My grandmother lost four children. Born in the 1870s, she lived the perilous life of a respectable married woman of the working classes in the early part of the 20th century. My mother, her seventh and last child, arrived as a welcome surprise in 1921.
Childbirth was the Janus face of love’s consequences: joy or death lurked nine months after your short ecstasy. No wonder they took sex so seriously. If the beloved survived labour and delivery, the ordeal was often too much for the child. How did they, did she, cope? She talked very occasionally to me, with wet eyes, of little Annie, who died at five of a heart problem. But the babies—it was too hard to talk of them. I was a very little girl, and talk of babies was too close to talking of childbirth. She would not, in her reckoning, have wanted to spoil my innocence with such things. I remember her always as very dignified: tall and very old, white hair plaited and coiled into a neat bun.
Her house was small and very neat. Tasks were done to an unbreakable routine: Monday washing was one thing my Aunty Winnie rebelled against. The daughter-housekeeper for many years, she insisted on using the local laundrette as soon as it opened in the 1950s. But the polished brasses at the fireplace, the hearth-risen fruit bread at Easter, the Dickensian stout-and-brandy-laced Christmas pudding, were all still the way Grandma did things.
I was thinking of all this because of a very good program, The Frontier House, to be screened by the ABC over this month. In The Frontier House, reality TV treads some familiar territory, previously seen on The Forties House and The Edwardian House. These exercises in historical reconstruction are the acceptable face of the reality TV phenomenon. No bedroom/bathroom cams, no puerile competitive tasks, no audience voting. Just interesting reminders of our grandparents’ struggles. Seemingly minor things making you think hard. How clean would we have been without running water, even cold running water? Without toilet paper?
Three families were selected from 5000 applicants to spend five months in Montana, from spring to late autumn, based on an 1880s US government scheme that granted lots of 160 acres of frontier land to people who could stay on them for five years. Many such ‘homesteaders’ abandoned their land—the three modern families were to be assessed at the end on how