Childhood & Sentimental memories

alfiedog_2

What a great thread:T AMIE399 you said all the things I was going to say:D I bore my kids to death with tales of the paraffin man and the Corona man. I cannot see a can of condensed milk without having to get a spoon out and eat some straight from the tin:rotfl: Evaporated milk seems to loom large in quite a few people's memories, curdling in the juice of tinned fruit cocktail!
I also made perfume from rose petals and kept butterflies in a jar:o
I remember being soooo excited when we had a phone installed and trying to beat my brothers to answer it the first time it rang ( and just about every time it rang!)
Showing my age , but I remember getting 8 black jacks and/or fruit salads for an old penny:o
Happy Days! (ooh yes, used to watch that too! )

shetitasatic

Eating my nan's cherry pie and putting the stones around the rim of the bowl, and doing 'rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief' to find out who you would marry annd 'this year, next year, sometime , never' to find out when!

Sleeping at my gran's thatched cottage deep in the Devon countryside- no electricity, mains water or drainage. The toilet was an earth closet at the bottom of the garden (she grew wonderful veg!!) and we went to bed with candles and oil lamps, with a 'po' under the bed. She had a stuffed owl in a glass case on the staircase window sill and my sister was scared stiff to pass it !

Being ill in bed, and having a fire lit in the bedroom and Heinz tomato soup - still my 'nursery food' for when I'm feeling down.

Being paid a shilling each (with my sister) to clean all the shoes in the house on Sunday mornings - done outside the back door

Picking mint and chopping it and making mint sauce for Sunday lunch - my first solo cooking

Standing for what seemed like ages, stirring the gravy in a roasting tin with a ridged bottom - I can hear the noise the spoon made now!

Being allowed to iron handkerchieves and tea towels and thinking how grown up I was!

Walking to primary school across the park and walking on the ice in the lily pond - and falling through and going into school wet up to my knees!!

Collecting and pressing wild flowers - I still know the names of nearly all our wild flowers

Picking little tiny wild strawberries from the hedgerows

getting up at 5am to go out picking wild mushrooms with my Nan and putting them in big ' chip baskets' made of very thin woven wood

........... and more, so much more.....

Austin_Allegro

Looking back a lot of my frugal ways were probably formed in childhood.

I lived with my father who grew up in the depression and war years, and my mother who grew up in the postwar austerity era. My grandfather also lived with us and he lived through the two world wars and depression. Before he moved in with us in 1980 he'd lived in a house in Cornwall with no electricity.

Grandpa used to scavenge old timber from skips and build really nice, faux-antique furniture which he gave to relations as presents. He also built a shed for us children out of reclaimed stuff. His big failure though was trying to grow his own tobacco and grapes to make wine.

Dad was at work most of the time but used to help me a lot with mending bicycles etc and at one time all the local children used to get him to fix theirs too, until he got fed up and told them to stop coming round!

Mother and granny spent a lot of time doing things like blackberrying and making jam etc. I used to hate having to go blackberrying or to pick your own farms as I was a lazy blighter...

We also got taken round any jumble sale or bazaar that was going. I soon learned that if I bought secondhand toys and comics I got far more for my money than new stuff, and my bedroom eventually filled up with junk that usually went back to the next jumble sale.

We also got dressed in hand - me - downs from some relations. They were usually horrible polyester stuff. Then I made friends with an American boy at school who was bigger than me, so his 'mom' used to give my mother all his cool American clothes which you didn't see in England in the seventies.

shetitasatic

More......
Taking money to school to buy national savings stamps - with a picture of a very young Prince Charles or Princess Anne on them

Being so proud of my Coronation scrap book (1953). I stuck all the pictures in with homemade flour and water paste. I put the scrapbook in the window seat cuboard and the mice nibbled it to bits!

Eating pancakes my Mum's way with golden syrup and cream on them - who wants sour lemon juice!

