THE GOOD OLD DAYS
Mum's Microwave
Postcard
Inside Toilet
Postcard
Central Heating
old Photo
Mum's Tumble Dryer
Old photo
Supermarket Delivery
Outside Toilet
photo
Mum's Washing Machine
old photo
Old Supermarket checkout
The Bathroom
Richard Beckett
My Dad's Word processor
Richard beckett
Childhood memories
By Richard Beckett
Look at some items which I recall from my childhood. Were they really "The Good Old Days"?
The room where we ate (nowadays called the Dining room) was called the Kitchen. The room where the cooking was done was called the Scullery and it also had the "copper", the boiler where the washing was done.
There was no bathroom and the toilet was outside in the back yard. On a cold wet windy night we did not venture out there unless absolutely necessary, the "Inside Toilet" was good enough for us.
We did not have a bathroom, so in the morning we washed in the sink in the Scullery (Kitchen) using water heated in a kettle on the gas stove, and on bathnight it was in a tin bath in the Scullery using water heated in the Copper, or sometimes in the winter the bath was put in front of the fire in "The Kitchen" (Dining Room). Because the water took so long to heat in the coal fired copper, I used to be bathed in the water my elder sister had already used.
There was no Washing Machine, so when the washing was done on a monday it was in the copper in the corner of the scullery. There was no Tumble Dryer so it all had to be wrung out using the mangle in the back yard and hung out on the washing line strung down the back garden. But of course on wet days everything was hung up on the lines in the scullery or on the clothes horse in the kitchen (Dining Room) and the house was full of the damp soapy smell.
No Central Heating, the only heat was from the fire in the main room and on cold frosty nights the inside of the bedroom windows used to get covered in ice where the condensation from our breath had frozen .
Wallow in nostalgia by all means, but I would not want to return to conditions back then thankyou very much.