tightening our belts

It wasn’t just through the war that we did without, the austerity period lasted a long time after the war finished. My parents always lived in council property or similar, they never ever thought of owning a house. When I passed for the grammar school there was a major fight between then over should I be allowed to go and how could they afford it. All the while my father kept every penny of his naval pension to himself, so that he could smoke and frequently drink himself insensible. Had that amount of money been added to the household budget we would have fared a lot better than we did. But it was a case of I am master in my house, and my needs/ pleasures come first. My grandson has just bought his second house, he is not 30 yet, it’s 4 bedroom detached brand new. When the mortgages started to go up I asked if he could manage ok. Yes he said, we just won’t eat out every night! Times have certainly changed, and not all for the better.

Chestnut

geekesse

Smoking takes the edge off hunger, and is easier to access than prescription medications for stress and anxiety. I’m not condoning a nicotine habit, but I understand why those in poverty may choose to smoke.

The cost of smoking:
10 a day costs over £38 per week / £165 per month.
20 a day costs over £76 a week / £330 per month.
No-one in poverty could possibly afford this.

I don’t know anyone who buys cigarettes. They roll their own with tobacco which is much cheaper.

This post reminds me of a couple of current ones that are going round on Facebook. The rose-coloured glasses sort that seem to claim everything was better way back in the 50s/60s without mobile phones, when (apparently) children were sent out to play at daybreak and only came in for meals and bedtime. Were they safer times though? I remember a few highly reported child murders. Were they such great times when few people even had fridges, let alone automatic washing machines etc, and when women like my mother, who had been gloriously independent as a WAAF in wartime, was suddenly confined to housework and childcare. I think current times are so much better but right now we're heading for a poverty disaster. Some are already in it.

This is a time we can really help the younger ones because we’ve either had to do it before , have lived with parents who had to do it or remember times when our grandparents were doing it from habit. It doesn’t matter how you are tightening your belt just that you have to in some way be it food, heating or clothes.

Older generations may be able to help younger ones, yes, however

Society needs have changed

Growing up decades ago is very different to schooling needs now, technology needs, etc

Some things are common sense for every generation - do not waste food, eat at home only, rice and beans go a long way, bars of soap are more economical than gel, etc

If you do not have/cannot afford a fridge, stand milk cartons etc in a large bowl of coldwater and put a cloth over it with the ends in the water. It is amazing how cool this basic evaporation method can keep the food so covered.

Back in the 1960s I lived in a bedsitter where I depended on a small camping fridge. A small metal box encased in about 4 inches of porous plaster with a small dish shaped indent in the top. I filled the indent with water every morning and even in the height of summer I could leave milk and/or meat there safely for three or four days or more. A bowl, a cloth and some water is all that is needed.

I was born during the war - nearly 2 when it ended and I can remember some of the things my mother and grandmother did in the years up to 1950. To begin with they used the cooling method I mention durther up my post.

Milk was unhomogenised and if it went off , it was put in a butter muslin bag and hung in the pantry to drain and it became cottage cheese. My mother and grandmother kept half a dozen chickens at the bottom of a south London suburban garden and grew as much fruit and veg as they could.

geekesse.
There are other ways than smoking to deal with stress and anxiety and 10.00 ( the cost of a packet of cigarettes ) will go a long way to feed children with a balanced meal.

I was born just after the war and things were tough. A lot of food was on ration and I remember the ration books everyone took shopping with them. I was sometimes bought a tiny Hovis loaf that cost a penny, but was more often refused because even a penny could not be spared. I liked to have a dolls tea party in the garden and these were the ideal size to pretend with. I'm glad I have known what it was to be so poor, because now I feel I can still cope however bad things become.

On the news the other night they did a feature on child poverty and how children and parent having to skip meals very hand wringing stuff. Followed by an article statement that Britain have the most number of obese children in Europe followed by a fat mother saying she can't afford to cook from scratch so she is forced to buy takeaways I have no words

Oh my goodness, I remember the tiny Hovis loaves! They were so cute. Perfect for a dolls tea party (and you could help them eat it). Thanks for the memory.

Expectations are so different nowadays. I was born in 1949. For the first 5 years of my life we didn’t have an inside lavatory, a bath was a once a week affair in a tin bath in front of the range, we didn’t have a fridge until I was about 11, or a phone until I was 16 and a car when I was 18.
Nowadays the young people I know expect a detached house with en suite, family bathroom and downstairs toilet and a garage or at least off road parking for 2 cars. They all have the latest mobiles costing over £1K with contracts at £40, top of the range cars, eat out several times a week, always appear clutching a coffee, spend a fortune on nails, hair, facials, massages, tattoos, Botox, fillers, spa days, extravagant weddings etc., etc.
Both parents have to work to maintain this lifestyle so children get farmed out to be brought up by other people.
These are people with good jobs who probably have little or no savings and don’t know how to economise.

Perhaps they are better at not judging others parenting decisions though

Espee Oh dear!!

You're right Espee. There is a certain level of society who live like that, and no-one is 'judging their parenting skills', just making an observation. And they will find it hard to economise and be frugal because as I explained up thread they have been living in a land of milk and honey for the last 40 years and do not know what it is like to have water, energy food and petrol rationed or at eye-watering prices. That is the society they grew up in and built their lives on.

