Old-fashioned couple in 50s time warp

Spending her day scrubbing the kitchen floor and baking cakes, Joanne Massey is desperate to be an old-fashioned housewife.

The 35-year-old from Stafford lives her life in the past – the 1950s to be exact. But retreating into a different era is not just about vintage clothes and vintage decor – she has vintage values to match.

Joanne and husband Kevin, aged 42, live in a perfect 1950s house and take traditional roles. While Kevin is out at work, Joanne is quite content playing the dutiful housewife, staying at home cleaning and baking cakes.

She says it makes for a very successful marriage. “It fills me with a happy wifely glow when Kevin comes in and says, ‘these are delicious’.” Kevin, a graphic applications designer, shares Joanne’s obsession with the Fifties and the couple have turned their home into a vintage shrine.

They wilfully ignore most aspects of modern life. “We don’t listen to the news. I don’t read a newspaper. I don’t watch television. I don’t go out for meals,” says Joanne.

“Sometimes I can be in a conversation where I don’t know what people are talking about. For example, I didn’t know Tony Blair wasn’t Prime Minister until about like two months ago!” She adds: “In our marriage, I am very much a lady and Kevin is the breadwinner and my protector.

“We’ve been married for 13 years and we’re extremely happy because we both know our roles. There is none of the battling for equality that I see in so many marriages today. What’s wrong with wanting to be adored and spoiled? If I see a hat I like, I say ‘Oh, we can’t afford that’ and Kevin says: ‘You have it, I’ll treat you.’

“I don’t even put petrol in our Ford Anglia car, which is 43 years old, because I think that is so unladylike. I ask Kevin to do it.

“I make sure our home is immaculate, there is dinner on the table, and I look pretty to welcome my husband home.”

The couple’s kitchen is an original ‘English Rose’ design, with units made from metal, which they bought from a family in Scotland after placing an advert in an antiques magazine. Joanne also has an original Kenwood Mixer, the phone is bright pink Bakelite, and even her crockery is original 1950s. “I like to close the front door, pull off my gloves and know that I am in my own world,” she says. “I only ever wear 1950s clothing, such as tight pencil skirts, a white blouse and a wide belt. Kevin wears ‘modern’ clothes for work, but at weekends he wears a smart suit and a trilby.

“I admit I am in retreat from the 21st century. When I look at the reality of the world today, with all the violence, greed and materialism, I shudder. I don’t want to live in that world.”

Joanne’s supermarket trip is a weekly ordeal which she dreads. “My ideal way of buying food would be the old-fashioned way. I want to go to a little Fifties shop in a little street with all cute shops in it out of an old British movie,” she says.

Joanne says her obsession with the 1950s began as a teenager. “I loved old movies because they seemed to represent a halcyon time, when women were more feminine and men more protective.”

The couple met in 1993 at a Fifties convention, and they had an old-fashioned courtship before he proposed. “It may sound silly, but living like this really does make me happier – as though I’m existing in one of those old-fashioned TV shows where everything is always wonderful.”

Joanne is one of four women who feature in Channel 4 documentary tonight, First Cut: Time Warp Wives. Debbie Cleulow, 34, who lives in Upper Tean in Staffordshire with her husband Martin, 38, has made her home a shrine to the 1940s. “Other women may laugh at my determination to make my home perfect for my husband, Martin, but I enjoy spending my leisure time baking cakes and sewing,” she says.