Spring and the warmer weather is always very welcome but how much more welcome it used to be before the days of central heating. Global warming has resulted in seasons which are barely recognizable as those we knew in our youth. Each year by the time we returned to school for the autumn term, around the 7th September, summer would be finished and the autumn truly with us. On the whole it tended to be much cooler and wetter and the prospect was for even cooler days and nights from that point right through until April or May. My recollections of the weather from the mid-forties until the early sixties was that you could depend upon it to be only moderately warm in the Summer, wet and cool in the Autumn, wet and cold during the winter with January and February being particularly cold and with the chance of some snow. Spring was a very changeable season but as one expected it to be it never came as a surprise. March would bring wind, which would be gusty and chilly but invigorating, and not too much rain. Whereas April could be relied upon to provide us with a great many showers of rain, often quite heavy, interspersed with some warm weather, which always promised an early summer, but always deceived. May could be generally dry but not particularly warm and it would be almost mid-Summer’s day before summer was really with us. But this was not summer as we think of it now. The average temperature would probably be about 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit in the system we then used) and we would begin to think it a little Mediterranean like if it sometimes reached into the mid 20s C (25C = 77F), but on those very rare occasions when it hit the high 20sC or even the low 30s C (30C = 86F) it would for most of us seem unbearably hot. It was rare that increased warmth was not accompanied by increased humidity and even rarer if not followed by thunder storms and heavy rains which would bring the temperature plunging back to the levels which we were used to and with which we could cope.
During most of this period we were a family of 7 with Dad as the sole wage earner. Shortly before he retired in the 1960s he was still getting only £12 a week, therefore, back in the 1940s it would have been somewhat less. As inflation didn’t take off until the late 1960s, at this time any pay award was usually very small and certainly didn’t happen annually as a matter of course, therefore, one might hazard a guess that Dad would have been earning something of the order of £11-£11.10.00 (£11.50) per week. To that princely sum could be added Family Allowance, which amounted in the aggregate to a few shillings a week. The family allowance was, at one time, 37.5p (7/6d) per child but this ceased at the age of 16. From this had to come the rent, food, clothing and heating. The first two of these were the most important and were never cut back but they would have left little over for the other necessities such as clothing and heating. As one had to be warm both at home and out of it, decent clothing would have been the more important of the two. Dad working as he did for London Transport was provided with a uniform and that he wore day in and day out. Other than that he had a suit, which was kept for occasions such as weddings and funerals and lasted him for many years. Mum probably had a couple of frocks and or skirts, one of which would have been kept for best (in those days very few women wore trousers and Mum was not one of them). Like most housewives of those days, to keep her frock clean she always wore a pinafore over it.
We children relied very heavily on hand-you-downs from either relatives or from neighbours and from the combined making and mending skills of Mum and Dad. The whole family’s clothing was supplemented by what Mum could make, and she could make many things. She was always a very fast knitter and she certainly got a lot of practice for she would knit all our jumpers and socks. She could also turn her hand to dress making for herself and Pat and for us boys in our younger years the occasional summer blouse. Dad on the other hand was kept hard at it mending our shoes on his lasts. Looking back it seems that Dad was forever soaking leather in water to make it flexible or forming it into soles for shoes. The pieces of 4-5mm thick sheets of leather, which he brought home with alarming regularity, would on their arrival appear to be as inflexible as pieces of timber. He would place a holed, or otherwise sadly damaged shoe on to one of his lasts and remove the last remnants of the previous sole, which, probably, he had so lovingly formed there only a few weeks earlier. Once the new leather was sufficiently softened so as to be malleable he would nail it onto the shoe and then proceed to cut it to shape with his lethally sharp leather knives; many a time his poor hands would suffer yet another cut in the name of love.
Only in the direst necessity would a new item have been bought. It must have been particularly hard on my parents when, in 1949, I won a scholarship to Brockley County Grammar School and a uniform, PT kit, rugby kit and cricket kit was required, most of it new. Chiesman’s at Lewisham were the sole suppliers of the uniform and their articles were, by the standards of our life, very expensive. Further, as the school colours were chocolate brown, emerald green and old gold, it was virtually impossible to find cheaper alternatives elsewhere. Pat had been the first of us children to qualify for a place at Grammar school when, in 1947, she had passed her Common Entrance Examination, or 11 plus as it came to be known. However, the expense of sending a child to a Grammar school was almost certainly responsible for Pat missing out on her opportunity. When, two years after I went to Brockley, Ken qualified to join me it must have been particularly hard for Pat. Was she a victim of the working class prejudice, which said that as a girl a better education, would be wasted on her or was it that two years before I was given the opportunity the family fortunes could not bear the expense? Whatever the reason she was very unfortunate that she did not attend the level of school for which she was manifestly qualified.
