphreys’ moveable iron buildings, and have it adapted for our purposes. In this case we can only, I fear, manage the servants’ sitting-room and extra accommodation for glass, china and washing-up, and we shall have to put the room door just apart from the house, though, of course, a very short passage could be erected. But before anything is done, care should be taken to ascertain the rules and regulations respecting the erecting of buildings in the special locality, as all seem to me to differ; and, indeed, in some there are none at all. Yet, in any case this is a thing to be ascertained definitely, for I have known a Local Board step in and formally order the removal of a beautiful and pet conservatory, because the builder had innocently infringed some bye-law in its construction, and had not obtained the sanction of the authorities to the plans of the structure before erection was commenced. If neither the landlord nor Humphreys can come to the rescue, I am going to advocate a step which will be nothing short of anarchy and revolution in the eyes of any old-fashioned person, for I am about to suggest that, in these desperate straits, the usual third room should be handed over to the maids to sit in, while we can keep it in a measure in our own hands too, by erecting our store-cupboards there, and extra shelves for glass and china. But if we do, we must not be always pouncing in and out on the maids, but must give out everything for the day’s use before ten o’clock, after which we should never go there unless actually obliged, for nothing is so detestable as a room into which anyone can go at any moment, and where the maids can never feel they are safe from eternal supervision. If the door of this third room opens straight on the hall, and if another can be made to open into the kitchen premises—and this is often the case—it would be well to permanently close the first and have the second made. The original door need be only bolted or locked inside, and covered with a curtain, while it is not either difficult or expensive to contrive another exit, for a hole is easily knocked in an ordinary suburban wall, and a door frame and door added. And I venture to prophesy if this is done, that there will be a reign of peace in the kitchen department unprecedented in the annals of most houses, because servants will usually stay where they are comfortable, and where they feel they are considered, and their health and happiness are both thought about. I know quite well that in their own homes and in the houses they come from, they have no real privacy at all; but I also know that most maids leave such homes at too early an age to recollect half, or, indeed, to realise half, of the miseries they are called upon to bear there, and they very easily forget the past, and only really comprehend the present and its possibilities; besides which, a maid goes away from her home to ‘better herself.’ Were she content with semi-starvation and over-crowding, she would remain there, or enter on the desperate existence of a factory hand or a home worker. The fact that she wishes for more comfort, for more human surroundings, sends her into domestic service; and if that comfort and those surroundings were forthcoming, servants would be far more plentiful than they are at present, and would likewise come of a far better and much more honourable and pleasant class. The first step then is, undoubtedly, to secure something in the shape of ‘the room,’ as the servants’ hall is called in more ambitious households, and the second is to see that it is decently arranged and is sacred to the maids for a certain portion of the day, and most certainly for all the evening. I say a certain portion of the day, because, in small establishments, it is possible that the mistress may have little jobs of finer cooking, of plate-cleaning, or even dressmaking to do that she cannot well manage in the one sitting-room which would be her portion when the third room is given up to the maids. If this be the case, the establishment will naturally be so small that the maids will be too much occupied all the mornings to be able to use it, so that until 12.30 it could remain in the mistress’s possession; but after that hour she must never enter it. Just as in a larger house and with more maids, the hour of ten must see her out of the kitchen, that part of her work being completed then for the rest of the day.

Almost the first things a housemistress should ascertain about her house are the position and number of the pipes which are part and parcel of the water supply, as, unless this is ascertained, and she is able to possess herself of a species of sketch-map of them, she will not be able to know how to manage should the usual winter arrive in all its strength, and the water become frozen in the pipes in a manner that should never, for one moment even, be allowed. As a rule, our winters are not very long or very severe; if they were we should, no doubt, be readier for them than we are now. But we can always depend on a cold ‘snap’ or period during which our very unpreparedness lays us open to a thousand and one discomforts and dangers, none of which need have been ours if we had had the common sense to recollect that we should have looked out for and prepared against a state of things that is as inevitable as it is undoubtedly most detestable and disagreeable. The suburban builder, as a rule, has his ideas, and his only, on the subject of pipe laying. One idea is, so to imbed them in the walls of the house that we cannot get at them at all, and another is to place them outside the house in the most exposed position possible, where they are warranted to freeze on the first provocation, unless we can take the matter into our own hands at once, and either box them in, filling in the space between the pipes and the boxes with sawdust, which generally protects them for all time from the severest frost; or, at the approach of winter, so swathe them in flannel rags and hay bands, that frost cannot touch them, not forgetting to treat in a similar manner the pipes in the tank room. These should be our especial care, for they are often the first to freeze, and are the cause of many and many a detestable and untoward catastrophe.

