half loaf

galen I can just eat malt extract on a spoon out of the jar. Why waste it on bread. I love it.

Ugh, I hated that malt extract! Loved pikelets toasted in front of the red fire, on a toasting fork.

I can still remember Mums Co-op divi number 74509 in fact I still have the little black book. If I had been particularly helpful through the Summer holidays I was allowed to collect the divi and keep it for myself.

My mums Cop divi number was 1648. Yes NHS orange juice was wonderful and a desert spoon of malt extract wonderful. Another treat was condensed milk sandwiches.

I've had some malt extract on buttered crumpet for tea! To hell with diets

A piece(of bread)and dripping or a piecewith butter and sugar mmmmm

Or jeely piece for my play piece during the interval at school.

Comic? 'Sunny Stories'. A warm Liberty Bodice, straight out of the 'New World' gas oven. The 'Express Dairy' shop. Collecting car numbers, holding my collar if a funeral went past and 'Royal Scot' biscuits. All some of the 50's memories.

I started going for Mum's shopping when I was 4. The things I always hated getting were liver (from the butcher) and lettuce ( from the greengrocer). I always seemed to be given the scraggly bits of liver and a droopy lettuce and mum always blamed ME! her co op divi number was 333962. I liked it because you could say it in so many ways-treble three, double three three etc.

I had a Saturday job at my autie's hardwear shop and had to fill the paraffin cans of Esso blue for customers' Aladdin heaters. It was 2/5 a gallon. We also sold loose nails and screws, etc. if you need only two nails that's what you got - not a full packet. I also worked at a haberdashery shop - I loved all the new boxes of nylons. They came in half sizes - I think 9 was the most popular.

Hunt - I used to shop for Mum at a young age too, but older than 4.
She usually wanted eggs, and they didn't often get home without a few cracked or broken.
Another thing she used was white vinegar for her hair. I took a bottle to the chemist to be filled - dropped it once, it broke and people were scared it was acid I must have looked like the child acid bath murderer!

Ah liberty bodices there was an oxymoron. Rubber buttons, and suspenders to hold up the thick brown stockings and I do mean thick. The bodices seemed to have a million taped seams, took hours to dry but I can't remember them being uncomfortable.
Also school macintoshes, could not call them macs, that came with hems already turned up so the next year arms and bottoms could be turned down. Kids would not be seen dead in anything like it today.
My mum all her life wore, under her clothes, a vest, a bra, a corset and a petticoat. They were well corseted ladies in those days.

I used to sneakly cut the buttons off my liberty bodice and use them as erasers at school. My mother could not work out why the buttons kept disappearing!

As I remember, the only winter outer clothes I had were my school uniform mac and, occasionally, a school uniform coat. There are family wedding photos with my 2 sisters and I, all wearing our school uniform coats/macs over what was probably our only nice dress. I do not think there was anything exceptional about this. I could be fiercely difficult if my mother tried to dress me in anything I didn't like (as the eldest of three girls, I considered a lot of my clothes were too young for me) and I never batted an eyelid at wearing school outer wear outside school.

I was a child in the days of clothes rationing, which ended in 1949. You couldn't buy cloth off the roll either.
My winter coat in 1946 was made from Dad's services overcoat (navy).
And when I went to grammar school I had a check dress made from a heavy cotton mattress cover - horrible, I think I refused to wear it more than once.

My mum unravelled jumpers and knitted new things....she washed the wool and I was taught to wind it off the skein and into a ball...many balls.
Also we made rugs from old wool, each working one end in the winter evenings. (Boring though!)

There was a gentleman who came round with a suitcase full of remnants with which my mum made dresses for us. She was a dab hand at smocking.We had two older girl cousins whose pre-war hand-me-downs were a godsend for a family of three girls.

We had a 'posh' second cousin whose hand-me-downs came to us, but as I was taller then her, they always went to my sister, who hated the fair isle cardigans and kilts, summer gingham dresses and winter pinafores. Years later, we learned that the hand-me-downs were already handed down from the local Lady Whatsit who resided in a nearby hall - my great uncle worked for her and lived in a tied cottage, so she would visit for charity purposes and dispense alms and children's clothes. To this day, I wonder why they pretended the clothes were bought by my great aunt.

There was a sort of code for the bags things were sold in .From what I remember when I worked in Walter Wilsons as a school leaver it was blue for sugar, purple for currants and a yellowy colour for sultanas