Memories - early or general

Your memory of the early days brought back a lot of memories for me. Starting life living at 64 King Edward Road all we had was an outside toilet, no bathroom! We had to boil the water on the stove and use a galvanized steel tub in the kitchen.The youth of today have no idea how lucky they are to have all the things that they take for granted !

Hey Kaga, Yes it most definitely is the cut!!! We used to get out of school at Freddie birds and hang out by the cut. Saw quite a few fights there after school too! Remember sticking fireworks in clods of earth, lighting them and dropping them in the water, they used to go off like depth charges. We used to hangout by Trentham rd. a school mate of mine Pete Batters used to live there

I remember the sequence of moves we played at fivestones were (I think) 1s 2s 3s, ups and downs, finger ends, jinks, no jinks, marjinks, snatches. Perhaps there were more but can't think of them.

Jonboy, yes you about got them all there with the fivestones, but do you remember the little silver bombs that you put 'caps' in and dropped them with a loud bang, and a couple of cocoa tins and a piece of string for a telephone, and then there was the potato gun, and tip-cat, a piece of stick about six-inches long, balance it then strike the end of the cat, as it flew in the air you struck it hard, and knocked it as far as you could. Sure was better than watching the boring telly.

I expect many of these have been mentioned before, but these are some of my early memories: Sweets - Flying saucers, liquorice bootlaces, liquorice pipes, sherbert dabs, parma violets, slot machines with Gobstoppers ... Dipping rhubarb sticks into a bag of sugar. Pinching the crispy bread done in the oven at a friend's house when I was five that was put out for the chickens. Delicious. Just like melba toast. Cod liver oil and malt, condensed milk (my sister and I used to buy a tin of it and keep it in the fridge ... despite making a rule that we spooned it both together, we often found the other had sneaked to the fridge and tucked in!) Bread and dripping with loads of salt and pepper Tinned fruit and jelly for pudding but with a slice of bread and butter to eat with it, mother's idea. Walking into town from Hearsall Lane with my friend to go to Hogarth's store, I think it was in Broadgate, or could have been Corporation Street, to buy some "three-halfpenny bundles"... little leftover bits of material that we used to make dolls' clothes. TV programmes - Muffin the Mule, the Bumblies, Hank, Anne of Green Gables, Andy Pandy, What's My Line, the Adventures of Robin Hood (I was madly in love with Richard Greene), All Your Own - the kids' 'talent' show that I always wanted to be on, then the wonderful Westerns ... Wagon Train, Hopalong Cassidy. The dreaded Interludes such as The Potter's Wheel and The Windmill with it's dreary music. I remember when ITV was introduced my dad had to buy a little black box to put beside the TV set and if we didn't want to watch BBC (remember the stuffy announcers - Sylvia Peters, Macdonald Hobley?) he would have to turn a knob on the box to get ITV, with, and what a novelty then, ADVERTS!

Mother would come home with skiens and skiens of wool, she would plonk me down in a chair, make me stick my arms out, place a skien over my wrists and wind it in to a ball. some days my arms ached so badly and pins and needles ran down my arm. I had a couple of pullovers that kept my knees warm, we had the largest multi-coloured squares and oblongs bedspread you could imagine. By the time I was eight I had two knitted maroon pullovers, pairs of red and green gloves, mustard socks, sky-blue scarf and balaclava helmets, much like gunmen have today, but one of them the eyeslit was slightly higher than the other, and when the Livi opened, for a few weeks I was the only Coventry kid with woollen trunks. Mother had been in bed ill for some weeks, then she decided she needed a bath, so father took the tin bath off the back wall, with the help of my older sister they lugged it up our narrow twisted stairs, sister fell on the steps a few times and the bath slid into my fathers knees, then he had to lug the hot water from our front grate to the bedroom, the room got wet, the stairs got wet, he got in a right mood, later he couldn't tip the water out the window into the street, so he lugged it across the landing through our room, opened the bottom sash and tipped it out the window, now our room was wet and so was the landing, when he had finished we came down stairs and the back door was soaking and the water had run under the door and soaked the back room. Happy early days.

My gran used to live in Lower Ford Street. There was no bathroom so she kept a large china potty under her bed for her and my granddad to use - fancy struggling down the narrow stairs each morning with that! The lavatory was out in the yard and was made up of planks going from one side of the wall to the other with a large hole in the middle to sit above !! No fancy loo paper in those days, I'm sure many of you remember the pieces of newspaper tied together with string and stuck on a nail. As a little girl I dreaded going into that place as it was full of cobwebs up in the corners, and naturally, spiders. Speeded me up somewhat though! There was also a large tin bath that I think was hung on the fence outside in the yard. She had a dolly tub in the corner of the small kitchen where she boiled her whites on a Monday (I think Monday was always wash day then) and a large mangle to wring out the washing. Looking back it amazes me how she managed - she was a fantastic plain cook and had one of those small dark grey mottled ovens on legs and had to light the gas with a match.and it used to make quite a bang. Scared me to death that did, something I can still not do to this day. Perishable food was kept on a slab in the larder cupboard. There were hardly any work surfaces but she always managed to serve up several dinners at a time, all piping hot and delicious. One day my cousin and I were sitting in the dining room when there was a terrific crashing noise. We rushed to the other room at the front of the house to find that the ceiling had collapsed! What a mess. Her house was demolished years ago to make room for Sky Blue Way.

