Easier to be OS in the olden days?

[Deleted User]

I remember the buses with the clippie who came round and took your cash and gave you a ticket from the machine. Those buses were jolly cold downstairs as they had an open back entrance that led to the stairs. The only seats usually left when I got on were the long bench ones right at the back by the cold platform where the clippie stood. The driver sat in his own little cubicle at the very front of the bus completely separate from everything else. I had a 9 mile each way to school having passed the 11+ and got a place at the all girls technical school. We were the first batch of 11 year olds they'd ever had, previously entry had been via the 13+ and they didn't really know how to deal with us. The whole school experience was a little innovative. I didn't enjoy it much as some of the mistresses were very intolerant of a child who had poor origins and felt I should not have been let in. It was quite uncomfortable as my parents couldn't afford 'proper' school uniform and the second hand stuff I had to use was ridiculed by some of them and I was made to feel very second class. Wouldn't be allowed to do it now would they?

meritaten

I meant to say too, that once 'In' as a Saturday girl, if you were honest and reliable - you got offered full time work in your 'holidays'. so for two years I did the Easter and half time breaks, the six week summer holiday (covering for the girls on their holiday breaks) Autumn break and Christmas and New year! and the yearly 'Stocktake' on a Sunday.
I loved the summer holiday one - I got to be the one in 'charge' of a 'counter' and had Saturday girls working under me!
Hated Christmas one though - the customers were very stressed and rude usually! and on Christmas eve we had all the drunk guys come in at the last minute searching for presents for their wives! We did have that sussed though - they were sent to 'Ginnys' counter where she had a range of Scent 'Coffrets'! We thought it great to go home an hour early! (shut at 5.00pm instead of 6.00pm), but as everywhere else was shut too, we just went home!

Clippies were a rare breed here Mrs LW! working with so many men wasn't considered 'seemly'. the bus conductors were mostly younger men whose main ambition seemed to be driving a bus. they were mostly quite brash blokes and could keep the passengers amused! I have this memory of one young man, fag hanging from his mouth, making change from his bag and yelling out down the bus at a departing passenger 'Oi - you just wait a minute - I haven't taken YOUR fare'!

mama67

I had a shop like that as well Mrs LW., and did the same for my boys and then the kids at playgroup.

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

It was a far cry from all the must have electronics, latest phones and designer clothes that even 5 year olds seem to expect to get these days. When our two were young (1978 and 1984) we were cash strapped too as I was also a stay at home mum but they got one big present, a cabbage patch doll or in one year a brittans farm but they also got homemade bunk beds and a crib for their dolls and homemade clothes for them and covers etc. then they got books, magic painting books, one thing they loved was a tiny sweet shop with tin scales and tiny bottles of real sweeties to weigh out and they loved the year that I made them a shop by saving packets from things we'd eaten and filling them with paper and resealing them. He Who Knows made them a sledge when we had snow and there were always little things to make up the numbers, a bottle of Matey bubble bath, some hair bobbles, a pair of lacy edged socks things like that. I don't ever remember them expecting presents that cost hundreds of pounds or asking for anything that expensive either. Christmas was more family time with nice food and going on the santa special steam train on boxing day and walking in the woods on christmas afternoon then going home for tea not so much what you could show off to your friends with but then both of mine are happy to be the individuals that they are and don't feel the need to be the same as everyone else so the must haves aren't and never have been a problem.

Seraph123

Loved reading this thread. I was born in 1955 and it wasn't until I went to a posh all girls school when I passed my eleven plus that I realised that we were quite hard up. Dad was a fireman and mum worked part time and my maternal grandmother lived with us. My sister and I both passed our eleven plus exams with flying colours and got our first choice of school which happened to be the one my mum had longed to go to as a girl. It had been a private school till only a few years before my sister went ( I was 4 years later) and it must have been a struggle for mum and dad to find the money for the fancy uniforms. Think the Provident cheques might have helped there. I was amazed to find that other girls lived in houses with carpet that went right up to the walls, had toilets inside the house and went abroad on holidays. We went to stay with an aunt and uncle in wales for a week every year and I thought we were so posh. My mum was an excellent cook, seamstress and knitter and made all our clothes , sometimes unpicking old sweaters from the jumble sales to reknit. We were never hungry but there was no messing at the dinner table and if you didn't eat it you got nothing else. There was no fridge, no washing machine, no indoor toilet or bathroom and in winter the ice on the inside on the bedroom widows stayed there all day. The milk on the doorstep used to freeze in the winter and push the tops off the bottles.. I had a happy, secure and loving childhood spent in respectable penury

