Oooops!... Just looked at your post again Flopsy. I can't imagine that we would've been in the Lost Childrens Hut as our 'vintages' are not quite the same! I appear to be much younger lol

sisterseagull.......If your father had occasion to go onboard HMS KEPPEL we might have met! We used to "day run", go to sea with training class and back into harbour for the night. Actually met Wife Mk.1 at Weymouth!!

ren........I'm sure you will be riveted to learn, that as far as memory will allow, I think the underground toilet at Cambridge market place was still there in 1992!! Very wise of your mother not to venture down it..........even I was wary of it! Lol

Thanks , C30 , for the advice about the toilet I will stay away too!

I was ill for a year when I was about 7-8. My parents always spoke with wonder about the doctors and nurses who turned out day and night to give me oxygen or the new wonder drug for all, penicillin. My family was poor. Respectable but poor. They could never have afforded the treatment had I been born ten years earlier; I owe my life to the NHS, it's a debt I can never repay. I can't repay them for the free orange juice either, how I loved that stuff! It came in small flat-sided bottles with a blue screw top. Many years later I re-designed the top level NHS website - every time I looked at their corporate blue I thought of that juice. It was a concentrate, I drank it neat. My eldest niece, same age as me, hated the juice but liked the free codliver oil - she'd swap me. I still can't believe she did that.

Of course I remember free milk, yuck! However, when I returned to school after my pneumonia year my free milk turned into hot chocolate, made by one of the teachers in the staff room. It made being "delicate" quite worthwhile.

Your family must have been rich folks, Ren. You had a fridge? And all you people with cars. Gosh. My parents never owned a car. My dad had one of those bikes that seem to have been made out of cast iron it was so heavy. He rode to work and back every day, about ten miles each way. He had a child's seat on the saddlebar and would take me for rides in the country. One time he leaned the bike against a fence, pointed at the baby baa lambs and said "look, lunch!" - country children rarely become vegetarians, the practical aspect of farming is engrained from an early age.

I bought my first bike when I was three. I bought it. No one else. I used the money Mum had put in a post office account made up from the money people gave me as a baby; "crossing the baby's palm with silver" meant I got sixpences, shillings, and the occasional half-crown, all of which was saved for me. My bike was a two-wheeler, none of that trike nonsense. I don't think they'd invented stabilising baby wheels then, but if anyone had suggested such a thing I think I'd have whacked them in the eye. George taught me to ride it. He was a Royal Marine who lived opposite us and was home on leave from Korea. My brother was stuck on a warship parked off Korea and was so mad when he got home to discover someone else had taught me to ride a bike that if George had been in the Army rather than the Navy I think we might have had war on the street. Anyway, George taught me to ride a bike but my brother taught me how to come off one should it look like a crash was inevitable, a good trick that later saved my neck - quite literally.

We went to a neighbour's house to watch the Coronation. The whole street packed into a tiny room watching a fuzzy screen the size of a chocolate box. Then we went out into the street which was lined with trestle tables laden with plates of goodies. Rationing had been taken off for the event so there were cakes, buns, and more cakes. I blame the Queen for a lifelong addiction.

We got a TV when I was twelve. Two channels, BBC and ITV; to change channels you had to open a panel on top of the set and turn the dial. This was only possible when Mum was out - she thought ITV was common so didn't allow it. Dad and I would wait for her to go to bingo before we could switch, and then we had to watch with one eye on the street because as soon as she turned the corner we had to switch back to the BBC. If I was ever allowed to stay up so late that programming ended for the day, we got the national anthem. In our house that meant standing up while it played.

Mum won the bingo once. That's when we got a lavatory upstairs, with a bathroom suite all the same colour. It was quite a horrid green but Mum liked it and it was her money AND it meant I no longer had to go to the loo on the back doorstep. Well, not on the doorstep exactly, lol. The door to the downstairs loo, the only loo for most of my childhood, was accessible only via the back porch. Which was fine most of the time except in winter. If you couldn't use the potty, you had to creep downstairs and open the back door... and in winter that often meant a six foot snow drift would fall into the kitchen and all over you and your jimjams. Which when you already need to use the loo is no fun at all!

I don't think we had Liptons in London but had one opposite the hotel we often went to in Stratford on Avon and often had lunch upstairs, they were very good. I'd forgotten Treetop, they used to have TV ads all the time, shows how much more must be there if we keep thinking of it.

