Our childhood experiences

I was born in East London in 1948 in a hospital with the highest infant mortality rate in the country. My mum, dad, sister and I lived with my nan and grandad together with an aunt, uncle and cousin and another uncle. After 6 months my mum took us 2 to live with my nan in Yorkshire and tod my dad she'd come back when he'd found somewhere to live. It took dad to 6 months to find a 2 bedroom ground floor fat with a small garden, an old range in the kitchen and gas lighting. No bathroom but we did have an indoor toilet!!! I went to school, down my doad, the easter after I turned 5, mum took me the first day and I went on my own from then, at 7 I went to the junior school about a mile away that I also went to by myself from the start. My brother was born when I was almost 4 and he slept in mum's room, when I was 9 the flat was modernised and a bathroom put in in the old scullery and a kitchenette was also formed out of that room. At age 10 we moved to a 3 bedroomed house with a larger garden. But I still went to the grammar school that I had been allocated to from the flat. Uniform was so expensive there was no chance of buying a second lot! Dad worked for British Rail as a publicity officer and Mum went to work in the freight office when I was 7, so holidays were always quite exciting, we went all over the place as we got free rail travel. My sister and I looked after our baby brother, including cooking dinner, chips on a gas stove!!

Dad got his first vehicle when I was 14, it was a moped, he got the bug from my boyfiend who had a motorbike, he then progreesed to a motorbike and sidecar so we could all go out in it, I was always pillion passenger. Finally he got his first car when I was 17, I didn't even know he was learning to drive. He just turned up at the station to pick me up from work!!

My dad had a motorbike and sidecar and I have a very clear memory of sitting on my mum's lap in the sidecar going somewhere or other.
When I told mum I remembered it, she blanched. They'd got rid of it and bought a car just before I was born!

Maywalk sorry I didn’t see your question before. I was born in 1943 👋waves to Hellogirl.
I was sent to convent schools and so was mostly taught by nuns with a few lay teachers mixed in until I went to grammar school in the early fifties when it changed to mostly lay teachers with a few nuns mixed in.
I’m so sorry that you had such bad experiences with nuns.

I was a 60's baby, born into a nice family on the surface. All that glitters isn’t necessarily gold.

My story reads like something out of a Kathleen Cookson or Victoria Holte type story.

It was strange, disturbing, my dad was violent, my mom couldn't leave him (it was a time when women didn't especially ftom my mom background) and full of secrets and lies.

My dad died when I was 18 which was no loss. I loved my mom dearly though and we had a loving all be it codependent relationship.

I certainly bought all that into my adult snd recreated it. I finally broke free of the cycle. Got into good recovery and very happily remarried

We will leave it their as I don't want to ruin a happy thread. I'll leave it with the happy ending of meeting my 2nd husband.

Mine is like a fairytale of the witches and warlocks before meeting my Prince charming 🤴👑🤴

I bizarrely just had a flashback to my parents and the neighbours two doors up drinking on the front lawn with the neighbours dog and the neighbour getting so tiddly he fell off the wall into the rockery

I won't add to the thread as it's a nice thread and my childhood was horrendous. However, Annie my heart goes out to you and all who suffered in that horrible disaster.

I love reading all your stories and I’m so glad I started this thread. Thank you for your contributions, they are fascinating, conjuring up images of times long gone.
I hope some more Gransnetters pop along to tell us about their early experiences.

My mother having been X-rayed (!) when pregnant with me, went into hospital for the births of my sister and me because she had a narrow pelvis. When the time came, she thought she wanted to go to the loo and I was nearly born in the toilet!

Both my parents came from simple East End families and couldn't wait to get out of London and have a big garden of their own. They put off (not entirely intentionally, as I understand it) having children until they were well enough off to afford their own house. Our first house was in Enfield. I remember an infinitely tall Victoria plum tree in the garden with a swing attached, and "helping" my father dig a pond at the end of the garden. We later moved out to the middle of East Anglia which was Dad's area as a "travelling salesman". We always had a car (company car) and a telephone as he was practically working from home.

My mother was a brilliant housewife and we always had good food (as much as possible from our own garden) and nice dresses to wear at birthday parties which she sewed. My parents were intelligent and although my father had left school at 13 (I think) they were keen on educating themselves further and especially us. We were all very musical and would sing rounds and harmonies to our Dad's guitar accompaniment.

