Home of Our Own

In the Eyre Street house I was faced with a problem I had not had in the hotel—laundry. The work was laborious and time-consuming. Sonia could not add it to what she already was doing. It was obvious that I would have to hire a laundress. Rose joined our menage.

Rose was a large, quiet, rather shy woman, a fine representative of the honest and honorable British Honduran people I so rapidly was coming to respect and cherish. She set about doing our laundry in the Belize fashion.

She washed everything—clothing, sheets, and towels—by hand in large galvanized tubs. She scrubbed the laundry on an old-fashioned scrubbing board, rinsed it in carefully rationed water, and hung it on clothes lines strung under the house, out of the sun, to dry in the constant breezes.

Sheets and pillowcases, however, Rose took dripping from the soapy water and spread flat on the grass to bleach as they dried. She rinsed the bed linens in water tinted with bluing and hung them on lines for a final drying. Later Carli’s white school uniforms received the same careful attention.

I learned never to run short of the little square blocks of laundry “Blue” that were Rose’s second line of defense against yellowed sheets. Cakes of bluing disappeared so quickly that one would have thought they were candy-coated.

We had an electric iron, to Rose’s delight. She was used to the kerosene-heated irons most people had.