meritaten

god - we WERE respectable though! at that time your 'good name' in the community was taken seriously! 'What will the neighbours think' was a sort of 'byword'! yet my very strict, very moral, nan was the first one to give me her support when I announced, in 1977, that I was um, pregnant! Engaged, but definitely pregnant and unmarried! mum didn't speak to me for six months - I had to just let her organise the wedding her way. because frankly, I didn't really care about a 'wedding'! it was my mum and his mum who organised it - we were just going to move in together! SHOCK and HORROR - the mums wouldn't have it!

(it was only much later researching family history I came across nans first childs death cert (a son who only lived a few hours) and worked out she was six months pregnant when she married too! but, that was because she had to wait for her 21st birthday as her mother wouldn't agree to the marriage.

lessonlearned

After the war both my mum and dad became clippies and the did that job for 11 years before my dad finally managed to get something better. Hard work for them but great for me because the often took me to work with them in the scool holidays. Cue trips to all the beauty spots in Derbyshire and days at Skegness, (Skeggie)

Dad often had at least one other sideline job on the go - one of them was as a collector for the Provident. :rotfl:

Living_proof

Seraph123 - did you not have blue tits in your neck of the woods? They pecked open the milk bottle tops (gold/silver/ was it red?) right through the year.

Seraph123

We did indeed and Mum used to get really angry with them but I loved to see them doing it lol

candlelight_2013

It was much the same with the small bottles of milk at school. Frozen in winter and warm, almost curdled in summer because it was left out in the playground in the full sun. At secondary school we had a sort of tuck shop and you could buy a jammy dodger for one penny. If I had managed to save anything from my sixpence pocket money I could buy one.

When our Grandad visited us he might give us ten shillings between the 3 of us, and we knew that was three shillings and fourpence each. Can you imagine that, it was a fortune to us children, but it had to last until the next time we saw him which could be 3 or 4 months. We saw Nan almost weekly but he was a businessman and always at work.

I loved all my grandparents but they didn't have the input that I think grandparents have now. Because Mums have to work these days, grandparents have taken over that roll more and more and we have such a close relationship with our 3 grandchilden. When they were younger we took them on holiday every year, they slept over almost every weekend, and we also did the school run and brought them back here for their dinner each night. We did this because we wanted to and to help our daughter, I must add this was after we had both retired, we couldn't have done the school run before because we both worked.

Candlelightx

[Deleted User]

Ah the school milk bottle I used to like school milk unilt a girl called Sylvie in our class chugged a bottle down too quick, and threw it back up again even quicker, I have never drunk milk since then, and will only ever have it in tea or a milk pudding.
The birds would always try to peck the lid off the milk bottle but my Mum had a tin box with a lid that the milkman put the bottles into

The queue for the cod liver oil capsules at school and the spoonful of Malt extract that was dished out as we lined up The teacher in each class only ever had one spoon and it was doled out alphabetically and my surname began with a 'B' thank goodness.The kids at the other end of the line had to take their Malt from a spoon that had been through many other mouths before theirs There were 42 in my class at primary school so God help you if you were called Smith and the kids before you had runny noses ( quite often in those chilly days of the late 1940s) I also hated having to wear an awful Liberty Bodice with buttons made of rubber that felt like it was chocking you in the winter .When really cold red flannel put underneath as an extra layer of insulation Luckily I was a very skinny rake of a child so it did give me a bit of shape but if you were like my best friend Brenda bless her, she ended up looking like a blimp or the Michelin Man.
Most of the girls had long hair and I had long pigtails which I hated

My Mum took me to get my hair shorn when I was eight, and it was great that I didn't have that hot heavy hair anymore but my Dad was furious with my Mum and said I looked ridiculous as all little girls should have long. hair I think my Mum was just fed up of me complaing about how long it took to get the tangles out and dried when washed No hairdryers in those days just a brisk rub with a towel and the dreaded steel comb to make sure you hadn't picked up any 'visitors' from school friends I never once did and yet nearly all of my grandchildren at one time or another have had nits picked up from school.The yearly visit to the school dentist where it was pullem out and no fillings.In fact the first filling I had was when I was 16 and I still have the same filling in my back tooth.It was done at Guys teaching hospital in London as I worked opposite there and had toothache.Dis a great job of it :)