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.