FORGOTTEN WASH UP

Taranaki Daily News, 11 May 1935, Page 22 (Supplement)

FORGOTTEN WASH UP

AMUSING RELIC OF IRON AGE. BURNED GREASE INSIDE. It is amusing to discover that the modern housewife's chief trouble is much the same as the Iron Age woman s. At Poston, in the beautiful Golden Valley near - Hereford, there has been dug up on the site of an Iron Age camp an earthenware pot whose inside is black with burned grease. “There is nothing to compare with it in the country,” claims one antiquary. '“Oh, isn’t there!” groans the housewife. But after all this pot does differ from the one to be found in your kitchen sink after each hot dinner. It was made about 100 A.D. It is tall and graceful, and so thin that it can never have been put on the fire. Perhaps it was buried in a hole filled with hot ashes. Campers sometimes make a fire in a hole, lift out the burning wood, and then put in a pot or biscuit-tin containing food, which they bury. The meal cooks well, if slowly. After the meal comes the washing-up, and eighteen centuries have not altered a woman’s conviction that this is the most hateful of all domestic tasks., We have scouring powders and brushes. The Iron Age woman had sand and bundles of twigs; but nothing can make the cleaning of a greasy cookingpot either easy or pleasant. Of course the hateful task mus|> be tackled at once. But the woman of Poston was the kind who puts things off. She said, “I’ll do it by and by.” Most women have been tempted to say that. But see how fatal it is! The pot which has just gone to Hereford Museum will be evidence against her - for all time.

After eighteen centuries she is held up to scorn for a sloven. Everything else about her is forgotten. She may have been a brave soul who saved her baby by holding a wolf at bay with burning sticks. She may have fought at her husband’s side when the camp was attacked. She may have been the kindest woman in the tribe. But everything is forgotten except that she was “pot particular about the washing-up.”