I was awake early this morning , and it got me thinking about my life over the last 75 years and how we coped with the change of seasons to Winter each year, with all the challenges it brings.
1949 onwards
I was born in 1949. The first 2 years of my life were spent in a council pre-fab home with my mum, dad and 10 year old sister. Those pre-fabricated homes were built post war as an emergency stop gap to help house the population during the housing shortages after the war, and were meant to last 10-15 years, but many years later they were still there and being rented out by the council. At the age of 2 though, my family was lucky enough to be allocated a brand new brick built council semi on a big housing estate built on what was previously farmland, and there my memories begin....
I remember the house being roasting hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. The only heating was an open fire in the kitchen and one in the front 'best' room. We basically lived in the kitchen as it was smaller and, in theory, easier to heat and only lit the fire in the front room at Christmas and even then only if we had guests! There would be frost on the inside of the bedroom windows and I recall not wanting to get out of bed in the morning to get dressed. The phrase 'heating or eating' hadn't been coined at that time but I'm sure my mum made the choice many a time during the winter months when she had no money for coal. I would go to school without having eaten breakfast or even having a hot drink because she knew I would get a small bottle of milk at breaktime in school. By the time I was 4 and a half I had a baby brother too. Dad worked in the metal industry and mum was a housewife so there was just one income. I don't ever remember feeling deprived and we were always clean and tidy. A boiler situated behind the open fire heated the water when the fire was lit so a bath could be shared if we were lucky! but it must have been difficult for our parents at that time.
I remember the chimney catching fire on more than one occasion leading to panic and great lumps of smouldering soot landing on the rug with a thump, to be scooped up on a small shovel and heaved outside 👀 The chimney sweep cost good money so dad would borrow a set of brushes to sweep it himself, often with dire results like the brush getting stuck and we kids would be dispatched outside with instructions to yell if the brush appeared at the top of the chimney. Those were the days!
During the late 1960's mum gave in and saved up for a gas fire to be installed in the kitchen. No more cleaning out the grate or trying to get the new smokeless fuel to 'catch' by holding a newspaper to seal the opening and 'draw' the fire, only for the paper to catch fire first, then a panicked crumpling of said paper was initiated to put it out 😅
Mum lived right up to the end (aged 91) in the same house with no central heating....
1971 onwards
Graham and I got married in 1971 and bought a house on a different estate. It didn't have central heating either, just one gas fire in the small living room. We had no money as every penny we had had been put down as a deposit on the house. We bought the gas fire and existing living room carpet from the sellers for about £100 (why we paid for the fire which was already fitted is something I later regretted. They would probably have left it anyway)
The 3 bedrooms were all bare boards and the vendors even stripped out every lightbulb. The day we were handed the keys we arrived straight after work to take a look. It was late September and pitch black and there wasn't a single lightbulb in place. How miserable is that?
After we moved in in October 1971, I remember we rented a black and white TV for 50p a week and sat on the floor with our backs against the wall to watch it as we had no chairs!
For a long time, we lived with furniture that had been given to us by friends and family. The only new stuff we had was a gas cooker (paid for by us in monthly instalments) and a mattress for the bed and....delight!...a small table and 4 chairs bought by my father as a wedding present. We were incredibly happy.
These days young couples expect to move into a virtual show home straight away, don't they....
We eventually took out a bank loan to have gas central heating installed. What a difference it made.
Two children and 11 years later we made the monumental decision to emigrate to Canada. I'll tell you more in the next post.....
What was your very first home like? How much stuff did you actually own at that time?
Thanks for popping in. Stay safe and well wherever you happen to be,
Angie ❤️
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What lovely memories, and how hardy everyone was when there was usually only one fireplace in the home!
ReplyDeleteMight pinch your idea for a blog post if that's OK
Of course you can Sue. I'm happy to have inspired you as its normally the other way round and I pinch your ideas! 😁
DeleteMy first home was much like yours, heated by a real fire, we had fireplaces in every room, but most were never lit, away from the fire the house was always cold, and winter mornings were freezing. They were amazing days with more happy memories than sad ones.