School milk in little 1/3rd pint bottles in metal crates. In winter they were brought in first thing and put on the radiator to thaw out in time for break

Pouring full cream milk into a large metal basin, then letting it settle all day, then putting it over a pan of water on a very low heat to 'scald' The cream would form a crust on the top and in the morning it was my job to skim the cream off - we had this for breakfast on bread with homemade jam. Living in Devon, this clotted cream was done everyday!

picking peas straight from the garden and eating them from the pod and the pod as well - didn't call it 'mange-tout' though!!

playing french cricket in the street - 6 in the garden and out!
playing stride and whisper and football with a leather ball stuffed with newspaper

listening to Radio Luxembourg on Sunday nights as I knelt on the floor so Mum could towel my hair dry - even in the late fifties there was no TV for a couple of hours in the 'God slot' - the early evening on Sundays

Having to be perfectly quiet on Saturday evenings when the football results were on and later being trusted to write them down correctly - every one did the football pools! later, being trusted to fill in the coupon with a cross for the draws.

Wearing last year's Clark's sandals with the toes cut out, to playin.

Handmade dresses(usually made from cut down adult ones) made with big hems to let down and finally with 'false hems' so they could be let right down

Sitting with arms outstretched, bent at the elbow, thumbs sticking up so that Mum could wind hanks of knitting wool
and ,
in extreme circumstances to wind unpicked wool from old jumpers which would be steamed (to get out the crinkles!) and re-knitted

thriftmonster

I had forgotten about the coconut tobacco! Also round us, liquorice was called "Spanish" - why?
I can also remember being sent down to the corner shop to buy my Grandad's cigarettes for him - imagine nowadays......
My Gran used to make icecream out of Dream topping and carnatian milk for us - lovely. And during the Christmas holidays Mum would buy a box of crisps - Bensons - and we could have a packet a day. And we used to get sweets in 2oz as well - chewing nuts or alphabet sweets.

kayjay1809

One of my favourite meals was tinned luncheon meat, chopped into squares and mixed with baked beans, grated cheese and brown sauce mmmmm

Bacon and cheese pastries, made with leftovers when mum made the jam tarts

Eating runner beans with everything cos my dad grew too many, ditto tomatoes

And we had bread and butter dipped into everything - fruit in syrup and evaporated milk, stew, gravy, you name it we dipped it

Chocolate instant whip with dream topping

the smell of cods roe on a Saturday, used to make me heave

and this isn't going back too far I'm only in my 30's (just!!). How times have changed if I fed my son any of that he'd think I'd lost the plot!!

Boomdocker

mum buying a 2nd hand Atari games console(remember them??)and thinking it was the height of technolgy[/quote]

We used to have a Coleco and I only got rid of it a couple of years back. My Dad had a Spectrum ZX84, the games were on a tape and took forever to download. I remember some of the games, Attic Attack, Horace the Spider, Jumping Jack, Manic Miner, Jetpac, Kong........They dont make 'em like that anymore.

borderlakland

Boomdocker wrote: »

mum buying a 2nd hand Atari games console(remember them??)and thinking it was the height of technolgy

We used to have a Coleco and I only got rid of it a couple of years back. My Dad had a Spectrum ZX84, the games were on a tape and took forever to download. I remember some of the games, Attic Attack, Horace the Spider, Jumping Jack, Manic Miner, Jetpac, Kong........They dont make 'em like that anymore.[/quote]

my dad still has our old sprectrum with all the above games.i was the only 1 in our house who completed attic attack.can still remember the noise of the games loading from the tape.

also remember taking corona bottles back to the local grocer for refund on the bottle.
another one here who made perfume(it used to stink to high heaven by end of summer holidays)
being in luuurve with tucker jenkins from grange hill.
my kids were gobsmacked when i told them how few kids programs were on tv only from after school 'til 5.40 then a couple of hours on saturday morning(Swap Shop vTiswas??) then a more boring drama on sun afternoons.

bommer

Thanks for all the lovely memories everyone seems to have had such wonderful childhoods. Working as I do in a children's charity I no that so many children do not have the sort of wonderful memories that we have.

Fortuneately two memories stick in my mind. Being aloud to "test" out my husbands to be pride and joy "racer" when I was about 9 and him 12 as no one else was allowed, and a lovely photo of him at 15 being presented a trophy at the Birmingham Anglers Association by my dad. I fancied him for ages but we finally got together when we were 16 and 19.

Unfortunatley today he has been diagnosed with terminal Cancer, so memories like these will be very short and sweet.

Best wishes Bommer x

Olliebeak

So sorry to hear about your DH, bommer.

A lifetime together is something that not many people can manage these days. Celebrate your life with each other and make the very best of the time you have remaining. Life and love are the most precious things that we have in this world.

God Bless you both.