Washing Lines

Now they have melded their twin passions into an anthology called Washing Lines, which was launched at the Woodstock Literary Festival on September 17.

Janie, who lives near Chipping Norton, said: “We discovered that we shared this obsession with washing when I was hosting the poetry group. I had to choose a topic and I chose laundry. We both prefer travelling by train because from trains you can see washing lines in back gardens; we both have albums full of photographs of washing lines from all over the world.”

They had both collected poems about washing, and they started emailing each other each time they discovered a new one. “We realised that it was a mammoth subject. These were not just housewives writing twee verse — they were wonderfully powerful poems, by men as well as women.”

Barbara had also been collecting wood engravings, which they have used to illustrate the book. “Once you start looking, you discover that washing lines are everywhere. You see them in adverts and on television. Artists use them all the time, in many different ways.

“We talked about putting together an anthology because we wanted to share the poems, to show other people how wonderful they were.”

Janie worked for art publisher Phaidon when it was based in Oxford, and then as a freelance rep selling books to schools. Encouraged by a friend in the industry, they approached a few publishers, who liked the idea, but said it would be too time-consuming to get copyright agreements. So they scraped together the money to publish it themselves — a three-year project which involved tracking down each of the 50-odd poets, or the estates of those who were dead. Their publishing company is called Lautus Press, from the Latin word meaning washed, or alternatively ‘refined or elegant’.

The poets use washing to reflect on war or family life, particularly the link between mothers and daughters, or to invoke memories of home and childhood. Sometimes the smell of clean linen is a metaphor for starting anew; at other times the rhythmic dance of folding sheets mirrors the ebb and flow of close relationships. Barbara said: “Symbolically, it stands for everything being OK, that someone is taking care of the family.”

In the course of their research, they realised it was a touchy subject in America, where washing lines are banned in some areas as being untidy. The book includes an afterword by Alexander Lee, who runs Project Laundry List, a ‘right to dry’ campaign which promotes the message that line drying could save ten per cent of the US’s domestic electricity consumpton.

“It’s so sad that people use tumble dryers when it’s so easy to dry clothes outside on a fine day,” said Janie. “But the writers we contacted responded so enthusiastically – and so have other people. A friend told me about the history of Headington Quarry, where most of Oxford’s washing was done and a house was described as having a ‘48-sheet garden’. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Poetry is notoriously difficult to lay out, as each poem needs different techniques, according to how it appears on the page. It took them three years to produce the book, using a typeface called Minion Pro, which was suggested by a designer Neil Morgan. “It’s a wonderful typeface. It lies across the page just like washing,” said Janie.

The finished product is as satisfying as a clean basket of laundry, and includes poets from Homer to Pablo Neruda, as well as modern heavyweights like Seamus Heaney and Gillian Clarke, plus folk songs such as Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron.

The Woodstock Bookshop, where Janie works part-time, sponsored the launch on Saturday, September 17, , when Gillian Clarke, National Poet for Wales and chair of judges for the T.S Eliot Prize for Poetry, read from Washing Lines and from her own work as part of the Woodstock Literary Festival.