Beating the carpets

This was one of the exhibits in the museum we went to the other day with our friends, and it really took me back to my childhood.

When I was a little girl - before I was twelve, when we moved to a much larger house - we lived in a bungalow in Durham Terrace in Edinburgh. For most of this time, like most people, we had no fitted carpets - they didn't really exist - so on the floor we had large carpet squares laid on polished linoleum. And when spring cleaning came along, the carpets and rugs were taken outside, hung on the clothes line and beaten with a carpet beater like these ones.

My dad never did any housework so it was my mother who did this, helped by me when I got big enough. It was very hard work, and though I expect it did wonders for our upper body strength. it also made us dirty. Thumping the rugs with a carpet beater brought clouds of dust out of them and on to us: not just the reasonably clean dust that we get nowadays but sooty dust engendered by a coal fire. Even though we only had the one coal fire, in the sitting room, the muck got into other rooms as well. I imagine that the air outside was much dirtier also, from our neighbours' chimneys. I remember window sills being gritty from this dust.

I must have been about ten when we first got a fitted carpet in the living room. By this time we had a vacuum cleaner. My mother was ecstatic at not having to polish the linoleum at the sides of the room and everything seemed much cosier. (This was of course a bit of an illusion because in winter, a house heated by one coal fire (and a couple of convector heaters in the very dead of winter) was very far from warm.)

My mother never understood the modern fashion for rugs on floorboards. It's interesting, isn't it, how styles come round again, though usually slightly altered? I can't see carpet beaters coming back into use, though.