Not until the 60's in London where the landlord provided a huge ,noisy old thing. We also didnt have a TV till the late 60's.We had a meatsafe.It was only my single uncles who had cars.
My early life mirrors yours in so many ways Flopsy. We went to a friend's for the Coronation too.Amazing how we did without, especially in and after the war.

Not guilty! I wasn't born until after the war.

I'm a baby boomer, born after the men came home from the war. Of course my dad hadn't actually been away - he was too old to fight in that war - but he clearly got into the spirit of things. They told my mother that I was the menopause but she insisted on x-rays; honestly, there was so much radiation around in those days I'm amazed we don't all glow in the dark.

Well, we didn't have much choice did we Ren. The things weren't available to buy anyway, but the great thing is we didn't know we were doing without.

I was brought up in Poole, Dorset. A friend of my Mum's lived in Harrow and her husband worked for the BBC (Harrow was posh in those days) They owned two caravans at Swanage and used to come down for two weeks a year for a holiday. I remember going to see them on the train (steam train) and then walking to the caravan site from the train station. Used to play on the headland with her two children and once fell into a massive blackberry bush, covered head to toe in scratches.

I remember wash day. Clothes washed in a boiler, then put through a big mangle which was kept out in the shed. Whites were boiled up with a blue bag, which was also used to treat wasp and bee stings. On wet days washing was all over the house in front of fires to dry. Dinner was always cold leftovers and as a kid I kept out of the way as wash day was also bad tempered day. Then it all had to be ironed. My mother thought she was in heaven when washing machines and spin dryers became readily available.

Meals were cooked from scratch. We had an old mincer (Spong?) which clamped onto the edge of the kitchen table, and leftovers from Sunday went through that to be turned into shepherd's pie. Nothing was wasted, everything left over was turned into another meal somehow. There were no ready meals. We were all told to eat lots of dairy products - probably to make up diet deficiencies from the war years, there was no such thing as cholesterol.

I had an aunt who lived in Dorking - a small village in those days not a commuter town. They were at the end of an un-madeup road. No electricity. Gas lights downstairs and you went to bed with a candle, which I loved as a child. They had a massive garden, grew all their own veg. kept chickens and a cow. You wanted an egg for breakfast you went and got it from under a chicken. I had milk straight from the cow - no worries then about bacteria etc. and I have never since tasted milk as good. The cream was skimmed off and she made her own butter.

NHS orange juice, gorgeous, Cow and Gate used to make the same one when I was expecting my babies, I used to drink it, not give it to them. My baby brother had the NHS powdered milk when mum had to stop breastfeeding him.

Nobody mentioned dried egg? It seemed to be quite useful stuff actually. Any views?

-Around Boston in the Fifties we still had Milkmen but they threw an anchor down to let the horse know not to leave while they made several deliveries.
-The Rag men who came around in push wagons to collect rags.
-The ice man who first draped a canvas 'runner' on the stairs to keep drips off the waxed stairs, found the block of ice on his tongs was too large to fit the icebox so pulled out his hammer and chisel to crack the block, sending the waste piece sliding down the canvas runner so he didn't have to carry it, then kicking the top of the canvas down the stairs and it would roll up as it went down, taking all the moisture with it. We kids would get pieces of that waste block to suck on.
-The coal chute into the basement window to cellar coal bin.
-Two men working a trolley car: one to drive, the other to act as conductor and sell tickets.
-Swan boats that were foot power driven paddlewheels in Boston Commons (they still have them).
-The grinder man with his push wagon grinding wheel roaming the streets to sharpen cutlery. (He looked an awful lot like the ragman.)
-Every home had a curio cabinet to show off the family heirlooms and keepsakes.
-Every few years the brass decorative tacks on the upholstered furniture were switched out with the other set that had been polished in the intervening years.
-Taking out the swill bucket to the buried outside garbage holder (In later years I used those cement cyliders effectively in landscape installations by turning them upside down and setting them six to twelve inches into the gorund and filling with soil and planting in them : or, inverting them putting in posts and then filling with gravel for sturdy temp garden posts).
-The police all walked their beats.

