Good riddance! Things you don't see anymore, thank heavens!

I was also brought up to feel very prudish about being naked and I detested school showers. These feelings were very much down to my mother's prudishness/ embarrassment at all things bodily. I still have that feeling and I resent it.

This thread brings back these memories still loaded with a degree of horror at what we went through.

Things in schools do seem to have improved, particularly with the ban on corporal punishment.

School showers weren't around when I went, between 40s and 50s, and if they had been our nuns would not have allowed them. We had roomy cubicles for changing after swimming. Had we shared, we could all have changed in one go, but the nuns told us that would be " wrong", so we had to stand shivering waiting for a vacant cubicle. At the leisure centre nowadays I still prefer to use a changing room. Or if I can't I get dressed super quick. I blame those nuns.

I was not bothered by school showers - without my glasses I could not see what anyone else had got that might be of interest and did not think they might be able to see much of me!

One of the schools I went to was run by nuns, and they told me they were not even allowed to look at their own naked body and had a bath with a sort of cotton tent on. How pathetic!

Oh lucky girl that made me laugh !! But I'm sure that kind of prudery did go on in convents.

Oh no the cubicles for changing after swimming. We had to share a cubicle and it was so difficult to get changed and dry in a cubicle designed for one person. We were all about 12 so not little children.

We would really struggle and in no time a sort of intercom would announce that the coach for our school was waiting outside.

I had long hair and it used to be soaking wet along with my damp clothes and skin.

I caught menigitus some weeks later and some of the parents put it down to us all being wet and cold and complained to the school.

Personally I don't think my illness was to do with being cold and wet after swimming and - when I went back to school and swimming we were still two to a cubicle.

I too remember flying board rubbers. I also remember a small, shy boy in my class of '49 having the most distressing stammer .... and the old bitch of a teacher who regularly picked on him to come to the front of the class and read aloud. My lasting memory of him is his crimson face, and the struggle he had to even get one word out , and Mrs. M (a town councillor when she wasn't employed as a so-called infant teacher,of whom people such as my mother were in awe) encouraging the class to laugh at him. On one such humiliating occasion he wet himself. Despicable woman..... good riddance to teachers like her. I often wonder what happened to him.

Communal showers-ugh. I had forgotten about them! The excuses for getting out of them were many and varied-colds, periods, bandaged arms we used everything in the book. I was in a co-ed school and we had one male teacher who used to put his arm around the girls whilst he marked their books. He also ran his finger up and down your back-the older girls said he was feeling to see if you were wearing a bra. They would lock him up now!!!

hair curlers you put in the fire to heat up and they sizzle your hair, irons that you put in the fire (flat irons), toasting forks, stone hot water bottles, salt bags and many others that were part of my upbringing in the 60s.

Really? In the 60s? I took a toasting fork to University in 1958 and at school in the early 50s, we had flat irons in our DS class but used an electric one at home, but rubber hot water bottles were available in the 1940s. My granny referred to the stone bottles as 'pigs' and the rubber ones were 'bags' which is a more accurate description than 'bottle'. In the 60s I bought Carmen rollers which were heated by electricity. I was so happy when I no longer had to go to bed in rollers!

still have my toasting fork, you can use it on a gas fire.

My mother has her girdle and it makes lovely scones (not a panty girdle by the way), she put her panty girdle on the open fire and set the chimney on fire and never did that again.

My mother has her girdle and it makes lovely scones (not a panty girdle by the way), she put her panty girdle on the open fire and set the chimney on fire and never did that again.

Gibbs Dentrifice. It came in a small tin and was used by the whole family. It was a sort of pink paste.

As soon as I was earning money I bought a tube of MacCleans toothpaste - wonderful.

Parafin heaters: smelly and temperamental. In use in our house in the early 60s for rarely occupied rooms and then carted off by me ten years later to my damp student flat.

Oh yes - that toothpaste in a tin - I really rather liked that. And more economical as you could get every last drop out.

I was trying to explain to GS about Gibbs Dentifrice! And about the fact that his great grandad cleaned his teeth with soot and salt!

You can still get toothpowder - most pound shops and Home Bargains sell it!

Wood chip wallpaper. I had it in my bedroom in the late 1960's early 70's . It was painted and I remember lying in my top bunk picking the little bits of wood out of it. Actually scrub that. It was rather fun actually.

The outside toilet that we shared with the downstairs flat ( a scruffy old man) I was terrified of "going" down the yard and totally blame this for my "toilet issues" that I have today.

I agree about the bri-nylon sheets from Brentford Nylons. I had the nightie and the quilted dressing gown too. I remember having bright orange sheets that gave me a static electric shock.

We still have woodchip wallpaper in our upstairs loo!

(the room it's in, not the actual toilet of course...)

Polystyrene ceiling tiles. Yuk. Highly dangerous if I remember rightly especially if like my parents you painted them too.

Somehow I don't think woodchip wallpaper would have lasted long in the "actual" toilet Ana

Corporal punishment in schools.

I can still feel the sting on my hand caused by the thick leather strap. My brother had a teacher who was a priest and he used a meter stick on pupils who misbehaved.

Outside toilets.

Ours was at the bottom of the backyard. I can remember going in there at night through the snow and ice in the winter.My father would put a pariffin heater in there in winter to stop the pipe freezing.My mother would tell us never to touch the heater or we would get burned to death-lovely thought.

Sorry for repeating myself a bit, I had forgotton that I had already posted on this thread

Oh, I don't know so much, gillybob, that woodchip's tough stuff. We stripped our bedroom walls back years ago and there's still a couple of small patches we gave up on and just painted over. I could imagine it bobbing about in Ana's toilet after the apocalypse. Woodchip is the cockroach of the wallcovering world.

Sorry haven't read all the thread but someone mentioned eiderdowns. We had sheets, blankets, a counterpane and an eiderdown - yes? It was only recently that my DH was talking about the "eider" duck and these eiderdowns were of course made from the feathers of the "Eider duck" - and as I recall they were stitched into small squares just like a duvet, but used on top of the blankets and counterpane.

I wonder why no one ever realised that the eiderdown was in fact a duvet!! And can anyone remember when duvets became the norm? I think I thought it was an "Ididown" when I was a kid.