when i was young

[Stuart Henderson]

Some really great & interesting posts above and can relate to most of the content. I was born in 1931 and my mother died when I was nine making things even worse with air raids ,ratuining & other shortages, We were poor I guess but as a kid didnt notice I suppose accepting hand me downs from more well off neighbours,running errands ,paper round etc.
Recently visited my son & family in Saudi Arabia who live on a BAE compound which is very modern & well equipped.swimming poolS,gym,bowling alley,restarauntS and lovely school. My wife and I were invited by the headmistress (because of our age) to give a talk & answer questions on toys we had as youngsters and life in general back then to the class of six year olds. We sat in front of the class , onthey were on the floor on mats, Lots of questions, did you have telly/computor,car, icecream but the one we liked best "did we live in a cave"? Cpme to think I bet my daughter in law planted that one in their heads. It really was a great expeience and I must admit even a bit frightening for this old geezer...... They later sent a photo to us all of them signed the back.
Stuart

[David Williams]

Hi Charles.
The wife still has her scrubbing board,hand mangle and her
clothes line,cant afford to buy all these new gadgets.She
wouldnt know how to use them anyway!!!!!!!!
Dave Williams(R583900)

[Jim Brady]

Where I was born and brought up in Bootle,it was said that Bootle was the most bombed town (town not city) in England.Having said that it was a great playground for us after the war with all the bombed buildings where we had many gang huts.We had the docks one side of us and the gasworks on the other so it is no wonder the Germans would'nt leave the place alone.
I came from a big family so it was six in a bed three at the top and three at the bottom.When you think, you slept under a lath and plaster ceiling, roof space and a slate roof,no loft insulation then.Sash windows,no double glazing and the wind had no problem finding it's way through.The inside of the windows would be iced up and if you left a glass of water on the dressing table that would've turned to ice.It's a wonder we never got hypothermia.
My mother was'nt one for buying christmas presents but one thing, we were always well fed and well dressed,riggged out a couple of time a year.The thing was we had an outside toilet down the back yard,no hot water and we thought that we were quite well off.When we looked around I suppose we were compared to some,but there was'nt anybody around in those days to tell us that we were living in squalor and that we were underpriviledged.Yes the outside loo,now that I am older and I look back I remember every winter it would freeze up and we would have to pour buckets of water down it,but the most stupid part of it is that when the thaw came we would have a burst which would result in my dad knocking it up.The land lord would have to send his man around to repair the burst,this would be most of the houses in the area.Did nobody ever think of lagging the bloody thing.
I had such a good childhood it would take up to much time to tell you on here.
Regards.
Jim.b.

[Ivan Cloherty]

When I was young !you want me to remember that far back?. I suppose for many of us prewar kids life was pretty much the same, hard at the time but we as kids didn't realise, a nightmare for our mothers, again we kids didn't realise it, I say mothers, because fathers were rarely on the scene, albeit for different reasons than they are today!

Got bombed out three times, was it something I'd shouted at the planes? mother always reckoned it was personal, first time I don't remember as was too young but do remember the Underground "sleepovers!", 2nd time remember standing in a bedroom after the all clear, when all of a sudden the front of the house collapsed and we were left staring into the road, that caused mother a bit of consternation, 3rd time came out the air raid shelter to find a heap of rubble, In between bombings we travelled North South East and West as evacuees with our canvas name labels tied to our coats and cardboard gasmasks strung around our necks, somehow my sister and I always seemed to be billeted together. Could it be that no one wanted that cheeky looking little troubler causer without it's handler! and believe me my sister was like a dog handler, but aren't they supposed to love their charges, I think she must have taken mother's joke about be being responsible seriously.

Mind you with all these bombings we didn't need the services of a removal van, as there was nothing left to move, apart from the photos in mother's handbag, which went everywhere with her, god when I think back, the situation must have been soul destroying for her at times not knowing where your kids where, where your husband was, whether alive or dead. She was one very petite strong willed woman, there didn't seem much that phased her. In the last year of the war we ended up in a condemed cottage in the Yorkshire Dales, with no running water, no gas, no electric and the famous "Don't forget to take some paper down there with you" toilet, bloody cooold in winter. She and hundreds, nay thousands like her were the backbone of this country, never really complaining, just getting on with it, protecting their families as best they could, standing in queues for hours not knowing what they were queueing for, not leaving the queue to find out, afraid of losing their place, most of the time the thing you were queueing for having been sold out and replace by something you didn't need.