I was born just about when the war in Europe ended, so I'm just a bit too young to remember dried egg. I never had dried milk either, though I remember my mother had a few of the National Dried Milk tins in the kitchen and used them for storing all sorts of things.

I was a Cow & Gate baby, mum was ill for about a year after I was born so my brother helped to look after me when dad was at work and breastfeeding wasn't in his job description.

My brother had left school by the time I was born; he wanted to join the Navy but was too young so he worked as a telegraph boy. In those days the sight of the telegraph boy always made people take a deep breath - bad news travelled on a red bike. However, the last telegram that I remember seeing was the one my parents got from The Queen for their Diamond Wedding and no one had to breathe in for that.

My brother and father both wore cycling clips - there were always disputes about who had stolen whose. They also both polished their shoes until there was no need for a mirror. I don't get mine to quite such a shine but I still polish leather shoes - if I didn't I think both my brother and father would turn in their graves.

I don't remember dried egg, and anyway my mother kept chickens. She swapped eggs for sugar. We lived next door to a butcher, he kept rabbits in his garden. And sold them naked in his shop - the rabbits that is, not Mr A the butcher! He showed me how to kill a chicken. It ran round the garden long after he'd wrung its neck so I didn't think much of that. When my mum killed a chicken it stayed dead!

The lamplighter - the man on a bicycle and a long pole who used to turn on the street light.

Pig bins - we used to have several in the street where you put things like vegetable peelings then a lorry used to come round several times each week to empty them, they were pretty smelly.

The small town in Gloucestershire where I grew up had a laundry, run by two elderly spinster sisters. This was a relic of the past, even then, with steam boilers and those black flat irons heated on stoves. Long gone, of course.

What I miss most is petrol filling stations where the attendant used to fill your car for you. These days we have to do more and more for ourselves and pay extra for the 'privilege'. I won't use self service tills in supermarkets on principle (and for fear I'd make a fool of myself trying to work out what to do).

When sweets came off ration, my mother made me a costume for a fancy dress competition with various bars sewed to the dress (made from crepe paper) and a necklace of liquorice allsorts. I won, too, and have a photo somewhere - black and white, of course.

Come to Jersey, there are still some petrol filling stations where they fill up for you, AND they have a dish of sweets near the till so you can have a fruit toffee while you wait to pay.

Lol, I too remember most of these things.

Come to South Africa as well, we still get our petrol filled for us, oil and water and tyre pressure checked


Living in a small rural town also has its benefits in that we still can have our milk, booze, groceries and meat delivered with just a couple of phone calls.

Do you remember using 78rpm records to make 'fruit dishes'? Heating them in very hot water as I recall - not that we actually put fruit in them.

Here's a link to a website giving dried egg information. It was 1942 they brought it out and actually people liked it for scrambled egg etc,.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/dried_eggs.htm

I've just remembered the 'shop' which was in my nana's neighbour's front room in the middle of a row of terraced houses. They sold sweets and pop (maybe other things too, but that was all I was interested in).

I loved the Richard Digance link, by the way.

I remember going shopping with my Grandmother, and in this shop that she liked to get her clothes in they had this system with the money. You gave it to the assistant who served you, she put it in a little metal can, attached it to a pulley, and then it whizzed off on these overhead lines to a big booth high up in the centre of the shop. There a cashier took out the money, put in the change and the receipt and sent the can back to the assistant. When they were busy there were dozens of these little metal cans whizzing around overhead all over the shop. Must have been quite a complex system to ensure each can went back to the right assistant. Used to fascinate me though. Sometimes the assistant would let me put the money in the can and attach it to the pulley.

They used to give you a chair to sit on while you waited to be served as well.

Rossian..........still got a couple of those old black flat irons, kicking about in the garage somewhere! Remember my mother heating them up on the cooking range and spitting on them to see if they were hot enough!

Off topic a moment...........totally agree with you regarding current "self service" fad in supermarkets.
It doesn't take rocket science to work out that if they can get unpaid customers to do the job of paid check-out operators, then the supermarkets can make staff redundant.
Thus saving then from having to pay wages, thus making "mega-bucks" more profit. For that reason I refuse to use them.
Btw.........it is already happening........my local supermarket has 40 checkouts, 3 of which are "self service", 1 is "Basket items", and usually only 6 out of the remainder open. I realise it isn't cost effective to have them all open at slack periods, but even with run-up to Christmas, when the store was heaving, they seemed to have more closed, than open!

