The Young Wife's Tale.

THIS WAS THE FIRST PIECE WRITTEN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES COLOUR MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1969 WHICH RESULTED IN A COLUMN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES FOR THE NEXT THIRTEEN AND A HALF YEARS.

You see her down the market in the lunch hour, battling through the crowds, scuttling from barrow to barrow to find the cheapest cauliflowers or peppers, weighed down by carrier bags and responsibilities.

Last month she was the dolly who blued her wages on clothes and make-up and took her washing home to Mother every week-end - now, in one stride, she is the newly married working wife who must be housekeeper, cook, hostess, laundress, seamstress, beguiling companion, glamour girl, assistant breadwinner and willing bed-fellow rolled into one.

Looking back on the first fraught year of my marriage I realize we lived in total screaming chaos. I spent most of my time in tears - not tears of misery, but exhaustion. I couldn't cook, I couldn't sew, I had no idea about running a house, my knowledge of sex was limited to Eustace Chesser and Lady Chatterley - yet suddenly I was on trial: sexually, domestically, commercially, socially and aware that I was inadequate on every count.

My husband's remarks like: 'Do you really think the book case is the right place for a mouldy apple?' would wound me to the quick - or that despairing 'Let's start as we mean to go on' as he looked at the flotsam of clothes strewn over the bedroom, and resented the fact that I had already appropriated five and three-quarters of the six drawers and three out of four of the coat hangers.

As we made love most of the night, I found it impossible to get up in the morning, cook breakfast, do my face and get out of the house by 8.15. Then followed an exhausting day at the office, only punctuated by one of those scurrying, shopping lunches. I was seldom home - due to the caprice of London Transport - before 7 o'clock. Then there was the bed to be made, breakfast to be washed up, the cat to be fed and chatted up, the day to be discussed and supper to be cooked. This was a proper supper (garlic, aubergines and all). The way to a man's heart was supposed to be through his stomach, so there was no getting away with pork pie or scrambled eggs. When I cooked moussaka for the first time we didn't eat until one o'clock in the morning.

We were very gregarious and were asked out a great deal. My husband also played cricket and rugger at weekends, so as a besotted newlywed I was only too happy to abandon the housework and watch him score tries and centuries.

As a result the flat became dirtier and more chaotic. The only time we ever really cleaned it up was when in-laws or relations came to stay, and my husband would then say that it was just like a barracks before the annual general inspection. 'How pretty those dead flowers look' said a kindly aunt. 'Have they become fashionable in London?'

The only other possible moment to clean the flat was on my husband's occasional TA nights. Then I would hare round like a maniac, dusting and polishing; hoping, for once, to welcome him home scented and beautiful in a negligee with a faint smell of onions drifting from the kitchen. It never worked. Invariably he would let himself in unnoticed to find me tackling a mountain of dust under the bed with my bottom sticking out.

It was only after nine months, when the ice compartment wouldn't shut, that I learnt for the first time about defrosting the fridge. Things in the fridge were another headache. There were always those nine reproachful bowls of dripping, the tins of blackening tomato puree, the fish stock that never graduated into soup and the lettuce liquidizing in the vegetable compartment.

Laundry was another nightmare. It took me months to master the mysteries of the launderette. Very early on in our marriage, a red silk handkerchief found its way into the machine with the rest of the washing. My husband's seven shirts came out streaked crimson like the dawn, and for days he wore cyclamen underpants and claimed he was the only member of the fifteen with a rose-pink jock strap. Once the washing was done it lay around in pillowcases for ages waiting to be ironed. My mother-in-law once slept peacefully and unknowingly on a pillowcase full of wet clothes.

In fact my ironing was so disastrous that for a while we tried the laundry. This presented insuperable problems. One week we were too poor to get it out, the next week-end we'd be away, the next they'd shut by the time we there, then finally we found they'd lost all our sheets. One laundry, we discovered afterwards from the butcher next door, was notorious for 'losing' sheets.

Our own dinner parties were not without incident. The first time my mother came to dinner the blanquette of veal was flavoured with Vim, and the chocolate mousse, left in the fridge all might, was impregnated with garlic and Kit-e-Kat. The cat once ate his way through two large packets of frozen scampi and, the night my husband's boss came to dinner, stripped the salad nicoise of its tunny fish and anchovies.

The flat, as I have said, got grimier and grimier, and the same week that a fungus began to grow under the sink I overheard someone say at a cocktail party that we lived in 'engaging squalor'. It was the last straw, and we hired a daily woman. It was not a success. I spent far more time than before cleaning up before she came, and after the first few weeks the standard went down. Then my husband came back one lunch hour and found her in our bed with the electric blanket and the wireless on.

The cats - we soon acquired a second - did not add to the ease of our married life. Whenever the doorbell rang I used to drench myself in scent to cover the smell of the tomcat, and in summer there were fleas. The landlord forbade pets in the house, so the day he came to look over the flat the cats were locked in the wardrobe.

In spite of the 'engaging squalor', our spare room was permanently occupied; girls who had left their lovers or husbands who had left their wives, people who came from abroad or up from the country, all found a flea-bitten home there. The hall was always full of carrier bags full of knickers or the cornucopian suitcases of birds of passage. One man came for two days and stayed for four months. One drunken Irishman who started rampaging lustfully round the flat in the still watches of the night was locked in his bedroom. Next morning we found him in the kitchen making coffee, and the imprint of his huge sleeping body remained outside on the long grass we called our lawn.

'When I was first married,' said a friend wistfully, 'I could never make mayonnaise. Humphrey kept kissing me and the oil would go in great dollops instead of drips, and the thing curdled. Now we've been married five years and can afford a mixer, and I make perfect mayonnaise every time now - it's my marriage that has curdled.'

We have been married seven years now - I still can't make mayonnaise - but we're not itching, and our marriage hasn't curdled. Even so I asked my husband to name, after seven years, the things that irritated him most about me.

His answers came out pat and immediate: using his razor on my legs and not washing it out; not putting tops back on tonic or soda water, or the ice tray back in the fridge; those little balls of Kleenex everywhere; the eighteen odd socks in his top drawer; the red rings of indelible lipstick on his handkerchief; running out of loo paper/soap/toothpaste; forgetting to turn off the lights/fires/the oven; and, of course, my friends.

OK, OK, I said crossly. Then I remembered a poem by an American poet John Frederick Nims that my husband had sent me when I was feeling suicidal early on in our marriage, which had suddenly made everything all right:

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring...
Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat.
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of split Bourbon float.
Be with me, darling, early or late, smash glasses,
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

© JILLY COOPER.