N 1946, writer Mollie Panter-Downes described a middle-aged couple determined to do things properly. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Stephen and Laura Marshall’s domestic lives have changed beyond recognition. Where once, ‘in the kitchen, caps and aprons shrieked with sudden merriment... the butcher’s young man came whistling to the back door, on his shoulder a clean white enamel tray, on it reposing a leg of lamb’, now ‘silence settled with the dust’ on rooms from which domestic help has vanished. Maids Ethel and Violet have instead learned ‘to assemble the bright and shoddy’ in a nearby factory, the butcher is unable to deliver, the cook long departed and the Marshalls’ gardener—a genius at growing vegetables—killed in action in Holland. In an age before gadgetry, husband and wife, echoing many
