Hardship? This is easier than 1950s
i’M SURPRISED life during lockdown has been compared with that muchderided decade, the 1950s (Femail). if you weren’t alive back then, you won’t understand the differences. i do remember when the majority of the working class did not have a bathroom or inside toilet, fridge, vacuum cleaner or washing machine. Some didn’t even have electric light — one side of our street still had gas mantles. Ordinary families didn’t have a car, TV or phone. dad did a manual job and came home for a cooked meal every lunchtime. Mum had to shop every morning to put a dinner and afters on the table for 12.15pm on the dot. Not a one-stop supermarket, but joining a queue at the butcher, greengrocer and grocer. She had a pin-money job in the afternoon at the corner shop, weighing out food into paper bags or wrapping it in greaseproof paper. School finished at 4pm, so she was back home before my brother and i returned and had another meal to prepare for dad’s 5.15pm homecoming. Mum also served up breakfast and supper, which was sometimes just an Oxo cube in a cup of boiling water. in the winter, the fire had to be cleared out, relaid and lit every morning. Washing, including bedding, was done by hand and put through the mangle. the water had to be heated up by wood and coal fire under a copper. how did Mum get the laundry dry in the winter? Why do you think we changed our clothes only once a week? two flat irons were heated up alternately on the gas cooker in the scullery and the ironing was done on the battered dining table. We bathed only once a week because the water from the copper had to be carried in saucepans to the tin bath in the living room. Oh, and there was ‘slopping out’ every day, too. You don’t think we got up during the night to go to the loo at the bottom of the garden, do you?! the rest of Mum’s time was spent sweeping, mopping, dusting and polishing. She also did the daily shopping for my grandparents — all four lived opposite us when i was a child — and she looked after them when their health declined. All this happened on the South Coast — it was grim down South, too! Lockdown wouldn’t have worried Mum. She would have thought she’d died and gone to heaven if she could have turned a tap and got hot water, pressed a dial and watched her laundry being washed, bought convenience meals and, best of all, not have to go to an outhouse at the bottom of the garden for a call of nature. We really are snowflakes these days. Mrs PAM NOCKeMaNN, Southsea, Hants.