One little hospital-related snapshot...
In 1961 when I was four and my brother was two, he had surgery for a collapsed rib cage.
I don't know how long he was kept in for but I can remember being taken to visit him. I wasn't allowed onto the ward but he came out, in his little pyjamas and tartan dressing gown, and sat with me on a narrow bench in the corridor.
A kindly nurse brought me peanut butter sandwiches.

At home my Mum would talk encouragingly about "missing N..." to try and reassure me.
However I was quite happy being an only child again and replied,
"I like missing N..."
Which wasn't quite what Mum had expected 😂
(He did come home safe and sound!).

Wow.... these are soooo interesting.

Ok.. this is my childhood story.

I was born 1964 in a hospital in Leeds area that is no longer there. I was adopted at 6 weeks to the most precious mum and dad. My mum had her own hairdressing business so from a young age i would stand on a foot stool and help to wash customers hair. My grandad and grandma owned a farm and as I'm typing this out I can still capture the smells ( some pleasant and some not ! Haa )My grandad bought me ponies and showed me how to milk cows. Every year we had a huge bonfire in my grandads field and all the neighbours contributed the food which was placed on a long table affair in the field

He built 2 bungalows in 1 of his fields, 1 for him and my grandma and the other for my mum, dad and me. When my grandad suffered a stroke I remember it really affecting me, i was so upset to see him this way and so i thought by moving his left leg repeatedly, that it would help him get better, obviously those were the thoughts of a little girl.

I spent an awful lot of time going for lovely walks with my dad, my mum never came with us because she would be looking after my grandad who was in the bungalow next-door.

My mum and dad didn't adopt anymore so i am an only 1. I don't know if i wished I had a sister but I remember laying upon newspaper, tapped together with sellotape, dad drawing around me, me painting it and calling it SALLY !!!! haaaaa, so i don't know what that was about!

My dad made lovely things from wood, he made me a sledge and in winter when snow lay on the ground he would take me and the sledge to 1 of my grandads fields and push me down the slope, he made a swing which hooked up in the garage, he made me a pair of stilts which i have to this day.

I never saw my mum sitting down, always in the kitchen or round at my grandads. Always amazing homemade cakes, biscuits, EVERYTHING.

I could go on for hours and hours but rounding it all
up I would say I had an absolute perfect childhood.

❤

Oh Annie, I'll never forget seeing Cliff Michelmore on TV trying not to cry.

I had a very odd childhood. Born in the '50s to impoverished parents. We lived in a council house. Dad was an artist who had me painting from the age of 3 and I used to help him use goldleaf on special frames while mum worked as a waitress to make ends meet. Mum would shoo me out of the kitchen to 'Go and paint with your dad.' My favourite smell is still turps! I had no idea this wasn't a conventional childhood. As mum worked evenings and dad worked as an auxiliary coastguard for some extra money he would take me on duty with him and sit me by the ship to shore radio and I heard men on ships at sea saying naughty words. Then I would look through the huge coastguard binoculars on a stand and see the mountains on the moon. All this before I was six. Bizarre. I loved it but I've never managed to conform since.

I was born a few months into WW2. My father was a schoolmaster, a reserved occupation, so he didn’t have to go in the army. The war ended when I was five. I remember blackout curtains, dried egg, ration books and the Spitfire, which I thought was a enemy plane because it sounded so horrible.

I went to private schools from the age of three. I loved school, apart from maths which I loathed and was very bad at. I especially loved poetry and music. From the age of seven I was at girls-only schools.

When I was nine I was sent to ballet lessons, triggering an obsession with ballet that lasted until I was about 15. It totally dominated my life. When I was eleven I presented a bouquet to the famous ballerina Alicia Markova, on stage at the Liverpool Empire. A highlight of my life!

My nice life was disrupted for a while by mastoiditis at the age of ten. I was extremely ill and in hospital for some weeks.

Annie
It’s something we will all remember always.
My husband and I both remember the horror of watching the news as children.
Heartbreaking, a total disgrace.

I can't even begin to understand how awful that was for you Anniebach.
I was 19 at that time and remember being shocked and upset. I cried every time the news came on.

I was born in a mining village in South Wales, part of a very large extended family. My father and his 4 siblings, his mother and her 4 siblings all born in the same village, many Aunts,Uncles and cousins. A wonderful childhood. The school was in the same street as our house, the Chapel two streets away, twice every Sunday and Band of Hope every Thursday.
We played in the street, sledged on heavy canvas on the tip, squeezed under the school gates in the summer holidays so we
could slide on the school roof, until we were reported, had the cane.
It was the happiest, safest place in the world until 21st October
1966, that day I stood and watched parents and grandparents digging for their children’s bodies, murdered by the National
Coal Board .
I have never felt that safe again .

