I certainly did - I think most Grandads will have done.  There are many things you learn at school that you might think you will never need to know once you have left.  Names of the worlds rivers, the speed of light and the periodic table.  Unless you think you are going to be an [...]

What was the connection between my dads roses and our coal fires? The answer is DUNG! The coal man and the milk man had horse drawn carts and I had to run out after them and collect the horse dung in a bucket to put on the garden!
It was cheaper than buying manure from a [...]

Parsimonious – an adjective meaning – to spend as little money as possible.
Example – Oh come on Dad! £1 per week pocket money is really parsimonious of you!

A lovely noun meaning - nonsense - foolishness!

Worst of all was – toilet paper! Not soft like today’s but hard shiny paper called IZAL – not on a roll but in separate sheets! (It made brilliant tracing paper!) If your mum has got any greaseproof paper for cooking – it was just like that. Sometimes we didn’t even have that. I [...]

I remember my first camera. It was a ‘Brownie 127’ it was box shaped and took black and white pictures. There was no video of course – but we did have ‘slides’ and my dad had a little projector and a few jumpy reels of Mickey Mouse films that he would play onto a white [...]

We didn’t have washing machines or tumble dryers or dishwashers. Cloths were washed by hand in the kitchen sink or boiled in a big saucepan on the cooker – and then put through the mangle to squeeze most of the water out before being hung on the cloths line in the back garden to dry. [...]

At school we had a small bottle of milk every morning. We wrote with cheap pens with nibs and real ink in ink pots! But not until you were older, before then you used a pencil.

Question: Did you use any air-raid shelters in the war?