ReplyDeleteDon't you think we were so much happier with less? We knew no different and just accepted life for what it was. Happy memories indeed 😊
DeleteYour early home memories are practically identical to ours. I well remember getting dressed still in bed under the covers, due to the ice on the inside of the windows. And the horrible smelly oil heaters. We also had just the one coal fire in the lounge - when we came downstairs in the morning and put the lounge light on, little silverfish used to scatter in all directions on the fire hearth. And yes I'm sure our Mum used to go without meals so she could feed us 4 kids. We have such easy lives nowadays in comparison.
ReplyDeleteOh golly yes. I remember ice on the inside of bedroom windows too. I remember a meal of dripping on toast and in the summer, if we were lucky, a sandwich of lettuce and tomato with salt and vinegar ( no meat or cheese)
DeleteThings are certainly different now.
Your first memories are very similar to mine, although Mum and Dad lived with my Nanna for 2 years before Dad got a job in Hemel Hempstead with Lucas and a council house came with it. Like yours, freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer, but I had a very happy childhood. Xx
ReplyDeleteIt seems many of us have similar memories Gill. How times change. xx
DeleteBrings back memories of childhood a couple of years after you, only a Truburn (Rayburn look alike) in the kitchen/lounge for heating, hot water and cooking, fire in the "front room" only used for visitors and at Christmas, just hot water bottles in the beds, no other heating. My parents continued living in that farm cottage well into the 1970s when they moved to a centrally heated council flat.
ReplyDeleteBut living on a farm, we had the advantage of limitless wood for heating, and plenty of home grown food.
Oh Will, limitless wood sounds like heaven! I always felt the cold as I was a small and skinny child. Home grown food sounds amazing too. We had a large garden but my parents had no idea how to grow vegetables 😕 All we had was a gooseberry bush which was so tart that I've never eaten gooseberries since!
ReplyDeleteDefinitely advantages of living on a mixed dairy/arable farm - plenty of milk straight from the cows, fresh eggs from the free range chickens (and chickens too when they got too old to lay), fruit and veg from both our own garden and the "big house" market garden, rabbits a plenty pre Myxomatosis.
DeleteIn retrospect, it seems like such a different world than today, in my case that "big house" became an old people's and nursing home, the farm was sold off and the farm cottages and buildings either "yuppiefied" or demolished.
It certainly was a different world then. It's a crying shame that small farms are falling by the wayside and now bigger farms are suffering too. There's no help from the government to keep these farms profitable it seems which, in my view, is short sighted to say the least and a criminal waste at best.
DeleteI do envy your childhood, Will, I would have loved to help look after the chickens :)
Our memories are so similar. The home I grew up in was the downstairs three rooms of my Nana's house, with the same open fire as you describe, and yes, the newspaper to make it 'draw' was a daily occurrence. We just had two bedrooms, I shared one with my brother, and the living/dining/kitchen was all in the space that would have been the kitchen of the house. Nana had the whole of the upstairs to herself. We had to be as quiet as mice if we wanted to go and use the bathroom upstairs. Strangely that was also my home for the first six months of my married life, but by then it had a gas fire in the kitchen and we could use the front room as our living room.
ReplyDeleteLike you say we were not even slightly like the modern couples that move into a perfectly assembled show home. We had a sofa, a new bed and a second hand cooker, table and two chairs. But we were happy and that was all that mattered.
How times change! It was so exciting to have our own home that nothing else mattered. We didn't get a sofa until about 18 months after we moved in. My sister gave us two old armchairs just before our son was born, otherwise I would have been nursing him on the floor!
DeleteWhat an interesting life story! I can't identify with ice on the insides of the bedroom windows since I was born in a tropical country where keeping cool was more of a problem than keeping warm. I can identify with the lack of furniture, etc. though, because when we immigrated to the US, we had no furniture and not enough money to buy any! Our first apartment was furnished with other people's cast-offs.
ReplyDelete