the milkman cometh

(with apologies to Eugene O'Neill)

We have started to have milk delivered. In real glass bottles, left by a real milkman, by the front door, by 7am, twice a week, and I love it.

[Still Life (1970) Alison Allnutt]

I hadn’t realised quite how much went missing from the kitchen when milk bottles were replaced, as in most households, by plastic containers from the supermarket. There is the look of course, such a lovely, familiar shape*, but also the feel and the handling of smaller bottles which pour so much better than stonking great plastic containers from which the milk whooshes, and of course the sound. Although we can’t hear the milkman clinking the bottles, we can get the full effect just bringing them in, lining them up in the fridge, taking them out. And you know where you are with a pint bottle which makes measuring out so much easier.

Now I am very aware that it may still be considered ‘common’ to have naked milk bottles on the table or on tea trays, and indeed when I was growing up in Stockport it was definitely not allowed by my Mum when we had visitors.

[Leeds Co-op Dairy milk delivery]

Sure enough, Alan Bennett, who worked on a milk round in Leeds in 1946, has something to say about milk bottles on tables. In the Lady of Letters (1988) Talking Heads episode, the nosy, judgemental Miss Ruddock is watching her neighbours and remarks: ‘The couple opposite just having their tea. No cloth on. Milk bottle stuck there, waiting.’

So to have the milk bottles out, on display, so to speak, and the milk not decanted into a jug, as we now do, is revelatory and/or subversive - or just plain comfortable and what you do when you are on your own and no-one is looking (and/or judging), as with this painting:

[Home (1942) James Fitton]

I actually like to see milk bottles because they are part of the still life of the kitchen, the flotsam and jetsam of domesticity, together with jam jars and Marmite jars, butter dishes and tea pots, cereal boxes, cups, saucers, mugs, plates, cutlery, plus daffodils and tulips, perhaps. I’m not sure anyone would think a 4-pint plastic container enhances the picture, but milk bottles are something different. They are homely, in proportion with with the rest of the table clutter, and now charming because relatively rare. And you know you don’t have to worry about which colour bin they need to go in because they go back, clinking, with the milkman, and are reused - up to forty times, apparently.

[Still Life with Wardrobe (1954) John Bratby]

John Bratby included everything but the kitchen sink in his famously cluttered paintings of modern life done in 1954; they are a snapshot of a certain type of 1950s domesticity, so much of which is unchanged, including Cornishware.

His table-top paintings are redolent of bedsitters, student digs, and rooms with lino flooring rented by lonely characters in novels by Barbara Pym (in Quartet in Autumn one woman hoards empty milk bottles and keeps her cherished collection in the shed). They also send me back to Cooking in a Bedsitter (1961) by Katharine Whitehorn which I probably read about the same time The Millstone (1960) by Margaret Drabble and The L-Shaped Room (1960) by Lynne Reid Banks, all of which remind me of rooms I had in Sheffield and Coventry in the 1980s in which a milk bottle on the table was the least of my concerns.

[Still Life with a Bowl of Cherries (1954-55) Jack Smith]

By contrast, I couldn’t imagine the much grander Mary Fedden ever allowing a a milk bottle into one of her table-top paintings (wine and olive oil, yes). Jack Smith, one of the lesser known of the Kitchen Sink quarter, is closer to her in his choice of items, and we are definitely moving into Elizabeth David territory with red peppers.

[Still Life with Milk Bottle (c1945) Anne Redpath]

Anne Redpath, whom I consider to be the doyenne of table-top paintings, turns her milk bottle still life into a lovely, pale chalky collection, with the bottle taking centre stage, matching the white tablecloth, the nice, plain bone china, a duck-egg blue glazed jug or mug with a single daffodil, and contrasting with a Penguin book. This is not a common milk bottle, at all, but a piece of good everyday design.

Milk in bottles also reminds me how much I used to like night-time milky drinks: Horlicks, Ovaltine, cocoa, or just plain hot milk and an aspirin when I was poorly as a child. So it’s nice to see that it’s still possible to attend 9pm Candlelit Compline in Magdalene College Chapel with ‘ancient plainchant sung in the dark; then port and hot chocolate’.

[Baking (1978) Pierangela Corvi Baking]

It’s not only the comforting drinks which have been lost, but also the special mode of milk bottle communication: the scribbled and rolled up notes for the milkman, asking him to leave fewer bottles, or more when you needed an extra pint to make custard with Bird’s powder, or Yorkshire puddings, or Shrove Tuesday pancakes. And where would Herman’s Hermits have been if it weren’t for messages for the milkman?

Bon dimanche!

*I’m talking about the classic bottle for pasteurised milk, not the taller one with the narrow neck for sterilised milk, from when milk was easily identifiable by bottle shape, like a teetotal version of Burgundy and Bordeaux bottles.