Old Finances (back in the day)

Justamum

Ida_Notion wrote: »

together with PLJ (overpriced lemon juice, basically, which was supposed to cut the fat or something) and Energen rolls.

I remember both those!

Ida_Notion wrote: »

They were sanitary towels with a loop at either end which you kept in place with a sanitary belt round your waist.

Yep. Had those. Awful.

Chickenopolis

Ida_Notion wrote: »

ROFL. This is all I know about your mum and older sisters, but I think I already love them

I used to live on the first floor of a house (two rooms and a kitchen) that belonged to the shop next door. We three kids shared the back room and my mum and dad had their bed in the front room with all the rest of the living room furniture (sofa, telly etc). We had access to the bathroom on the ground floor too, but the rest was used for the shop's stock and blocked off to us, which meant we didn't have access to the back garden.

For the first few weeks of the three years we were there, my mum used a little rotary clothes line out in the front yard to dry the washing, but all the neighbours in the street turned out to complain about it so she had to take it down and get the Flatley mentioned a few pages back to use instead. You'd honestly have thought we were permanently lowering the tone of Mayfair rather than blighting the sight of a row of inner-city terraced houses with laundry for a few hours a week. I'd love to have seen how they'd have reacted to knicker bunting

Hello Ida Notion

How shocking to hang out laundry in such a respectable area:rotfl:The women folk in my family would have made a point of flashing their undies each time they walked past the complainants houses and/or put up more knicker bunting :rotfl:

ChocClare

Ah, the joy of Doctor White's. If you didn't have a sanitary belt, you had to safety-pin them to your knickers. When you got changed for PE, you knew who was "on" by the tell-tale pins...

They were also the thickness of breeze blocks. I'd forgotten about this until my friend had her first baby and was introduced to maternity towels. These were apparently so huge that, when she and I were trying to find a seat somewhere just after her baby was born, she told me, "don't worry, if we can't find a seat for you there's plenty of room on my maternity towel". I knew just what she meant!

maganan

luxor4t wrote: »

Did anybody else have:

• sides-to-middle sheets?
• flannels made from worn towels?
• trousers cut down into shorts?
• clothes made from 'old aunty' dresses?
• new-to-you clothes from the kids up the road, that got passed to smaller siblings then handed on again?
• tins of odd nails, screws, hooks etc that 'might come in useful'?
• crocheted blankets /cushions made from oddments of wool?
• hooked rugs made from odds & ends with no design
• 'round the house' clothes? (adults & children)
• aprons to wear over 'good' clothes?
• furniture/rugs/wallpaper/curtains etc that clashed horribly but were 'too good' to change?

Oh god yes, sheets with a seam down the middle! Actually many of the cot sheets I had for my babies (now between 15 and 20) were made from worn flanelette bed sheets.

Lots of cushions of many colours and shapes no particular style at all but alot of furnishings/curtains seemed to be orange!

Gigervamp

maganan wrote: »

Lots of cushions of many colours and shapes no particular style at all but alot of furnishings/curtains seemed to be orange!

Orange and brown.



That's me on the right!

taplady

Loving the talk of all the old tv programmes:T will our children/grandchildren have such good memories of their childhoods I wonder ?

I also remember Dr Whites and the sanitary belt:eek: no such things as 'wings' in those days:D

There was The Slimcea Girl in her balloon and lots of other wonderful ads on TV.

A Finger of fudge - is just enough to give the kids a treat!
a finger of fudge is good enough until its time to eat, its full of cadbury goodness and very small and light etc!

A Mars a day helps you work rest and play

opal fruits made to make your mouth water

The Milky Bars are on me!

For Mash use Smash!

If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club!

I could go on and on!:D

Steel_2

30 years ago I was eight. We lived in a victorian terrace in west London with damp and mouldy walls, silverfish in rooms, and a cellar that used to flood two foot deep when there was a thunderstorm. The radiators used to leak as well.

Everything we bought was secondhand. Everything. My father's family started out in the south london tenaments - eight of them in a few rooms where you shared a toilet with your neighbours and washed behind a curtain in the corner of the kitchen (which was itself just the corner of a room). They moved around a bit until they got to All Saints Road, where by this time the six kids had got married and moved out, except my father who married my mother and moved her in. They stayed there with his parents while they saved for a house deposit. It took them five years.