This left little money for coal for the open fire, our only means of heating other than sitting around the gas cooker or the water boiler on washing days. Except for the very few occasions when we were ill in bed and a fire would be made in the grate in the bedroom, the only room which was heated was the living room. At 49 Elfrida Crescent this room, which was used for all daytime activities other than cooking, laundry and bathing, stretched the full width of the house. The fire was located on the wall adjoining the next property. Within an area of five feet from the fire we were generally warm, at least on the side facing it, however, one’s back always tended to feel cool. When facing the fire, on the right was a large, wide window, on the wall opposite the fire was a small window and towards the end of the left hand wall was the door, which led into the hall. The metal Critall windows which were installed when the property had been built just after the First World War suffered from a combination of rusting and the remains of the last pre-war painting job and so now, being unable to close properly, allowed one to have a continuous supply of fresh cold air, when the wind was in the appropriate direction. Decoration of Council property then as now did not allow for such niceties as rubbing down and general preparation but instead received a coat of whatever paint was available immediately on top of the existing rust, dirt, etc. Windows and doors were not double-glazed, in fact very few if any in Britain at that time and for decades afterwards were. In fact I had never heard of such a luxury until I met Lu and discovered that those soft, weak, lucky individuals on the Continent took it for granted in their homes.
As soon as one started to move away from the fire one began to grow cool. Outside of the living room it was very cold. Our toilet was on a landing three steps up from the hall but it was so cold in there that it might as well have been at the bottom of the garden. You did not spend more time there than was necessary. Going to bed was something of a nightmare. The room was cold, therefore, undressing was carried out at breakneck speed but not because it was a pleasure to crawl between the sheets. The household possessed a stone hot water bottle but this was usually reserved for the sick or the youngest but even then it could only warm the part it touched and at about 9 inches in length and perhaps between 2 and 3 inches in width it did not touch very much. Therefore, getting into the cotton sheets of bed was not one of life’s greatest pleasures. If you were lucky you kept your socks on but if either Mum or Dad came to check on you then you were forced to abandon them. It would always take a little while for the bed to warm to your body temperature or, as it seemed at times, for your body heat to drop to the level of the room. Once in bed it would take wild horses to prise you from it.
If going to bed was a torture then you must try to imagine what getting up was like the next morning. It was still dark out and you felt that night was still very much in command. If it had been a particularly cold one with either a heavy frost or snow then you could guaranty that on the inside of the window pane there would be a thin layer of ice from the condensation formed as your warm breath hit the icy window. If the coolness of the room needed to be verified this was easily achieved by bringing the face out from beneath the sheet, exhaling and watching the cold air turning it into an ice-laden mini-cloud. Under these circumstances, it was very rare that you bit the bullet and jumped straight from bed into your clothes, which had been cooling over night beside the bed, but instead you would delay the inevitable as long as possible. Every now and again, between the scrape, scrape of the toast being shaved, Mum would call up to enquire if we were yet up, the answer to which, knowing that she preferred the positive, was always yes. But eventually the shock of leaving the womb had to be faced again.
So out of bed we would jump, not onto a nice warm, wool carpet but instead onto the lino which must have been maintained at a temperature at least 5 degrees cooler than the white, frosty garden outside. As you had probably slept in your shirt in absence of any pyjamas and as underwear was something which was only worn by those who could afford such luxuries, dressing was accomplished in no time, usually within the warmth of the bed. You would then race down stairs to the toilet and from there into the kitchen where at the sink you would complete the morning ablutions. As showering had not yet entered our vocabulary and bathing was something you did just once a week, needed or not, all that was required was a quick dampening of the face and hands with a cold, barely wet flannel, it was not possible to wash more of the body because by this stage of the proceedings the only other parts which were still uncovered were the knees, a quick once over of the teeth with the communal toothbrush and if you were up to it a quick pull through the hair with the remaining teeth of the communal comb. From bed to the breakfast table, via the kitchen sink, probably took no more than about three minutes and, amazingly, by this time you were feeling warm. If porridge was the order of the morning you were provided with a reasonable bulwark against whatever depth of coolness lurked outside.
Home