For those born before 1940

[Texas]

If the Blitz and the war in general hadn't happened, how different do you all think your lives would've been?

Did National Service make any difference to your attitudes toward life?

Sometimes I think the former had the biggest influence on myself. Just after the Blitz I went with my grandparents to Cheshire and stayed there for over three years. Not really an evacuee in the recognised sense of the time, but evacuated all the same.

For better or worse, when I got back to Sheffield I felt different.

When I completed my National Service, returning from foreign parts I couldn't settle at all.

I put these two events as the reason why I became so footloose. It's only in my dotage I've become more settled.

So thats another black mark against Hitler.

[peterw]

Dear peterw, you did make me smile with you reference to 'the tyre you batted to and from school'. We had a craze for batting tyres on Hayward Road, morning, noon and night. It reminded me of the old joke about nipping up to Fox House, having it pinched, and having to walk back to Sheffield.

 

Incidently, if you ever stay at the Savoy Hotel in London, they have six different kinds of dripping at the Breakfast Bar.

 

Thatnks for the laugh! That joke’s a new one on me, never heard it before but very good!

[peterw]

If the Blitz and the war in general hadn't happened, how different do you all think your lives would've been?

Did National Service make any difference to your attitudes toward life?

Sometimes I think the former had the biggest influence on myself. Just after the Blitz I went with my grandparents to Cheshire and stayed there for over three years. Not really an evacuee in the recognised sense of the time, but evacuated all the same.

For better or worse, when I got back to Sheffield I felt different.

When I completed my National Service, returning from foreign parts I couldn't settle at all.

I put these two events as the reason why I became so footloose. It's only in my dotage I've become more settled.

So thats another black mark against Hitler.

 

Can’t agree about Hitler. I believe in destiny and what will be, will be.

[Beechie]

Fruit and veg from the back of a horse and cart, a live chicken from the rag and bone man, watch the lamp lighter adjust the timing clock once a week, see the knocker up man with his long pole. The sheer delight of throwing a big overcoat onto the bed on a cold winters night. I even remember being treated by a doctor in hall that had over twenty patients waiting, seated in chairs around the wall all looking on.

[Kidorry]

I remember the bin men having to empty the bins into a tub,hoist is on their back and carry it to the lorry to empty it.What a job.

[pensionipper]

I remember the bin men having to empty the bins into a tub,hoist is on their back and carry it to the lorry to empty it.What a job.

 

Yes - and they didn't mind if it was overloaded, or indeed what was in it. The bin was for rubbish, all rubbish, and that is what it got.

 

I well remember Hoggs the butchers. There were a few on Sharrowvale Rd. then and Lee's on Hickmott Rd., Shelleys round the corner on Ecclesall Rd., in fact it seemed that every few shops had a butchers not far away.

 

It is lovely to sit in front of a good coal fire but to be honest you cannot beat central heating!

 

Good luck to you all - from a pre-war survivor,

.

[Lucifer]

WE ARE SURVIVORS

We were born before television, before penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods. Xerox,contact lenses, videos and the pill. We were before radar, credit cards, split atoms, laser beams and ballpoint pens, before dish-washers, tumble driers, electric blankets, air conditioners, drip-dry clothes...and before man walked on th moon.

 

We got married first and then lived together (how quaint can you be?)

We thought 'fast food' was what you ate in Lent, a 'Big Mac'was an oversized raincoat and 'crumpet' we had for tea. We existed before house husbands, computer dating and sheltered accommodation was where you waited for a bus.

 

We were before day care centres, group homes and disposable nappies. We never heard of FM radio, tape decks, artificial hearts, word processors, or young men wearing earrings. For us 'time sharing' meant together-ness, a chip was a piece of wood or fried potato, 'hardware-ware' meant nuts and bolts and 'software' wasn't a word.

