Memories - early or general

Oh my, that's something else - picture rails, my Mum hung everything on those, ironing on coathangers, pictures of course, Christmas decorations, Dad's wiring along the rail in most of the downstairs rooms, he wanted music in every room. Along the rails over the doorways, it was a nightmare, most of the time he was fiddling around with it to get the sound to come through, with funny little speakers, but you still had to go to the radio to turn it off. ! Oh, but I don't ever remember seeing a mangle in the house but she did use the laundry service and all the linen and sheets had tags with the same number on. She then had a twin tub which had to be pushed to the sink, Hoover I think. I had an Engish Electric Liberator front loader and the seal went on the door - don't ask !!! I had a shock off that once too, it felt like a thunderbolt.

Janey. I remember the Hotpoint twintub as I was growing up and as far as I'm aware you needed a mangle, but there was a problem with the hose at the back which used to slip, which made the kichten floor very slippery

No, it had a spin drier, not a mangle.

Remember firelighters? When coal came in sacks and went in a coal bunker? When we lived at Tile Hill in the late 50s and early 60s we also used to have a delivery of coke, and it would be tipped all over the patio outside the French doors. I remember dad putting firelighters on the coal fire, topping it with small pieces of coal, then "drawing" it by using sheets of newspaper across the fire until the flames got going. Needless to say the paper often caught alight too, so was hastily thrust into the flames. No central heating in those days, but when the fire in our back room was banked up with coke it used to be sweltering in there. Had to open the French doors to cool things down.

Yes Janey, I remember fire lighters - still use them in my Anthracite central heating boiler. I have always had a coal/log fire until this last property, my younger daughter still has a coal/log fire and it is wonderful to stay with her in the winter (even when the smoke gets a back draft into the room). I miss an open fire terribly. But it wasn`t really that I wanted to reminisce about. Smokeless Fuel - first year married, 4th January1966, Maisonette, Hopton Close, estate off Broad Lane. Homefire - (Dr. Bronowski`s Nuts) was great but wealth beyond our means required unless for special occasions, so we had to make do with unspecified "smokeless fuels" which would only ignite with a gas poker thrust into the heap in the grate and often took up to 3 hours to ignite. Apart from fighting the fire every night (me 3 nights a week at tech + other nights rugby training) my wife had to cope with cooking an evening meal on a 2 ring camping stove, our gas stove hadn`t been fitted as all the gas engineers had been drafted in to fix the Lurgi gas plant at Coleshill(?) which had blown up. On top of this living under a noisy complaining advanced age single lady neighbour from the maisonette upstairs, who we are sure was trying to entice the milkman (I was going to put "h*ving it *ff" but thought better of it). Our first year of marriage was h*ll on wheels. Oh I forgot to mention our first washing machine - a Baby Burco. We did eventually get a second hand single tub with an agitator and when we moved to Coundon - an Indesit (new) and we have had Indesits ever since. The single tub went up to Scotland with my Mother in Law in the back of a Morris 1000, my Father in Law always complained she got the kitchen sink in the boot of his cars - so effectively she did the same thing in mine only it was a washing machine.

Good grief, a Baby Burco, last time I saw one was in my kitchen full of babies nappies boiling away in '62 and a steamed up kitchen. I did move on to better things though with a front loader, full of surprises - shocks and leaks!

When I first got married I did my washing in a Baby Burco, then lifted the washing into the sink with wooden tongs, rinsed it by hand and then put it in the Hotpoint spin dryer. It was hard work lifting wet sheets. Who says the old days were the best!

Hi all I love reading these memories. "Who says the old days were the best!" Maybe they are different? It might be how we view a situation. I was in college one day when I heard a young student actually say that she wished that she had the life-style of her mother, rather than the grind of college, nine to five working & so on. My mum like many had it hard in both ways, as she had her businesses to run as well as our home. That's why we had a daily, who cleaned the house, a Bendix built in washing machine along with other modern stuff. That was all in the fifties. That now has evolved to where most of us enjoy the fruits of technology, but go out to work to pay for it. A few years ago, the FT (Financial Times) did a comprehensive, deep rooted research into our economy of living. I was astounded by the findings. These were facts, not just newspaper-garb. Making a comparison between life-styles over the centuries, simplifying like for like, say like the cost of our homes. Following on from living in caves, our very survival has always depended on us living in homes & having food. Taking an identifiable individual such as a serf, equivalent to say a middle manager of today, our modern middle manager spends over twice as much today, just to provide the home, as did our serf of the Middle Ages, in the fifteenth century. Our serf also grew his own food & paid for his land-rent by the food that was left over. Mind you, he only had to get a bug & that was the end of him, so some things are better, hey!

