with hoops. The boys used to have iron ones, but the girls had wooden ones, and we used to have the middle size, I think it used to cost fourpence with a stick. We'd come down the road before school – there was very little traffic then and it was just horse traffic – and then go up the road and come back again. And then there'd be ball games in the wintertime. Also in the winter my mother would dress up with my Aunt Lilly. She used to dress up as a man. She was slender, but Lilly was plumper, so she used to wear a black cap. It was just making fun amongst your own people.
Mrs Skinner
At Christmas, there was an advert in the paper for a nice big doll, and my mother said to me, ‘Would you like it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ When I got up on Christmas morning, it was a big cloth doll filled with sawdust, but it was beautifully dressed – my mother had dressed it. We also had a Wooden Betty which my uncle had made out of wood. The eyes, nose, mouth and teeth were burnt in with a poker then painted. It went through five of us, and then it went in the oven to heat the Sunday dinner.
Fred Lightburn
We used to make firecrackers for the fifth of November with gunpowder from the store. The powder was in pellets and we used to roll it out into a fine powder with a rolling pin, then there was a certain way of filling it into folded paper. One or two of the old hands was well up to the job, and you used to get some hefty crackers, I can tell you.
Mary Maughan
For our one holiday a year we went to South Shields. There were shuggy boats and marquees, you could get a meal for sixpence and the village brass band would sit in a ring, and it was tuppence to have a dance to the band. It was with Sunday school, you got a bag of mixed buns, and mother would send teacakes and home-made pies.
Alwyn Lewis
There was a rugby field just outside our house and the girls used to play rugby with us. They used to wear clogs. There was one girl lived on this dirty old street called Becca Lewis. Becca Lewis was a great big rough girl – we used to think she was a woman, but she must have only been in her teens. She used to play rugby in her clogs and we were afraid to go near her.
Mr Patten
When you got home you maybe got a meal or you had to wait until the father came in from his job. If you didn't get a meal when you got in, you took off your school clothes, as you couldn't afford to soil those, and you went and played outside again. Well, there were apple trees, pear trees and plum trees in your district somewhere, and you would have to get them some way or another. Everything like that was fair game, and it was always fair game to tease the keepers and those people who had apple trees and things. Even if we couldn't eat them, it was a question of being clever enough to steal them from the owners. Your status was improved if you were the one to steal the most.
Mr Harrison
I used to see fights at school and there was a fight in the streets every night as well. We used to play in the pit pond and it was full of dead ducks. You had to shove them to one side while you were swimming.
Polly Lee
We used to call in at the greengrocers and get straw ropes off orange boxes. We couldn't afford proper skippy ropes. If you saw anybody with skippy ropes with handles on you thought they had plenty of money. The straw skips didn't last very long though, they'd soon break. You sometimes used to sneak a bit off your mother's line, but when you were skipping double you needed a long rope.
Florence Hannah Warn
We did not have any pocket money, but sometimes we ran an errand for someone and received a halfpenny, so we would buy some sweets, and for a farthing there were lots of things one could buy. There was a strip of toffee called Everlasting, which it was not; a braid of liquorice which broke into strips and were called Shoe Strings; a slab of black toffee called Wiggle Waggle, which blackened the tongue and lips. Bull's eyes were marbles of sweet which could be eaten, but when rubbed on a rough wall, revealed a flat surface with rings of varying colour, hence bull's eyes. Sweet shrimps, white or pink fondant mice – we girls were a trifle squeamish about eating these – for a farthing you could get six pretty little boiled sweets called Rosebuds.
D. G. I. Lodge
My brother had diphtheria when he was two and my mother was expecting another baby, so I went to stay with my aunt and uncle, who was a doctor. They had no children but longed for a child. I stayed and I stayed, and then one day I said, ‘I think one father and one mother and one little girl is best,’ and from then on I stayed with them.
One night my uncle woke me up and put me in a dressing gown and carried me to the front door in his arms. It was a dark night. The clouds were low and misty. We couldn't see anything. Then we heard the migratory birds going over. It was the most wonderful sound I've ever heard. They were flying so low and seemed to go on for ever. It was amazing. Curlews and sandpipers, redshank, all piping and calling to one another. I know nothing to compare with that.
Ray Head
I went to work for the Post Office in the City of London. Hounslow was an agricultural town in those days, a little rural place. Most people living there worked on the land. Most people working in London still came from the area close to the City – I was an exception. Most of these people walked to work. There were thousands of houses in Lambeth, Southwark, Whitechapel and Dalston, and all the inhabitants used to walk to work in offices which were really clerical factories. Everything was so labour-intensive. Typewriters were only just beginning and the telephone was a luxury for the very, very few, so everything was written by hand. In the banks, all the ledgers were done by hand and there was a great deal of clerical work to do.
I used to wear a stiff collar, tie, trousers, heavy boots, a bowler hat and an umbrella. You needed heavy boots because they soon wore out with all the walking. The people higher up wore top hats. The atmosphere in the office was pretty formal. Contact between men and women was very limited. We were kept apart and we dined in separate dining rooms. There was no palliness with the bosses. We were very humble. In spite of all this, we were happy. It almost felt like a club.
Ronald Chamberlain
We lived in Canonbury in Islington. It was a very nice, lower middle-class area, populated by clerks, post office people, bankers and people who worked in shops. My own father was a clerk in the Post Office. He earned a modest income, about seven or eight pounds a week, and he brought up three children on that. He was always very particular to be well groomed and well dressed. He wore a bowler hat and never wore shabby clothes. He never worked in his shirtsleeves and there were no Christian names used at work. They were very dignified in the office. He was a very modest man but he had a very high sense of propriety and conduct. All Post Office people had that attitude to their work. I remember being out with my father one evening and we saw a postman who had finished his work and he was slouching and rolling – he had obviously been drinking. My father was enraged by this. He went up to the postman and said, ‘Pull yourself together, my man! You are a civil servant and so am I, and in the Post Office, you can't behave like this!’ That shows the
