Jilly Cooper: How to Stay Married

Asleep in our bed

If I have a good daily, I find I spend far more time than before tidying up before she comes, and if I get a bad one, I spend hours tidying up after her, so my husband won’t grumble about throwing money away and force me to sack her.

Dailies also have an irritating habit of not turning up the day your mother-in-law is coming to stay, or the time you’re relying on them to tidy up before a large dinner party.

But to return to housework. Remember that the dust you flick away today will have drifted back into place tomorrow. Once when I was rabbitting on about the dirtiness of my house, a girlfriend, whose house is none too clean either, told me I was suffering from the bourgeois syndrome: namely, obsessive worrying over spit and polish. It worked like a charm. I didn’t do any housework for at least a fortnight.

A FEW QUICK POINTERS

Have lots of cushions to hide things under when guests arrive, and plump them a great deal. The woman who has the tidiest house in London has huge arm muscles from plumping.

Huge arm muscles

Closing untidy desks, straightening papers, putting books back vertically instead of horizontally and records back in their sleeves, picking things off the floor: all make a room look better quicker than dusting or hoovering.

Empty ashtrays, clear dirty glasses into the kitchen, open windows at night, or the place will smell like a bar parlour in the morning.

Get a decent hoover, or you’ll be like a girlfriend who grumbled to her husband that she was quite exhausted from hoovering all day.

He looked around and said: ‘I wish you’d do some hoovering in our house instead then.’

Don’t hoover under his feet — it’s grounds for divorce. If your kitchen is a pigsty, don’t have a glass door, or a hatch through which inquisitive guests can peer.

Don’t use all the dusters for polishing silver or shoes, of you’ll have to hare round before dinner parties dusting furniture with the front of your dress like I do.

LAUNDRY

If you can possibly afford it during the first six months, send your husband’s shirts to the laundry; one of the things that nearly broke my back when I was first married was washing and ironing seven shirts a week. Do encourage your husband to buy dark shirts for the office, so he can wear them for at least two days.

If you wash at home, don’t, as I always do, put in far too much soap powder and spend the next two hours rinsing.

If you wash at the launderette, remember to put your half-crown into the machine, or you’ll come back forty minutes later to find your clothes still unwashed. Be careful not to put anything that runs into the machine. When we were first married I left in a red silk handkerchief. My husband’s shirts came out streaked like the dawn, he wore cyclamen underpants for weeks and claimed he was the only member of his rugger fifteen with a rose pink jockstrap.

If you have a spin dryer, remember to put a bowl under the waste pipe or you’ll have the kitchen awash every time. Drying is a problem in a small flat: one of the most useful presents we had was a Hawkins Hi-Dri (cost about £9), which will dry all your washing in about six hours and can be folded away afterwards.

Husbands are not amused by singe marks. They can be removed with peroxide, and in an emergency use talcum powder. Always put ironing away when you’ve finished — either the cat is bound to come and sit on it, or it looks so badly ironed it gets mistaken for dirty laundry and washed again.

The ideal, of course, is to send everything to the laundry. Unfortunately our laundry is notorious for not getting things back on time (we’ve got very used to the rough male kiss of blankets) and for ‘losing’ things.

CLEANING

Try to keep all cleaning tickets in one place. We always lose them, and at this moment, half our wardrobe is sitting in various cleaners all over London, soon no doubt to be sold second-hand.

FOOD

I got the sack from my first job after I was married because I spent all morning on the telephone apologising to my husband for the row we’d had on the bus, and all afternoon reading recipe books.

Cooking well and cooking cheaply is a major problem for the young wife. Before she was married she probably invited her fiancé to dinner from time to time and blued half her wages on double cream and brandy to go with the fillet steak and the shellfish, so that he is under the illusion that she is a marvellous cook. Now she is married she will find cooking exciting meals every evening and not overtaxing her imagination and the family budget extremely difficult.

Don’t, however, be seduced into buying things that are cheap if they repel you. I once bought a black pudding, because I was told it was inexpensive and nourishing. It lay like a long black slug in the fridge for three weeks, finally turned green, died and was committed to the dustbin.

Ring the changes: however much he raves over your fish pie, he won’t want it twice a week for the next fifty years.

Buy in bulk if you and your husband have self-control: we find bulk buying never does anything but increase our bulk. The joint that is bought on Saturday never graduates into cold meat and later shepherd’s pie. It is always wolfed in one sitting. Once we made a big casserole to last a week. It took eight hours to cook, stank the whole block of flats out, and went bad the following day.

Buy in bulk

Leave long-cooking dishes to the weekend. Nothing irks a man more than having to wait until midnight to eat. Do take the stew off the gas before you start making love.

Never hide things — you won’t remember where you put them. I hid some potted shrimps once and discovered them a month later after we’d had the floor boards up.

HUSBANDS

If you find a half bottle of wine in the kitchen, check before you drink it. Your wife may be saving it for cooking some exotic dish.

Don’t be bossy in the kitchen. Nothing irritates a woman more than to be told to add some more paprika, or that your mother always made it with real mashed potato.

MONEY

Honesty about money is absolutely essential in marriage. If you are to avoid major rows, you must know how much money you’ve got in the bank, and how much each of you is spending.

In theory all bills should be kept together and paid at the end of each month. Weekly accounts should be kept and the financial situation should be reviewed every month.

In practice we never did any of these things. We both got married with overdrafts well into three figures — having lived at home I had no idea of the cost of living, and between us we were earning far less than £2,000 a year. We ricocheted from one financial crisis to another.

Economising is particularly hard when you’re first married, for there are so many things to do to the house, and if the wife is determined to impress the husband with her cooking, it’s cream and wine in everything.

We used to have absurd economy campaigns: drinking tea instead of coffee for breakfast, driving miles to find a garage which sold cheaper petrol, turning out the lights and creeping round in the dark to save electricity, smoking less (which meant we ate more), eating less (which meant we smoked more).