It was not just work which acted to fix temporal rhythms. As demonstrated by Mrs Beken’s diary, meal times were important in the ordering of daily practices, although the structure of meal times was very different to those of 2000. Without fail, breakfast was taken after getting up in the morning (usually between 7 and 8 on a weekday), lunch eaten between 12.00 and 12.40 for every diarist on a Monday (although on the Saturday lunch was taken between 12.30 and 2.00). Lunch was an important meal, with husbands and children returning from work or school in order to dine together. The evening meals that presented significant challenges of coordination in the households of 2000 were less significant in 1937. Rather, diarists reported ‘tea’ (light snacks) in the late afternoon of ‘bread, apple and cheese or ‘bread, butter and banana’; and then a similar ‘supper’ taken later in the early evening. There were no discussions of eating together in the evening during the weekday diaries; rather each individual member of the household grabbed their preprepared (by the diarist) convenience food (e.g. apple, bread, cheese) and ate alone.
Despite the structure and timings of meals being different from those of today, there were some important similarities regarding snacking – the consumption of foods that require minimal preparation time and which are often eaten alone. This led to perhaps the main difference between the two years. Eating a cooked meal (rather than snacks) required much planning and preparation, including the timing of when to ‘lay the kitchen fire’, which for Mrs Friend (a married housewife aged 32, living in Norbury with no children) was best done to coincide with ‘doing the Laundry’ as the kitchen was warm and clothes could be ‘dried if the weather turns bad’. For Mrs Friend, ‘laying the kitchen fire’ led to the coordination of a set of domestic practices, in addition to the laundry. Monday was ‘bath day’, ‘laundry day’ and also used to produce a stew (with Sunday’s leftover meat). Such material constraints to the timing and coordination of domestic practices had a profound impact on the order of temporal rhythms in 1937. Monday’s were laundry day because material infrastructures and cultural conventions acted to coordinate practices at a societal level.
The problems of coordination that affected the interview respondents of 2000 were less of a problem in 1937 because material constraints, working times and the local-ness of work meant that people within any given households came together at fixed times on a routine basis. The coordination of practices remained a mechanism that shaped the temporal organization of daily life in both years. However, in contrast to 2000, the coordination of practices in 1937 was less a matter of personal scheduling but structured around the fixed temporal constraints of institutionally timed events and the material hardware of daily life.
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Dale Southerton