Dinner on Sunday was always a roast that was stretched. And the meals during the week always followed the same pattern week in, week out, come rain or shine. Roast on Sunday, cold roast meat and bubble and squeak on Monday, curry on Tuesday, stew from the terrifying pressure cooker Wednesday, casserole on Thursday, spam and mash on Friday, and pasta with a small tin of tomato paste mixed in with loads of cheese on top on Saturday. Friday was my favourite day - God I loved spam. Still do ;-)

During the summer, sometimes on a Sunday my mother would get chicken, cut it into strips, egg and breadcrumb it (with the most bizarre orangey breadcrumbs from a packet) and then deep fry them. Then we'd sit in the garden and eat them with homemade scotch eggs and ribena.

Puddings were always either rice pudding, stewed apple with currants, jelly and a tin of mixed fruit. On special occasions out came the trifle. Snacks were invariably jam or treacle sandwiches. You could keep me quiet all afternoon with a treacle sandwich

I hated porridge though and remember once when we were very small we had it every day for months until I rebelled one morning and refused to eat it. My mother, exasperated, smacked me hard on the head with a metal serving spoon and made me eat it. Now I know that it was probably because money was scarce and without the porridge she was worried I wouldn't get a decent meal that day.

I remember my father, sister and mother fighting over who would get the dripping from the roast and the victor would scoff it down with lumps of white bread. I thought it was slimy and disgusting and wouldn't touch it.

We bought out bread from the shop on the corner (short of money; basic loaf, bit more to spend; cottage loaf), our greens from the grocer and our meat...I'm not sure where that came from. There must have been a butcher on the high road but don't remember them. I remember my mother dragging me from one end of the high road to other and back again to compare two greengrocer's prices and buy the cheapest. And everything always went into brown bags that were twisted over at the top by the corners in a flamboyant gesture by greengrocer.

The TV was rented, as was our video player when they first came out. The first film we ever rented came with the machine and was "on Golden Pond" with Katherine Hepburn and Peter Fonda.

Our first washing machine didn't arrive until the mid 80s and before then the big stuff (sheets towels etc) was piled into a trolley and taken 15 minutes up the road to the launderette. Never dried there though. To save money we dragged the wet washing home neatly folded in the trolley and stuck it on the line or radiator. Smaller stuff was done in the kitchen sink and I used to love stirring round the washing 'stew' with a wooden spoon.

The washing machine when it did arrive was rented and somewhere there is a picture of my mother holding up a T-shirt at the kitchen window that had just come from her first load, and inspecting it against the light to see if it had done a good job.

My father got rid of the car when I was four or five as we couldn't afford to run it.

Once a year we hired a car and drove to the south coast to stay in a caravan. We would be in one, my grandparents in another next to it and whatever aunt and uncle could come would be piled in a third with their kids. My maternal grandfather prepared for lazing on a deck chair by taking his v-neck off, loosening the first few shirt buttons and rolling his trouser legs up. The socks and shoes stayed on. And yes, he did knot the four corners of his hankie and put it on his head. My grandmother stayed in her stretchy polyester day dress but took her shoes and hold ups off.

When I was very small I would wear knitted swimsuits on the beach that my grandmother had knitted, but they were itchy and horrible and soaked up the sea water so they bagged horribly at the crotch.

We went en masse to car boot sales, jumble sales, fetes, junk shops, skips and tips for everything we needed. Our Victorian terrace had been gutted off original features which my father spent time putting back with skip finds during the 1980s as everyone started modernising their houses and stripping them clean of features.

I wish I was 38 back then sometimes.

Wow. Sorry about the length of my post. That brought back a lot of memories.

maganan

Gigervamp wrote: »

Orange and brown.



That's me on the right!

Ah lovely pic, bet that could be any number of us posting here similar clothes, hair cuts, home furnishings etc

maganan

Taplady you forgot milkyway - "the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite"

I really wanted one of the smash aliens, actually I really wanted to be able to eat smash not the real mashed potato we had to eat!

jannyannie

Hi all

Some of these posts really make me laugh. Growing up in a village and discovering feminism was quite an uncomfortable mix. I read the Female Enuch when I was 16 and it really freaked me out. In the 1980's people didn't get divorced, domestic violence was never investigated by the police, no one was politically correct and a single woman had no chance of getting a mortgage. When I saw Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes it cracked me up, I remember attitudes and people like that. Apart from becoming a vegetarian, leaving home at 19 and sharing a house, fighting to go to university and have a career, I was considered very strange. In the 80's girls were still expected to settle down and have kids.

As women we've come a long way since then, unfortunately some girls today use this freedom to get drunk and nasty, but at least they have the choice, something that a girl back in 1980 didn't really have at all.

Jan x