Ok back to thread theme...............

Shoes are now made so cheaply in the Orient that Cobblers are rare in their old form. I remember going to our local cobbler and watching him cut to size thick hide and then sew them on for new soles on shoes. You could drop your shoes off (Your Special occasion ones) and they'd be glad to spend slow time polishing them for you for a nickel. Pick up the next day. And shoe laces replaced if needed. Yah, back then our shoes went in for routine maintenance like our cars do now. Today we just wear them out then throw them away and get a new cheap pair of plastic manmade material ones.

I'm only 21, so there's not so much of a stark difference between my childhood and childhoods of today, save all the kids with iPhones and laptops and things. Here are a few things I can remember that don't happen/happen rarely now:

Penny chews.
Ten pence mixes.
I remember we only had five TV channels: BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5.
Portable cassette players were the norm. I know, I know, it's not quite a record player or something! I'm surprised that they are still sold, actually.

It still seems like another lifetime - things were so different back then, even for me!

There was a shop near us like your grandmother's Rossian... it too sold sweets and pop but this one was run by two middle-aged sisters. There used to be some fruit chews that were four for a penny. The two sisters tried to sell me some. For a penny each! I still remember my shock at learning that some adults would try to rip off a kid - but they never got a penny of my pocket money again, or even a farthing. I've still got a farthing somewhere.

Round the corner from them there was a hairdresser's. Its windows were "whited" out apart from one small sign, which read:

FRESH
FISH
MILK

I still want to know what sort of fish give milk!

Newspaper headlines and street signs were the first things I could read. One street sign is still known in my family by the way I read it out loud the first time. "Mum," I said, "what's a polissy notissy?"



And those shop pulleys! They had them in a department store at home, I used to watch mesmerised. When I went to Japan in the 1980s they were still using them in some stores, on the Ginza no less.

I remember when a super fast modem speed was 14,400 bits per second. I had that much to the annoyance of a friend who only had 9,600 bits per second - and he had already replaced his slower one.

For the curious, a 20mb file would take only 3.1 hours to download on my fast one.

I ran a web design agency with a 14.4 modem, lol. When we first started, the government paid me to do presentations on the new idea of using websites in business - whenever I clicked on a hyperlink and a picture appeared I could hear jaws drop all round the room.

On my 50th birthday someone e-card bombed me and it took virtually all day to open the wretched things!

I remember when gas was 15 cents a gallon.

I remember when department stores had uniformed elevator operators.

I remember when family doctors made house calls.

I remember when a loaf of bread was 10 cents.

I remember when a 'milk man' delivered all dairy products to your home.

I remember, when purchasing gas at a service station, the attendant would automatically clean your windshield and check the engine oil and water.

I remember separating mail into 'air mail' (for quick delivery) and regular mail for ground (slower) delivery. As I recall, air mail was 3 cents more than regular mail.

Vendome, in the UK most places can still get milk delivered - and the milkman will also deliver things like juice, eggs, bread, cereal, pet food, and a whole range of other things. I never use enough milk to even think about having a milkman, but I do have a vegetable box delivered once a week - and the veggie man also supplies juice, bread, meat, cereals, and a lot more. My basic box includes five different sorts of vegetables and three different sorts of fruit, all organic; plus I can tell them what I don't like and they'll replace it with something I do. Oh and the veggie man also delivers milk, cream, butter, etc. All possible because of the power of the internet.

I remember mail too. Two of my mother's sisters married Cornishmen so they lived about 175 miles to the west of us. The rest of her family lived the same distance to the east so we could literally meet them halfway. One of my aunts would send my mother a postcard one evening and we'd get it the next morning "arriving 2 o'clock" it would say so we'd go to the railway station, buy a platform ticket, and chat to my aunt for half an hour while the train waited for passengers off a connecting train. On other occasions, an aunt would write "meet the train" and we'd arrive to be met by the guard who'd hand over pints of Cornish cream, pasties, simnel cakes, all sorts of freshly made goodies. Nowadays, with all the modern improvements, a letter sent today with a first class stamp (when I was a kid we just had stamps!) may arrive, oh, sometime this week if posted by Tuesday. With luck and a following wind.