Philip, yes you're so right about the bug bit, tooth out, 'ouch'. I was four years old, finger lanced, just a doctors knife, and hold on to Dad. So most of the houses around me had sash windows worked with ropes and weights, so I leant out the bottom window and the rope broke or a weight came off, whatever, but the window came down and had me securely trapped, mum and my sister struggled to lift the window, got me free. So I'm in town with Mum and I see 'Peeping Tom' stuck in the window, and wondered why someone didn't set him free, so every time we went to town I would look up to see if the poor guy had been released from his sash window. Have no idea when it all ended, or why.

Speaking of windows, remember when curtains had a brass(?) coin sewn into the corner to weight them down? I always thought someone had lost a penny!

Hi Dutchman, Never encountered that, but I know they have little lead weights now. A change of conversation:- I am envying your cold weather! My early memories of cold weather, I loved it and the snow and loved to wrap up and go out walking. All the best D.

It was back in 1895 that HG Wells wrote THE TIME MACHINE. But this topic reminds of that book. Once again things flash through my mind back over 80 years like a time machine to 1932 time I see me and my brother peering through our front window at Dad having a bath in front of the fire, I looked at my brother and saw a mischievous look in his eyes we hurried round the side of the house to the 'wash-shed' in the back garden, then re-traced our steps to the front door, quietly we undid the latch on the door, crept in behind dads back and threw two large slabs of Lifebuoy soap into his bath, Dad yelled and shouted, but we were already running away from the house. Christmas Eve, and we four boys at home for Christmas 1953. Brinklow a large lonely rambling house at the side of the 'cut' built on the slope of a field, one side level the other side a drop of 4-5 foot large cellars, large chimneys, many rooms, no electric, dark cold and damp, the wind whistled through the house, a ghostly house in the dark winter nights. About two in the morning and there is a great scuffling sound in the chimney that woke my two young brothers, then something slammed into the youngest ones face (10) as he sat up, he screamed, I rushed in, my other brother lit the tilley lamp. A wood-pigeon had somehow fallen down the chimney and was flying round the room, clouds of soot everywhere, we made tea and ate pork-pie, set the unharmed pigeon free. Certainly a Christmas to remember that we still talk about. ps the house now belongs to the Pleasure boat people.

Once again my memory has been jogged back to the early 30's, remember my uncle placing a cable through an old cocoa tin, then running the cable through the house, the back door and down the garden to the bike shed, the cable went through another cocoa tin and I could talk to my brother in the bike shed from the house by talking into the tin, this was long before I had heard of telephones. How it was done I have no idea, but it seemed marvellous at the time.

Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock. I would go back to when I was a small child. When children played skipping in the road where there were hardly any cars. Where we dug a small hole in the entry and aimed our marbles into it. When we built dens in back gardens with old bits of fence, then sat inside with our bag of sugar and dipped rhubarb into it. When Christmas was really a time of joy and we made endless colourful paper chains and appreciated our meagre gifts and didn't expect expensive items as we knew we would never get them. Playing round at a schoolfriend's house and being able to ride on her three-wheeler tricycle that had a boot on the back! Wonderful. Looking forward to summer when I could exchange the long grey woollen school socks for short white ones and sandals, and wear pretty summer dresses usually made by my gran. And at the age of just five walking all on my own to school from our house near the Cedars pub to the end of Southbank Road. The only memory I would erase was when, at that age, I woke up one morning and for some reason thought my parents had left me alone in the house. They hadn't, but the front door was bolted shut and I couldn't open it. Undeterred, I ran back up to my bedroom, opened the window, climbed out to the ledge above the downstairs window, and, in my nightie, jumped down to the lawn below. A neighbour saw me but was too late to stop me jumping off. Luckily I wasn't hurt, but you can imagine my parents' surprise when the neighbour knocked on our door with little me by her side!!