Other things from my childhood....

Liptons foodstores
Tree-top fruit squash (lovely shaped bottle)
Aztec bars (my absolute favourite!)
Milky lunch bars
Swisskit bars (remember the ad slogan "I'd risk it, for a swisskit")
Steam trains... sadly missed :-(

Ah, yes, and also the Home & Colonial (grocers), Maypole dairies, Mac Fisheries, David Greig (butchers), Timothy Whites & Taylors (chemists) and Mence Smith (ironmongers), to name but a few.

The Corona Man! Dandelion and Burdock I always wondered what Burdock was.
Well it was Thatcher who was the milk snatcher in England. It should have been a big warning for later.
Oh those wonderful trains! I loved the pictures in the carriages, especially in the Cornishman. Once Mum and I missed the connection in Exeter 3 times.The meals in the dining car were really something. Travelling by train was a great treat then. I used to travel alone a lot from the age of 5. My mum put me in charge of the guard so I got off at the right stop.
I am so glad I was given so much freedom as a child. Out on the bike for the day with a picnic in the saddlebag, bus journeys to school on which I was completely alone from 5 years old.
What a sad state when a child cannot go out alone any more.
I also got lost a lot, which brings back great memories of the Police Station, where they gave out chocolate if you were lost and waiting for your mum. It encouraged one to wander off quite a lot....

We used to go to the seaside on day trips. My parents would settle in deckchairs, my dad would roll up his trousers and put a knotted hankie on his head, and then I would go into the sea by myself, from about the age of three. In Weymouth they made sure I knew where the Lost Children's Hut was. The only time I got lost that's where I went and naturally it was the last place they looked. I was quite happy though, they had ice cream.

I was about eight when I first went to Cornwall on my own. That was about 175 miles; like Ren I was put in charge of the guard and learned how to tell the difference between the two stations at Exeter. Once I left my brand new raincoat on the train and knew my mother would kill me but the stationmaster phoned the depot and the depot sent a locomotive back, with my coat!

The kids up my road would often get up early and cycle to Stonehenge, just under ten miles away. I was about five when I joined that expedition for the first time. We'd go to watch the sunrise, pick mushrooms and ride home again. We used to go there for the Solstice but then the fake Druids arrived and the locals weren't allowed to go near the stones any more.

The Corona man lived opposite us, if we ran out we could always get more!

Mum saved up everyone's ration cards so I could have a box, a whole box, of Smarties. I put my little fist in, grabbed some, ate some, and spat them out. And threw the whole box up in the air! I don't know how I lived. My brother saved his rations to buy a cake. Buy.a.cake. That didn't happen in our family, but he wanted to try a swiss roll so he bought one, dropped it, and it got run over by a passing bus. I can't eat a swiss roll now without thinking of the popping noise the cellophane wrapper made.

The milkman was chatting to my mother when I hopped into the milk float and started to drive it towards the main road and then, if a bus didn't get me, to the cemetery wall. I was three. The milkman ran, caught up, and grabbed the steering wheel - and turned the float into my dad's allotment. Dad lost two rows of onions, he was not happy.

JaneMarple, I also remember the school milk in bottles while in primary school. Being a milk monitor (delivering the crates to each class) was a nice 'bludge'. However, occasionally the milk crates spent too long in the sun before being retrieved and I still remember that awful taste of curdling milk. Some children brought chocolate (or occasionally strawberry) flavouring - always 'Nestles Quick'. This was the late 60s-early 70s in Melbourne.

Mike, we must be of the same vintage. I went to primary school in the 60s and high school in the 70s in Perth. I remember the free milk in 1/3 pint bottles and I remember being a milk monitor. I also remember keeping small cans of Nestle's Quik flavouring (strawberry, chocolate or banana) in our desks to flavour the milk. I used to love milk (still do but it doesn't like me - I've become lactose intolerant in my old age).

All this talk of antiques reminds me of a sign I once saw outside an antique store in rural California which said:

"We buy junk and sell antiques".

Ain't that the truth.

Oh Flopsy! I was in fits, you sound just like I was! I took off all my clothes regularly at a young age, and once went into the pigsty, and ate the pigfood. The pig escaped and ate the cabbages which incurred the wrath of Grandpa.
My mum was carefully boiling my milk and sterilising utensils, sieving veggies etc when I was found in the garden shed being fed cheese off the end of a pruning knife by an odd job man we had! I also went down into the underground toilet in Cambridge market place (the Men's of course) and my poor mum had to send a man in to get me out as she wouldn't venture in there not for any reason!
Back to antiques, yes I bet a lot of us wish we had kept our toys and things from then, worth a bomb nowadays.My cousin keeps a Smurf on her car dash, as she is convinced it gains in value by the year.

When we lived in London , even in the 60's, the milkman used to come in and put the milk in the fridge on a hot day, and any parcels the postman put inside the house too. Imagine that now.

Well, well Flopsy.... I was born and raised in Weymouth and, during the summer months, spent my entire life - or so it seemed - on the beach. I too often ended up in the lost childrens hut. If you remember it was right near the donkey rides, Punch and Judy stand and the St John's Ambulance first aid station (there was also a hut that sold ice-cream and pots of cockles and mussels nearby, but the less said about that the better!)... It's not beyond the realms of possibility that we were both in there together at some stage ha ha!

Steve

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.