I'm a 1952 baby, oldest of 3 who were all born in the same NHS hospital in London, miles away from where we lived. We had no car until I was 16. Mum was at home until the youngest was five.
My best friend lived in a prefab until mid-60s, when they were demolished, and she moved to a high-rise flat. We both went to the grammar school, which I loathed. I think that loathing shaped my life, as I was considered smart at primary school, and stupid at grammar school.

I was born in 1957. Mum had me at home. Apparently I was a very difficult baby and child. Reading between the lines I think mum suffered from PND she was always at the Drs with me were he suggested sending me to school at 3 years old.
It had to be private as there were no nurseries then. They could barely afford it but thought it was for the best. I hated it and remember mum leaving me sobbing. It felt very alien I joined half way through the year the rest of the children all knew what to do except me. We were taught to read and write. I was moved to infant school at six as they couldn’t afford it any longer.I was much happier .
I was an only child, but longed for a sibling. I was never allowed to play out until we moved house when I was ten, where I made a very good friend. Mum always worked part time. Dad passed away aged 80 after being disabled for 25 years, mum still here, still very anxious, which unfortunately has shaped her life and mine.

Like many of you, I started life in a tiny cottage with mice and a block of outside lavatories at the end of the garden, but my parents were given a brand new council house when I was about a year old.
Every house had children, and we would all play outside in the street, some families I wasn’t supposed to mix with, but it was difficult not to.
My mother must have suffered with depression of some sort, because I spent a lot of time with my gran, and my dad at the weekends, who was very hands on for a dad of his time.
I had piano lessons, which I hated, but I always loved school. We went to Sunday school every Sunday, all dressed up in our best dresses.
When I was about five I spent a week in the cottage hospital having my tonsils out, I had a lovely time, four little girls sharing a room, it was like boarding school.
We never had a car till I was about ten, but my dad hired one every year, and we stayed at a boarding house in Devon.
A lot of even my youngest childhood was tainted by my poor relationship with my mother, but there was always someone else’s kindly mum around, and my auntie lived a few houses up.
I really disliked the food of the time, many a meal I didn’t eat at lunch was put back in front of me at dinner.
I really disliked meat, and we seemed to have it in some form everyday, and lots of soggy vegetables.
Looking back I think we must have been a bit of a strange family, all the women would sit outside chatting in the evenings watching the children playing, but my mother didn’t mix at all, and although my dad was more sociable, he was happier inside reading his book, than chatting to the other dads.
Mostly happy memories when I was little, but a rapidly deteriorating relationship with my mother made things more difficult as I grew up.

I was born in 1951, at home. My mother was 35. I was a breech birth, bottom first and was delivered by our GP, I think. My sister arrived two years and 7 months later.

Like Ashcombe I was in hospital around the age of 2. I still have two scars on my neck where apparently I was operated on for “poisoned glands”. Shortly after that I had my tonsils and adenoids removed by an eminent specialist from London who was visiting Glasgow. My mother once remarked that I was a “changed child” when I came home from hospital but she never elaborated - now I wonder why I didn’t ask. In the 70s I remember there was an organisation called NAWCH: The National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital. They campaigned for unrestricted visiting hours for parents.

I went to a state nursery school locally, for one term before starting school. My class at school had 48 children. I learned to read and loved school.

We had no car but living in a Glasgow suburb there were buses and trams - I loved the trams but felt sick on the bus.

I got a place in a selective school (fees relatively low because of the government ‘direct grant’). I had a hard time keeping up with a more challenging academic atmosphere and mysterious ‘rules’. I didn’t make friends for a long time so spent many lunchtimes reading my way through the class library.

My mother grew up in Bournemouth where she met my father who did his preliminary training for the RAF (ground crew), during the war. Hence all our holidays for my first 12 years were spent at my grandparents house in Bournemouth. We had a whole month there, though my father could only come for two weeks. We travelled on the train - steam in the early days.

At home we played outside when the weather allowed and gradually explored farther around our area which still had lots of undeveloped farmland and disused quarries to explore. Gradually I saw housing go up in our treasured pieces of ‘waste ground’ and a school and playing fields take over the remaining farmland. We played on several building sites on the long summer evenings. The sites weren’t fenced off so we used the scaffolding as a climbing frame and dared each other to walk across roof beams with no floors or ceilings in place to break our fall.

