Memory Post – Heating The House in Winter

We have just had a cold snap, not much of a cold snap, it only lasted for two days and the temperature barely dipped below zero’

Nevertheless newspapers were full of sob stories about fuel poverty, how some people can barely afford to heat their homes and calls for the Government to make emergency benefit payments. In the Yorkshire post this week one woman claimed that she was so unable to pay fuel bills that she was using a hair dryer in place of central heating.

To be clear I am not being judgemental here, just making a social observation.

When I was a boy houses were cold in  Winter, very cold indeed and it was just an inconvenience that was part of 1960s home life.

On the 29^th to 30^th December 1962 a blizzard roared across England and Wales and continuous freezing temperatures meant that the snow cover lasted for over two months and the winter of 1962/63 was the coldest over England and Wales since 1740 and there wasn’t another frost free night until 5^thMarch 1963.

This would have been quite an ordeal I’m certain because like most people in 1962 we lived in a house without central heating and this was in the days long before double glazing and thermal insulation.  I don’t think we even had a fitted carpet!  The house had an open fire in the lounge and a coke boiler in the kitchen to heat the water and that was it.  Sitting around the fire was quite cosy of course but when it came to bed time this was a real ordeal.

Having a bath was a nightmare. Bathrooms were ice boxes – ours seemed to have an unfair share of outside walls. Hot water was limited and the tank (heated by the coke boiler) ran out long before there was enough in the bath for a proper soak.

I know that we had some electric fan heaters somewhere but Dad was reluctant to use these because he lived in fear of the quarterly electricity bill and we were only allowed to use them when temperatures got below well below freezing.

We certainly didn’t have anything such as this…

The bedrooms weren’t heated in any way and the sheets were freezing cold and we certainly didn’t go to bed without a hot water bottle and thick flannelette pyjamas and without modern duvets, as it got colder, we had to rely on increasing numbers of blankets piled so high that you could barely move because of the weight.

When the house ran out of spare blankets overcoats were used instead.  During the night the temperature inside the house would drop to only a degree or two higher than outside and in the morning there was frost and ice on the inside of the windows that had to be chipped off with a knife before you could see outside.  Our school clothes were stiff with cold.

I can remember the mornings well, first I’d hear Dad get up and after he had checked for frozen pipes and put the kettle on I would hear him making up the fire and raking the coke boiler ready for ignition.  He always did this job in his maroon and white check work shirt.  After fifteen to twenty minutes or so it would be time to leave the comfort of the warm bed and go and see what sort of a job he was making of it.

On a good day the fire would be well established and roaring away and the temperature in the house would be limping up towards freezing but on a bad day he would be fighting to get it going and would be struggling with a newspaper stretched across the grate trying to ‘draw’ the fire into life and the house would still be at the temperature of the average arctic igloo.

This was drawing the fire but it obviously isn’t my dad…

I can only imagine that this was quite a dangerous procedure which required maximum concentration if you weren’t to burn the house door and get it a whole lot warmer than it really needed to be.

The house would still be cold by the time we had had our porridge and gone to school or to work and then it would be mum’s job to keep it going all day so that by tea time when we all came home it was nice and warm again.

Only the living room of course so playing in our bedrooms was out of the question and the family spent the evening together around that comforting fire.

An interesting newspaper advert from 1958…

That seems like a good deal to me – a real bargain, a three bedroom house loft insulated for £5 5 shillings.  Dad’s salary in 1960 was £815 a year so I am certain that he could afford it.

I might be wrong here but I think Silver Stormax is sold today as Thinsulex Silver Multifoil and still seems fairly reasonable at £103.99 for a roll 1.2 x 10 metres.

Memory Post – Danger, Railways and Canals

In my occasional series of memory posts I link to my second (now discontinued) blog “Age of Innocence” .  In this two part post I look at growing up and playing dangerously…

Play places didn’t get more dangerous than the London to Birmingham railway line  It was relatively easy to get up on the tracks and put half pennies on the line for the trains to squash and expand to the size of a penny in the optimistic hope that this would double the value of the coin and shopkeepers wouldn’t notice.  (This never worked by the way).

This was rather like in 1969 trying to tile the edges off of a half crown coin to double its value to make one of the new 50 pence pieces.  (This didn’t work either).

Read The Full Story Here…

Time Travel – An Alternative Sort of Project

I am going to try something different for the month of March.

I have been motivated to do this by my blogging pal Brian who is currently writing a series of posts about genealogy and a search for the meaning of life.

Mine is a sort of alternative sort of search – genealogy without the genealogy!

