On my first day at infants school, more than 60 years ago, my classroom was the open shelter in the playground because there were not enough classrooms inside! I remember it was snowing and the teacher had a blackboard on an easel. All us kids sat shivering on small chairs at wooden desks.

I remember ‘smogs’ so thick you really couldn’t see your ‘hand in front of your face!’ I saw a bus conductor walking along the edge of the pavement with a rolled up newspaper alight so that the driver could follow the light!

Only the wealthy had telephones at home. The rest of us had to walk to the nearest public phone box. You had to put your money in and then dial the number you wanted. If it was answered you pressed button A and you were connected – but when the money ran out you were [...]

When I was about 8 years old I remember playing on the bomb sites near to where we lived. One had a bombed house on it that was just a shell. It had no roof and the floors upstairs were just hanging down from the only two walls remaining – but we had great fun [...]

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 [...]

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.

There were no supermarkets. Instead lots of different types of shops for different things. Everything had to be paid for in cash - here were no cards. If you wanted potatoes, for example, the greengrocer would weigh them out and then tip them in your bag. Everything had to be carried home and for big [...]