Somehow she always managed every now and again to find a "Dinky" toy for me, always second hand invariably with a part or wheel missing but loved all the same. On the Dales we made our own fun with instructions "not to come home till teatime and keep out of trouble" somehow we never got bored, killing those Germans hiding behind farmer Brown's apple trees, farmer Brown probably thinking "funny kids those townies"

All I can say is perhaps we were too young to remember the seriousness of it all, but nature has a way of helping the young accept things as normal, when they are not, did I enjoy it at the time, I probably did but of course I did not realise the heartache it was causing in my immediate family which was being repeated in every town and village and hamlet across our fair and pleasant land or how it prematurely aged our mothers bless em as they managed to keep us on track through thick and thin, and although being small and petite she had one hell of a right hand slap if we got too far out of line, a right hand that was to be respected, especially when accompanied by those immortal words "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" I assured her in later life it was one of the few things she ever got wrong!

[Ron B Manderson]

Somethin Vernon said about comics. Do you remember the Beano, Dandy, Eagle, Rover, School Friends etc. Something the young of today may never see. Are there still any in publication?

What about the rest.
Film Fun, radio fun, beezer, hotspur,bunty, victor
Question then Who was on the front, and who was on the back of the eagle
I loved the centre page with the cutout picture.

I am sure there was more comics printed.
you can still get Dandy, beano
Ron the batcave

[John Arton]

Firstly..the Beano is still going strong and is as popular now as it ever was. Early copies go for a fortune. A number of its characters are now being used for film characters, Desperate Dan etc.

Now I may be a bit of an old fart but i'm not that old. I have no war memories of the war as I was not even a twinkle in my dads eye by the end of the war, but I have lived in some pretty poor houses.
In 52 when we came back from Gibraltar for some unknown reason we ended up in Ambleside in the Lake District.
Why my parents chose the Lake District I don't know as they were both born in Manchester and all their relations lived in either Manchester, Liverpool or Southport. Maybe the lack of housing in those places due to bombing had something to do with it.
The only connection my parents had with the area was my on my mothers side where some of her distant relatives in past times had lived there and her brother had spent time working on the Hawes resovoir for Manchester water works.
Anyway we ended up living in this 100 yr. old cottage (its still there much upgraded though) that had no inside toilet, electric or gas. Cooking was done on the open hearth fire with oven attached and baths were taken in a tin bath in front of the fire.
My abiding memories of that house, even though I was only 4 yrs old, was a huge beech tree in the front garden and that a fox lived in a big shed that was in the garden. The house was built on a slope with a road down one side and one year after some heavy ran the water running down the road came flooding in through the stable type back door.
We lived there for around a year before for some reason we moved to a farmhouse outside wWindermere. When I say outside I mean over one of the hills surrounding the place. No buses within a mile passed this place so to get to the shops was at least a mile walk over the hills or to the nearest road where buses occasionally passed, but in those days all the local shops used to do weekly deliveries to your door, so provisions were no problem.
This farmhouse was perhaps even worse than the previous house. Again no inside toilet, no electric lighting though we did get electricity (one circuit) put in for cooking with. Paraffin heaters, oil lamps and a chemical toilet for through the night.
The tenant farmer had moved into one of the original farm workers cottages and was renting the farm house to gain some income. They were immensley tight-fisted, they used to charge us more for their farm eggs than the local shop that they normally sold them too.
My memories of this place are that they had a large flock of geese that I had to guide my younger brother and one of my elder sisters through every day as they were terrified of them, of ducks and hens wandering through the house, helping the farmer pluck hens and realising that although they were hanging upside down, they were not dead (try it, hold a chicken upside down by its leg and it immediatley goes to sleep giving you the impression it is dead, then try plucking it, you will get the same suprise I did), and accidently pouring pitch tar over the farmers young son which resulted him having to have all his blond hair cut off and in winter being snowed in literally as the snow had come down the big farmhouse kitchen chimney and half filled the so called kitchen to such an extent we actually had to dig our way out from inside the back door before we could even open it to dig our way to the outside toilet.
After a year of living there my parents somehow managed to purchase a brand new bungalow some miles away in a small village on the main route into the Lakes. This meant that for the first time we had a inside toilet and bathroom together with mains electricity and access to a regular bus route. This was the house where we all grew up in from 1954 and which my mother lived in until she had to go into care in her later years.
The village consisted of a church, 4 farms, a garage, and around 40 houses.
I grew up working on farms in the school holidays and later in my youth, myself and all my class mates, allways had summer jobs working in the tourist industry either washing up in hotels, working on the pleasure boats on the Lakes etc. One summer I actually worked for the forestry commission on one of their plantations, tending the young saplings..soul destroying working on your hands and knees crawling up and down miles of rows of sapling, pulling weeds away from them to prevent them being choked and giving them each a handfull of fertiliser.
When we were not working we were out till late at night on our bikes getting up to all sorts of pranks.
I regulalrly used to disappear for a full day on my bike and my mother (father was dead by this time) never had any worries, unlike parents today who seem to live in fear of their children being kidnapped/attacked or even worse, which reading the papers seems to be a quite common occurence.
It's such a pity that the children of today cannot enjoy the freedoms that we did even such a short time ago as the 60's. It now seems that t.v. and computer games have replaced open air play with your mates. A follow on seems to be that a lot of these kids today will not take on the poorly paid jobs that we did for reasons that I cannot fathom or maybe because of all these damm stupid labour laws we have these days.
rgds
Capt. John Arton (ret'd)