I first started this blog in November 2009 and I called it ‘The Age of Innocence’ and I intended it to be a look back over the first twenty years or so of my life by examining some of the key events of the years that were making the big news that I was blissfully unaware of.  I have always imagined the post war years of the 1950s to be an almost idyllic existence, Enid Blyton sort of days with long hot summers, blue skies, bike rides and picnics and not a care in the world!

The blog was a slow starter, in the first month the statistics show six views increasing to nine in December.  On the basis of these figures it is fair to assume then that not many people have read my early posts so I have decided that ten years since first publication I will go back and review them and repost.

I am not travelling much right now so I will so how this goes through March – 1954  to 1957 but I will also get diverted and do a bit of time travel along the way…

Click on an image to scroll through the gallery…

Like me, you may find Brian’s Blog an interesting one – you can find it here…

“Buddha walks into a library…”

School Day Memories

When I first began blogging in 2006 I started with some posts about growing up.  This was on a bogging platform provided by AOL.  In 2007 they closed it down and I transferred my posts to Blogger.  I never really liked Blogger so I moved again to WordPress.

I have posted these ‘growing up’ posts three separate times but no one has ever read them so I thought I might tray again.

This is my story of Primary School days.

Read the Full Story Here…

France, La Croix du Vieux Pont Campsite and Fishing

One of the popular activities at La Croix du Vieux Pont Campsite was fishing.

These days I can’t really understand the point of catching fish (if fox hunting is illegal then why isn’t fishing – it is the same thing) but I used to go fishing for about three years between ten and thirteen years old.  I had a three piece rod, two parts cane and the third part sky blue fibreglass with a spinning reel which, to be honest, I never really got the hang of, a wicker basket, a plastic box for my various floats and miscellaneous bait boxes for bread, cheese, garden worms, maggots and ground bait.

Fishing was generally quite boring but one day became quite lively when my friend Colin Barratt (who was forbidden by his parents to go to the canal on account of not being able to swim) fell in while struggling to land a four-ounce Perch with a home made rod and line.

He had turned up just as we were about to go to the canal so we made him a rod from a garden cane with a bit of string and a nylon line and hook and persuaded him, against his better judgement, to join us.  One minute he was standing on the towpath with his garden cane rod and bit of string and there was an almighty splash and Colin was thrashing about in the water, spluttering and gasping and generally struggling for his life.  Between us we dragged him out without having to jump in ourselves and took him home and left him dripping and bedraggled on the doorstep.  We didn’t see him again for about three months after that but to make him feel better we told him that it was a monster Pike that had pulled him in.

This story was not all childhood fantasy I have to say and had some dubious foundation in fact because there was always a story that there was a big fish lurking in the reeds on the opposite bank to the towpath that was alleged to be a trophy pike which is a rather big fish that can live for thirty years and grow to over thirty pounds in weight – always supposing that no one is going to drag it out of the water on the end of a fishing line that is.

We never really caught very much, a few greedy perch, the odd roach and loads and loads of gudgeon but there was never enough for a good meal.  Sometimes if we were fishing too close to the bottom we would bring up a crayfish and the only sensible thing to do was to cut the line and throw it back, hook and all.

Actually by the time I was thirteen I had tired of fishing in the same way that I had tired of Boy Scouts and Saturday morning cinema because by this time I had discovered girls and the only good thing about the canal towpath after that was that it was a good place for snogging.  I didn’t really like catching fish at all, I thought it was cruel, so used to dangle a hook in the water with no bait attached while I concentrated on adolescent activities.

Water always had a special attraction and when we weren’t messing about on the canal there was always Sprick Brook where we used to fish for minnows and red-breasted Sticklebacks and take them home in jam-jars in the days before goldfish.  Sprick brook ran under the railway bridge on Hillmorton Lane and was just the sort of place where you could have an accident and no one would find you for days until someone organised a search party.

I still find fishing completely pointless and I am always amused by people who have twelve foot rods and sit on one side of the river and I always want to ask them why they don’t just get a shorter one and go and sit on the opposite bank?

Maybe it is because fish are just too smart.  One time in Portugal at the  the ancient town of Ponte de Lima I walked across a bridge that crosses the River Lima into the town and watched some men optimistically trying to catch the huge carp that we could see clearly swimming in the water below and teasing the optimistic fishermen on the bridge above.  They were big fish and had been around a long time so I don’t think they were going to get caught that afternoon.

If it was a pike that pulled Colin into the canal that afternoon I like to think it knew exactly what it was doing!