geekesse
Times have changed. Many mothers have to work, and few have land to grow stuff. Cooking on gas costs as much as the ingredients. A cinema ticket for an adult costs around £11, for a child £6-7. And frankly, you may have been happy, but an awful lot of people were not. Don’t knock today’s young parents who have it way harder than previous generations.
Yes Geekesse, the 1950's were grim for me although I didn't realise until I was 6 or 7. When I was at school I noticed how different I was to most of the other children, they lived in nice houses, some had a family car and they had holidays. I lived in a pre-fab, which was very cold in the winter and we had very little. My mother just accepted it, I hardly heard her grumble until the Suez crisis which meant my dad was put on "short time" and his money was halved. It happened to a few families on our estate where the job of the dad relied on oil. Many men though had decent trades and seemed to do ok, saving the magical few hundred pounds for a house deposit. For those in poverty there was no government help, we just went without. Now even the so-called poorest have TV's, phones and other "essentials". The 60's were better, but my parents seemed to accept their lot and never tried to better themselves, any talk of a nice house was dismissed as "ideas above your station". When I married in the early 70's, my mother thought I was mad getting into debt with a mortgage, she just didn't get it; all my life I had wanted a nice house and decent size garden and I sacrificed new clothes, colour TV, etc. for quite a while to afford it. At least then we had a chance if we worked and saved, my house cost £7,000 and we spent a further £3,000 building a double garage and eventually a nice fitted kitchen, it's worth so much now that if I was young again I could not afford it. When I read about the cost of private rent, and now the costs of utility bills it seems as if, as a country we are going backwards. Covid, Putin and now strikes, where will it end?