[Lou Barron]

After reading these posts i am very impressed by the stories it seems that most of us was brought up in similar styles .It was the days when Britain had people who could put up with the hardships and still come out fighting

[Tony Morcom]

I wasn't even born until 1957 but even in those days we found plenty to amuse ourselves. Like most of you guys I was out from breakfast until teatime. Played in the fields opposite and had the freedom to go where I wanted and when providing I wasn't dragged home by the local constabulary. I do remember the excitement when our first TV was delivered and plugged in. First 2 major programs remembered were Churchill's state funeral and the men walking on the moon. Other than that it was some years before tv started to cater for youngsters. Got the slipper from my dad a good few times which never did me any harm and made me respect my elders ~ a trait sadly lacking today. Life was good in those days and best of all we were rarely ill unlike the kids of today who always seem to be off school with snivels or bugs in one form or another. If we got sick because of something we ate, that was it, you were sick and got over it. These days if you are sick you are not allowed back to school for 3 days!! The other thing is we went to school to learn whereas these days they go to school to have fun ~ its no wonder they learn so little. I can't believe that my daughter, who will be nine in April is only now just learning her 8 times tables and they still have not been taught about money!! Mind you she can type on a computer a lot quicker than me and knows just what Google does and how to use it. The other day she was photographed at school by the local rag because they were doing some special day activity. She was very annoyed when her photo was not in the paper. I said to her that maybe it was in the online edition somewhat tongue in cheek. She, my wife and I all share the same printer which is connected up on my desk. Imagine how gobsmacked I was when exactly 3 minutes later the printer kicked in a low and behold it was her picture from the online edition of the local rag. Not only had she googled the paper and found it, she had found the story and set it to print!!!!!!!!!!! Send her out to play with her mates and she's back in 10 minutes because they are bored!! Its a whole new world.

[Jim Brady]

Yes all these empty bombed and some not bombed buildings was a great playground.We got inot one place and went up into the loft,in the dark we could just make out this "body" hanging from the rafters.this needed investigating but we did'nt have a torch.This "posh" kid had just moved into the area I bet he's got a torch someone suggested,go and ask him if he wants to join the gang and if he does he's got to have a torch.He had a torch it was the type like a hip flask with the big magnifying glass on the front.We edged upto this "body" and we were prodding it with a stick,after all that it turned out tobe a full side of bacon still in the sacking.someone had obviously been playing the black market and had left it.just across the road from there was a Welsh church which had been taken over by the government and turned into a British Canteen (theres one to remember).We decided to make the vestrey into our HQ,it needs a good scrub out it was decided.Upstairs there was a big tank of water,free standing like you have in your loft.We could've used fire buckets to bring some water down but one of the elders wanted the full tank down.We took the top off what had been the counter where people were served their meals and placed this big plank up the stairs.We made a rope fast around the tank and proceeded to lower it down the plank,all hands on the rope, steady boys steady.All was going well until a policeman appeared at the bottom of the stairs,panic set in all hands let go of the rope,the tank took off at speed hit a nail on the way down went a*** over tit and drenched the copper through.As it happened one of the first things we sussed out when we got into these places were good escape routes so nobody was caught.
Regards.
Jim.B.

[Les Woodard]

Parents trying to make ends meet so not much wriggle room for extra's. Forming our own street gangs and making sure no one else from other streets where let in. Was years before I saw my first black bloke. Now kids are kept under lock and key and not allowed to form gangs in case they get in trouble for not allowing others in the gang and the wonders of finding that they are not the only white kid on the block. No we had it all because there where not the rules then that are in force today but we knew when something was wrong.