Life is so much easier today — just ask my dad
There seems to be a belief that bygone days were happier and easier, but those of us who lived through them saw matters in a different light.
My father is 90, one of ten kids brought up in London’s east end. his father was a cigar maker and, when he wasn’t sweating for a pittance, had a market barrow in Petticoat Lane and another in Borough Market.
After the First World War came the Depression, slum housing and the iniquitous ‘call-on’ system at the London docks. Life was hard.
During the Second World War, my father spent two years in Burma, while back in London my mother was twice bombed out.
As for us baby boomers, we saw our electrician father, at the mercy of rapacious employers, struggle to provide for us. Nevertheless, we all survived, unlike two of dad’s siblings, who died in infancy.
For ordinary people like us there were no phones or cars and no foreign travel, unless you were sent abroad to fight.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, we played on bomb sites, hand-me-down clothes were normal, foreign food unheard of, and on Wednesday afternoons and on Sundays, every shop was shut.
Today we have a generous welfare system, the Clean Air Act, food banks, CCTV cameras everywhere, mobile phones and computers. And if I want to jet off to Spain or Dubai, I can.
Life for Joe Average is infinitely easier. Just ask my father.
TONy lEvy, Wednesfield, W. Mids.