We were part of a lively church community and Sunday School, junior choir and brownies took up much of our out of school time.

What a long time ago it all seems!

Oh and I can't forget the outside lavvy. With squares of cut newspaper threaded onto string and hung on the back of the door. Not sure if that was worse than Izal, at least it was absorbent

I was born in 1950. My dad had a motorbike with sidecar. I can remember Sunday outings with my big sister on the back of the bike, arms round dad, I was in the sidecar with my mum. No seat belts or helmets. We always had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding which was cooked in large tray, on Sundays. After was the remainder of the Yorkshire pudding, jam spread on the bottom served with custard. Mum always cooked a pudding every night, spotted dick, syrup sponge, tapioca, semolina, rhubarb crumble, bread puddings, all with lots of custard. (Except the tapioca and semolina) Always fish on Friday, sausages on Saturday. On Sunday morning dad would polish everyone's shoes and we would put on our best clothes for church, which was full to standing room only for the latecomers. And the small round corrugated dustbin, which took all the household rubbish, was collected by the dustman, who came round to the back of the house lifted the bin onto his shoulders, carried it to the lorry to empty it before returning it to the back of the house. Then there was the rag and bone man who came periodically in cart and horse. Late fifties we had a car and went to Clacton for a weeks holiday. Later it was Billy Butlins holiday camp. Oh the memories..........

Oh it’s so lovely to read all your stories, all very different and very interesting. I hope more posters come on here tomorrow and tell us about how they started life.

Maywalk what happened to your eye is interesting. When I was nine months old I was very ill with pneumonia, like you, and I was taken into hospital. I was treated with antibiotics and I recovered. Then it appeared I had a problem with my eye and so my mother took me to the Manchester Eye Hospital, where it was discovered that I had suffered a haemorrhage at the back of one of my eyes. It was put down to the antibiotics, but reading what happened to you, makes me wonder. Maybe the pneumonia caused it. Anyway I had to have two operations on my eye. Obviously I’m partially sighted in that eye, in fact not much sight at all, but the other eye is good, and it hasn’t affected me too much. I do have some trouble with 3D vision, but I cope as I’ve never known anything different. I can drive because as long as one eye is good, you get a license. I’m rubbish at parking though, and I think that’s down to the poor 3D vision.

I had a difficult childhood my mother had narcissistic personality disorder so I never had the best life. My dad thankfully was a nice man. At 7 I took myself to school over 3 main roads and was sent shopping for her sanitary towels among other things. I realized at age 7 that if I didn't look after myself no one else would. I wished I had a brother or sister to take the pressure off but sadly didn't. My treatment affected my life and when I had my children, I thought what my mother did to me and did the opposite with them. Mind you it made me tough.

Born 1948 at home I was the 4th girl of 5 the fifth one being my younger brother. There were 4 and 5 yr gaps between us all not sure how they managed that in those days. We lived on the 2nd floor of a big Victorian house all us children sharing one room. I really remember my Mum carrying buckets of coal up 2 flights of stairs and the old lady on the ground floor giving us sugar and sandwiches and home made toffee apples. A tin bath hung on the stairs and I remember scrubbing them on a Saturday morning. We had days out I don’t remember going on holidays.

I was born in 1943, my mother was a single parent because my father, who was in the RAF, was killed 6 months before I was born. We lived with my grandma and auntie at Hoyland till I was 3, when my mother married again, and we moved to my stepfather`s house at Elsecar. He was a coal miner, so we got cheaper coal, dumped at the gate from a lorry, and we had to shovel it into buckets and take it to the coal shed round the back. We kids saved all the pieces of shale to use for chalking out hopscotch pitches.
My favourite treats were a stick of rhubarb and a paper cone of sugar to dip in, or a paper cone filled with a mixture of cocoa and sugar, we didn`t get many sweets. And my mother would keep us quiet for hours with half a pomegranate and a pin!
Favourite games were skipping, whip and top, and marbles.
I didn`t get on with my stepfather, and consequently, not with my mother either, and when I was almost 13, instead of going on the school bus one day, I got on one going the other way, to Barnsley, and caught the bus to Manchester, arrived at my paternal grandmother`s house, and remained there till I got married at the age of 20.