The not so good old days

I think the food coupons changed on a Thursday, or it might have been that my dad got paid on a Thursday (in cash of course, my parents never had a bank account) but that was the evening my mother took me to the Co-op for the big weekly shop. The manager told my mother she shouldn't bring me with her because even at 8 years old I was a shrewd buyer. I would tell her not to buy things we didn't need or couldn't afford. I used to make sure she put something in the various envelopes for the gas and electricity.

We bought sugar out of a huge sack - it was put into a little blue bag and weighed. Butter was cut off a huge slab, and bacon cut to taste on a slicer.
Biscuits were in square tins and they were also weighed out. If you were lucky, you could buy broken biscuits for a pittance.
I got my 'spends' of one shilling (5p for our younger members) and I would go alone, in the dark, to the nearest newsagents, where I would buy The Red Letter and The Silver Star (mushy romance magazines), and a bar of Cadbury's Milk Tray, which had six different centres. Later on, we bought 'Mis-Shapes' - good chocolates which had been deformed in manufacture.

We moved from a slum house in Salford to a shiny new council house on an 'overspill' estate in Little Hulton when I was 13 and I thought we had really arrived. Two lavatories, a fitted kitchen, a little garden and a tiled range. The road was a broad avenue with little cul-de-sacs of eight houses sideways on to it. When I was 18, I got married and we were able to buy a 3-bedroomed semi on an older 'private' estate very close to my mother'. It cost £1,500. We sold it after four years for £1,800 and could hardly believe that we had made enough to pay all the mortgage interest and legal fees.

Talking about the 40s now and because my mother is no longer alive I can say that she had an affair in 1944. Reading 'Millions Like Us' I realised that she was just one of many women who had affairs just because they were let out of the house, freed from only housework to do other work.
She was a legal secretary and worked for the chief of police and he said he fell in love with her at the interview and gave her the job. Later she told me it was the happiest time of her life but both were married - his wife was disabled so there was no talk of divorce.
I think that many women had the best of their lives in the 40s and were miserable and disappointed in the 50s.
The 50s is often regarded as a perfect time because there was hardly any crime but I don't know what else can be said for it.

When i started working in the 70's I was just seventeen. I was subjected to the most horrible sexual advances from bosses, some who were in their fifties. One used to rub up against me while I stood at the photocopier. I was scared to say anything as he was a manager. Then in my next job my boss thought it was hilarious to chase us girls round the office. He would catch one of us around the waist and swing us around, while obviously getting a thrill from what he was up to. I remember telling my mum and she just shrugged and said that's what men were like! I left that job because I couldn't stand it any longer. Thankfully my following workplaces didn't tolerate that sort of thing. When I think of how my daughter is treated as an equal at work I thank God for progress.

inishowen those men would all be out of a job these days.

I remember when I had a weekend job in the office of a car showroom at the age of 18, and had to take documents through the workshop to the manager's office. There were always wolf whistles and the manager would could out of his office with steam coming out of his ears, blaming me! He told me I must go round the outside of the building, even in the pouring rain, to get to his office in future. I told him where he could stick his job and walked out.

I was born in 1946, just before the NHS - my mother went into a Nursing Home to have me. If she couldn't have afforded that it would have meant a home birth I guess, not sure who would have attended As a young child I can remember suffering from severe ear-ache which looking back must have also perforated as I can remember my ear "running" - that was before antibiotics were generally available, I was given ear drops which must have been pretty useless as I can remember the pain and night after night crying. I guess by the 50's things were definately looking up with regard to health etc.