In a way nothing has changed but increases in food, petrol and energy bills, as same old, same old as when i was a child growing up once a week my mother would buy me a tiny thin cadburys bar as my one and only treat. I myself went back to work 18 months after my 2nd child and had childminders as lived away from family due to husband job had moved away south. I grow some fruit in our garden still with just the 2 of us. I dontate if I can £1 item to the foodbank as there is always someone else in greater need. I myself dont get my government state pension for another 2 years when most of my female friends did at age of 60. So in a way its the governments fault on that issue, so my husband at age of 72 being 8 years older than me has to do a shift for us to have a few extra little treats, and so our weekly pub meal is now once a month due to british gas direct debit virtually has doubled. But we are of a generation of not having any of the takeaway foods or even takeaway coffees that know my 2 grown up children buy, and when they complain I simply say "well ditch these type of things" and cook from scratch, we both dont smoke and have small amount of alchol most at weekends - life is a gas, gas, gas as they say but at least we didnt die last month of the covid18 - yes its still around as my husband had antibiotics due to bad chest infection with it and near phneumonia, I found that hard going and pretty scarey. As we can all MAKE DO + MEND - A SAYING OF MY OWN GRANDMA's. We cant help being victims of the price rises but we are all capable of dealing with make cut-backs ourselves and we must not take these issues personally as friends + relations who live abroad are also facing the same issues on the increases.

Sorry - my typing mistake COVID19 - NOT COVID18.

I was born in 1937, lived all through the war.
We children didn’t know any different but our parents did, they really suffered.
Husbands and fathers went away to war, some came back, some didn’t.
Some of the ones who did were changed out of all recognition by their experiences.
Life was very very hard and I wouldn’t want to see my young families go through it for anything.
However I do believe things have swung too far the other way.
Everything is so easy for them, they can have most things by borrowing to get it.
Tightening their belts is something some of them would never understand and would find almost impossible to do.

For a few years, I've done the washing on a 30 minute cycle at 30 degrees. I've used own-brand stuff for many years - toilet rolls, bleach, shampoo, soap powder, that kind of thing. I've stopped using the dishwasher now, and of course, don't need to use the tumble dryer - the washing is hung on the line. I've stopped using the 15 minute extra spin (isn't that using more electricity, not less?)

I was born in 1959. I had a rural childhood. My children and grandchildren live in a different world, just as I, as a child, was brought up in a different world from that of my grandmother. For me, as a child and adolescent, hair conditioner, going to the hairdresser, tights (strictly American Tan!), and Ski yogurt (how exotic!), were once a year treats. Now they are "essential" parts of everyday life. For my grandmother, someone in the family becoming ill was a financial catastrophe. No NHS. Now (assuming we can get an appointment...) we see free care as normal, taken for granted. Our right. I'm glad of this. We can't judge the present generation against how we lived, just as we can't judge how we lived against how our grandmothers did. The present younger generation is having a tough time. No free university education. No job for life. No real social security safety net if real disaster strikes. Life has changed and we need to help, if we can, and not judge. Can you imagine the shame of not being able to provide for your family without using a food bank? How did we, one of the richest countries in the world, come to the point where they need to exist?

We can all point to the 'poor' who have iPhones, have their nails done and place orders with deliveroo, but equally far more 'poor', people struggle day in day out, 'robbing Peter to pay Paul'.

Most people nowadays have smart phones, indeed in many cases you need a smart phone to access basic services, many people access a phone like this by signing up to a contract.

Few young women in receipt of benefits spend money having a manicure but many get together with friends and have an evening ' doing their nails', is that so wrong?

And as for deliveroo, I haven't the foggiest what this is!

But I do think that youngsters do have a hard time. They are treated like 2nd class citizens. They are often never taught to budget, or to cook,they are criticised without being taught to manage.

For a while there was a real struggle with families needing to make the eat or heat decision. This has largely ended. Instead, it's become Neither heating or eating. Whilst there have been numbers of efforts to provide additional funding for the many who are struggling, fuel companies are posting massive increases to their profits AND their prices!

katy1950 Obesity is often the result of obesity. It is not the result of people spending lots of money on food and eating constantly. It is the result of people with minimal incomes and often in supermarket deserts, living on cheap takeaways, full of fat and carbohydrates. Buying cheap processed foods, UPFs (Ultra Processed Foods) like white bread, cakes, biscuits, pasta cheap sauces and tinned food.

When I was about 5, in the late 1940s, we moved house to an area where we lived in a relatively affluent area, with just a major road betweenus and a poor area. One of the things I noticed, compared with where we had previously lived was the number of fat women there were about. I must have asked about this because I was told that it was the result of not having much money. When money was short any good food went to the men in the family, then children and the women liveed on suga sandwiches, white processed bread, margarine and sugar. Filling but not nutritious and full of empty calories.

As I said obesity is the result of poverty, not proof that people are not poor.

Correction: first sentence: Obesity is often the result of poverty

When I was a young single parent with a full time job, I couldn't imagine finding time to plant and harvest vegetables. The garden was bottom of my to-do list. For many years, it resembled that of Polly Garter from Under Milk Wood, featuring " washing and babies".

We live in what we think of as an area with little poverty. During covid a local food bank was opened and as our eating out and social events weren’t happening we made a weekly donations of items to the food bank which we ordered along with our weekly in-line shop. Now everywhere is open and normal life supposedly resumed the food bank assure us that the need is even greater - especially with the increase in petrol prices and electricity etc. We are lucky as we both have work pensions and state pensions and can afford to help out others who are struggling. We feel it is the right thing to do - I guess others might disagree.

Times have changed so much, but the poor still suffer. Smartphones are indeed a necessity, as is access to the internet, yet another thing that the poorest will struggle to afford or find, as libraries offering free access close. We’ve had both our libraries within walking distance shut down in the last three years, yet people are expected to claim benefits and apply for jobs online. It must be so stressful.