Janey, hi - it was like that in our house all the time, we had two rooms front and back, two doors front and back, small pantry in the back room. My brother was hardly fourteen when he acquired an old three wheeled Morgan car, always tinkering with it, he wore an old pair of overalls with the braces and he got filthy dirty. He walked in the back door and mother went mad, so he shot through the middle door to go out the front door, but dad was on a stool with a bucket of chalk and a broom painting the front room ceiling. Trying to dodge the handle of the broom he somehow got it caught in his braces, dragged dad off the stool, my sister rushed to see what the commotion was, and fell on top of them, covered in chalky water and oil and dirt. I laughed so much that mum made me help my brother to clean it all up, dad stopped our pocket money to buy some knew chalk. I loved my childhood.

I remember lots of episodes. Dad won a bird in a cage in a raffle at work, gave it me to look after. He placed it on a hook above the window and the settee, I loved the bird, and it sang it's head off. One evening months later, I was playing with my soldiers on the table, my sister was sitting side on to the table with a great yellow bowl of flour milk and butter, stirring with a wooden spoon, dad was sitting mending a pair of boots. He was hammering the leather onto the boot, the head of the hammer flew off, straight for my sister, she dropped the bowl and leapt onto the settee, hit her head on the bird cage knocking it off the hook, the door came open, the bird flew out, the hammer head caught my sister on the ankle, her hair covered in bird droppings, I dived for the birdcage and slipped in the batter on the floor. Mum came out of the back room, the bird fluttered by her, she put up her hand as she did not realise what it was, knocked her glasses off, my sister was crying, my brother said 'good I hope it gets killed' so I hit him on the nose and it bled so he was crying. Eventually I slipped out the front door, found my butterfly net, caught the bird, and everything was put right after a time.

Geez Kaga, I am surprised you have even survived this long. I can imagine that scenario, what a scream, never a dull moment at your place. It's a wonder your poor mother didn't leave home!

We had a whatsit, a thingumabob, stood near the whatnot, next to the gloryhole, the guzunder was in the gloryhole along with the housebrick hot water bottle, the sideboard stood in the corner, the safe was in the pantry and the piano was under the gasmeter. The kitchen was the backroom and the washroom, mum went all round the houses to say no, and shook her head when dad nodded off. When we came in from the loo, mum would ask if we had pulled the chain, and my brother would pull the silver chain on the gaslight and say I have, and plunge us into darkness. We had a porcelain horse about a foot high on the sideboard, dad kept his fob watch round its neck and mum kept her thimbles on its ears. We kept the round cottage loaf, in a square tin. The plum tree stood in the pavement.

Hello to everyone. Does anyone remember in the early days, which were the best may I say, the old dolly tub and dolly, also the old cast iron mangle which we may have still got, and, the best till last, the old tin bath in front of a coal fire, then jump into a cold bed with proper cotton sheets. I clearly still remember those days like it was yesterday (I wish) and to me they were the best.

Not forgetting ye olde wooden clothes horse, which was a permanent fixture in my Mum's kitchen, and my early working days. I was always swilling clothes out for work and hanging them on the horse to dry overnight. My Dad used to hold them against a mirror (forever hanging above the fireplace) to see if it steamed the mirror if so I was not allowed to wear whatever. Those old tin baths would be ideal today for a small raised kitchen garden. I think we are spoilt today with all the modern technology - or are we? Do 'Ironmongers' still exist?

Sorry, Dreamtime. I also remember the old wooden clothes horse, my nan and my mum had one, which they had it in the front room in front of the gas fire. I would love to go back to the 50s and 60s where we had back to back houses. You couldn't beat the old tin bath and, yes, I do believe we are spoilt.

Yes we may like the old days, but kids wouldn't, they had a series on tele' of the fifties, and the kids quit before the series ended I believe, couldn't stand the old fashioned way. Most of the stuff we had mangle, and stuff was bought in the twenties when my parents got married, so we had all the old gear. Even to no piped water, they had a little hand pump that came up from the well, at the side of the house, wasn't till the thirties we had piped water. We had a great big gas-meter tank that you fed coins in for the light and gas-stove, and it was placed left of the front door as you walked in and nearly everyone hit there head on it but the gas-board refused to move it. We really were down to basics, but I loved it for the warmth and closeness of the family in times of trouble.