 

Before 1940 'Made in Japan' meant junk, the term 'making out' referred to how you did in your exams, 'stud' was something that fastened a collar to a shirt and 'going all the way' meant staying on a double-decker bus to the terminus. In our day,cigarette smoking was 'fashionable', 'grass' was mown. 'coke' was kept in the coalhouse, a 'joint' was apiece of meat you ate on Sundays and 'pot' was something you cooked in. 'Rock Music' was a fond mother's lullaby, 'Eldorado' was an ice-cream, a 'gay person' was the life and soul of a party, while 'aids' just meant beauty treatment or help for someone in trouble

 

We who were born before 1940 must be a hardy bunch when you think of the way in which the world has changed and the adjustments we have had to make. No wonder there is a generation gap today...BUT we have survived!

 

Don't talk rubbish, I was born on the th of January 1940, we had very little but we all soldiered on like everyone else, we adjusted easily to every improvement that came along because it made life better. there will always be a generation gap in a sense because technology increases year by year and it may take a little more thought for us to assimilate, don't suppose you rememder woad and magic potions that kept you going.

[Tonyt]

A great piece of life as it was. To add my little bit, scraping the frost off the INSIDE of the window in the morning, jumping on the ice covered puddles on the way to school, racing matchsticks down the gutter when it was raining.

Then the war came so sitting under the stairs as the German planes droned overhead, I could never find my trousers in time and dreamt for years of walking down the street without them. Listening to the policeman at school telling us not to touch butterfly bombs and sticky bombs if we found them. Then finally the whole world turning upside down when my dad eventually came home and changed all the rules on how we were to behave.

[kay1]

Born in 1936. Lets not forget what a hard life our mothers had, Monday up at 5am to get fire lit and copper boiling ready for a full day of washing, stew in coal oven for tea when we got home from school and lads home from work,then sat in a 'sauna' while washing dried round us if it had been a 'bad drying day'. Tuesday all day ironing with flat irons heated from fire. Beating pegged rugs and scrubbing lino, no carpets or vacuum cleaners.(a Ewbank if you were posh),but the meals that were cooked on the Yorkshire Range I can still remember to this day, that Yorkshire Pudding on a Sunday cooked in the coal oven with the lovely burnt corners we used to argue over we all wanted the 'burnt bit'. Chips cooked in dripping in a frying pan over fire must have taken hours there were 6 kids and I think the pan only did about a dozen chips at a time. It must have been well into the forties before we had a gas oven, up to then just a one ring burner. I can never remember my mother saying she was tired, and she still found time to come out into the backyard to turn the skipping rope (one end tied to a drainpipe) for me to skip. I still treasure my childhood memories even though they must have been hard for our parents

[willybite]

Born in 1936. Lets not forget what a hard life our mothers had, Monday up at 5am to get fire lit and copper boiling ready for a full day of washing, stew in coal oven for tea when we got home from school and lads home from work,then sat in a 'sauna' while washing dried round us if it had been a 'bad drying day'. Tuesday all day ironing with flat irons heated from fire. Beating pegged rugs and scrubbing lino, no carpets or vacuum cleaners.(a Ewbank if you were posh),but the meals that were cooked on the Yorkshire Range I can still remember to this day, that Yorkshire Pudding on a Sunday cooked in the coal oven with the lovely burnt corners we used to argue over we all wanted the 'burnt bit'. Chips cooked in dripping in a frying pan over fire must have taken hours there were 6 kids and I think the pan only did about a dozen chips at a time. It must have been well into the forties before we had a gas oven, up to then just a one ring burner. I can never remember my mother saying she was tired, and she still found time to come out into the backyard to turn the skipping rope (one end tied to a drainpipe) for me to skip. I still treasure my childhood memories even though they must have been hard for our parents

 

hiya i remember in the 40s where i lived the majority of houses were the two up and one down type just a living area ,one bedroom, and the attic this was mine as i was an only child, but many around our way living in the same houses as us with three,four up to seven children we thought it was cramped, dont know what others thought. i know in the twenties my nan lived in a house like this and after my granddad died she was left to bring up five children all under the age of ten, now that would have been hard.