Jilly Cooper: How to Stay Married

How much to tip: about 10s a head — £1 if you’re feeling affluent.

Do measure the height of the rooms before you go out and buy furniture in a sale. We had a tallboy standing in the street for weeks, because we couldn’t get it through any of the doors.

If possible one of you should take a week off work (even if it is unpaid) to get things straight. Nothing is more demoralising than coming home late for the next month to face the chaos.

Try to get the kitchen and one other room habitable, then you can shut yourselves away from the debris when it becomes too much for you.

DO-IT-YOURSELF

One of the great myths of marriage — heavily fostered by television commercials of smiling young couples up ladders — is that home decorating is fun when you do it together.

It isn’t. It’s paralysingly boring and caused more rows in our marriage than anything else. Just remember that, like having a brace on your teeth as a child, it’s worth it later on.

Invariably one partner is more hamfisted than the other, and the trouble starts when the more dexterous one becomes irritated and starts bossing poor Hamfisted about. Hamfisted gets more and more sulky until a row breaks out.

My husband is a great deal more adept than I am at decorating, but even so it was always a case of Wreck-it-Yourself. Our first attempts at wallpapering out-crazied the Crazy Gang. We lost our tempers, the measure and the scissors. I had bought enough paper to do two rooms (wildly expensive at eight guineas a roll) but we had to scrap so much we only managed three quarters of one room. Finally, when we stood back to admire our wrinkled uneven labours, we found we had papered the cat to the wall like the Canterville Ghost.

Our wrinkled, uneven labour

A FEW POINTS TO REMEMBER

Buy cheap wallpaper for your first attempts.

When you strip wallpaper and come to a layer of silver paper, leave it alone, or you’ll find you’ve stripped off the damp course, and any paper subsequently put on the wall will turn green.

PAINTING

Do remember to put dust sheets down when you’re painting or you’ll get shortsighted aunts commenting on the attractive speckled border round the walls.

If you’re doing the landing and the hall, don’t as we did start painting the landing scarlet, and the hall indigo — it never entered our heads that the colours would have to meet somewhere, in this case halfway up the stairs. The result is horrible.

Go to a showroom where you can see the paint you choose in large quantities. That colour that looks so subtle on the shade card can spread to vast deserts of ghastliness once it gets up on the wall.

Don’t mix paints unless you’re an expert: they always come out sickly ice-cream shades.

Never get friends to help. Even your own pathetic attempts will be better than theirs. We let a girlfriend, who claimed she found painting therapeutic, loose on one of the spare rooms. When we looked in a quarter of an hour later, there were terracotta flames of paint licking a foot high over the virgin white ceiling I had painted the day before. None of our cries of ‘Steady on’ or ‘I say’ could halt her. The whole room had to be painted again.

Tell your wife before you paint a shelf or she’ll bustle in five minutes later and replace everything you removed. You are bound to have a row about who didn’t wash the brushes last time.

If you run out of paint, do remember the name and brand before you chuck the tin away. We had to buy five different shades of orange before we hit on the right one again.

Lots of praise is essential. Say well done even if it isn’t, people get inordinately proud of the four square foot of wall they’ve just painted.

MISCELLANEOUS

Curtains were another disaster zone — in an attempt to make them not too short, I made them miles too long, so they trailed on the floor like a child dressing up in its mother’s clothes. And of course there wasn’t enough material left over for the pelmets.

Don’t be fooled by do-it-yourself tiling kits: they’re easy enough until you have to round a corner or meet a natural hazard like a light switch.

TRADITIONAL ROLE OF HUSBAND AND WIFE

Traditionally the husband is the more practical and mechanically minded member of the partnership. But if he’s the kind who hits the electricity main every time he knocks a nail in and puts up shelves at 10°, and his wife is the practical type who got a distinction for carpentry at school, she shouldn’t hesitate to take over. As my husband remarked, here was one sphere in which he wouldn’t have minded having his masculinity undermined.

HOUSEKEEPING

A MAJOR PROBLEM for the newly married wife, particularly if she is holding down a nine-to-five job. Before she was married she blued her wages on clothes and took her washing home to Mother every weekend. Now, suddenly, she must be housekeeper, cook, hostess, laundress, seamstress, beguiling companion, glamour girl, assistant breadwinner and willing bedfellow all in one.

What she must remember when she gets home exhausted from the office to be faced with a mountain of washing up in the sink, the dinner to be cooked, the bed to be made, the flat to be cleaned, a pile of shirts to be ironed, and her husband in a playful mood, is that where marriage is concerned, CHEERFULNESS, SEXUAL ENTHUSIASM, AND GOOD COOKING are far nearer to Godliness than cleanliness about the house.

As long as the flat is kept tidy — men hate living in a muddle — meals are regular, and their wives are in good spirits, husbands won’t notice a few cobwebs.

If you amuse a man in bed, he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it.

RESENTMENT

If a wife feels resentful that she is slaving away, while her husband comes home and flops down in front of the television until dinner is ready, she must remember that it isn’t all roses for him either.

He has given up his much prized bachelor status for marriage and he probably expects, like his father before him, to come home every night to a gleaming home, a happy wife, and a delicious dinner. Instead he finds a tearful, fractious shrew, and he forgets that his mother looked after his father so well because she didn’t have to go out to work.

TOLERANCE

Tolerance is essential on both sides. If the wife is working, the husband must be prepared to give her a hand. Equally, it’s up to the wife to ask when she needs help, and not scurry round with set face like someone out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs . As men hate seeing their wives slaving, one of the solutions is for the wife to get her housework done when her husband isn’t around.

That housekeeping whizz-kid Mrs Beeton suggests getting up early, and I managed to persuade most of my employers to let me work from eight-thirty to four-thirty. Eight-thirty sounds horrendous, but once you’re used to it, it’s much the same as nine-thirty. You miss the rush-hour traffic both ways, you have a nice quiet hour in the office before anyone else gets in to ring your mother or make a shopping list (no one knows whether you got in exactly at eight-thirty anyway) and you get home at least an hour before your husband so you have time to get the dinner on, tidy up and welcome him home.

Another solution is to encourage your husband to have at least one night out a week with the boys, then you have a few hours to catch up.

DAILY WOMEN

Or you can employ a daily woman. If you get a good one, hang on to her, she’s worth her weight in bullion. Generally, alas, dailies start off marvellously and then after a few weeks the standard goes down and so does the level of the gin. My husband came home once and found ours asleep in our bed with the electric blanket and the wireless on.