The boiler in the suburban kitchen is generally one of two kinds, and is either of the low-pressure order, which has no system of circulating pipes, or the high-pressure species, which has and which requires more elaborate care than the former. If the low-pressure boiler is the one in use, and the frost is severe, it is better to completely empty all the pipes in the house, and to cut off the water supply to the house entirely, drawing the water from a supply-cock fixed just before the water enters the house, whence it can be obtained by hand as required. Of course this adds a great deal to the work, but it means safety, for when the boiler is kept well filled it cannot burst, neither can pipes freeze if there be no water in them to bring about this very disagreeable state of things. A low-pressure boiler having a lid that comes off, can always be hand-filled easily, while cans of water must be placed wherever one is accustomed to use water freely; and though baths may be curtailed and work increased, no damage or danger can ensue. Therefore the moment a frost sets in, cut off the water from the house, and rely entirely on the hand-filling of the boiler for all domestic purposes.

If the boiler is a high-pressure one, we must be very vigilant from the first moment a frost appears, while we must be ready for it long before it really arrives. The first thing to see is that this boiler is supplied with a safety-valve and a supply-cock; and the second thing to do is to have the principles on which the safety-valve is constructed so explained to us by the man who supplies it, that we shall always be able to ascertain in a moment if it is in working order, or if it is not. For safety-valves are possessed of a demon habit of being out of order when they are least expected to be, and we may be priding ourselves on the fact that we have one, and are therefore quite safe, when the wretched thing may be refusing to work, and we may be on the very brink of the catastrophe we have intended it to avoid for us. Safety-valves differ so very much that it would be impossible to describe here how a house-mistress can ascertain if her own special valve is all right or all wrong. The only thing she can do is to have written instructions from the man who supplies it. These instructions, the plan of the pipes and special rules about what to do in a severe frost, should be in a small book kept among the housekeeping books, and easily get-at-able in case the frost should occur when the mistress was away from home, or if she were ill or in any way unable to attend to it herself. If the supply pipes cannot be got at and protected from the frost as a whole, it is best, once the tanks in the roof are full, to cut off the supply entirely from the main. In this case the local authorities must be communicated with, and the tanks filled by the Local Board by means of a stand-pipe, and great care must be taken both to see the tanks are kept full, and that the pipe between the hot and cold water tanks is kept free from frost. If by any chance the worst comes to the worst, and danger is ahead, the safety-valve will show it by blowing off steam; then out with your fire at once, dear reader; you are done for, and must remain kitchen-fireless until a beneficent thaw sets in.

In the meantime a second stove in the scullery will prevent you from being foodless, and though hot water may be scarce and comfort little, you will at anyrate be safe, and as the maids have their little sitting-room they won’t be frozen in the kitchen or thawed in the scullery, as they most undoubtedly would otherwise have been. Of course, if we have our pipes properly protected, and there is no warning from the safety-valve, and water flows freely from the boiler-taps, we are all right. In this case it is best never to allow the kitchen fire to go out, but last thing at night to bank it up with ashes and briquettes, and so ensure its burning without stopping. Of course it should be protected by a guard, and no kindling wood must on any account be placed to dry either in the ovens or on the hot plates by the side. In the morning the fire should be thoroughly raked out, and set going again in the usual way. Unless this is done, the fire will not be good enough for cooking: it will be a caked mass, which will not ensure the cook’s manufactures being the success they should be; therefore, in giving our instructions, great stress should be laid on the real necessity that undoubtedly exists for a rebuilding and relighting of the fire for the new day.

Sometimes there are odd lengths of pipes that we cannot protect, and which only supply certain single taps. In this case stop-cocks should be fixed in them in such a way as to prevent the water entering them, and these should be used in the frost. Then these special pipes can be kept waterless without disturbing the whole internal economy of the house as regards the water supply. Of course I am not writing in any measure about the proper arrangements of the water pipes. I am only advising the ordinary suburban residents how to save misfortune, and a ruinous plumbers’, and very likely a decorators’, bill too, should the winter be as one usually finds it in England, where the spells of frost—undoubtedly short as they are—undoubtedly make people indifferent and happy-go-lucky about their preparations for hard weather.