The house was very big and cold, except for the living room with its large fire. The front lounge was used only on special occasions. The second room at the front of the house was our playroom. The windows had wooden shutters and a very wide windowsill, which we could stand on to perform plays.

There was no electricity or running water. The outside loo adjoined the dairy at the side of the house. It was a brick extension with three seated toilets and yellow brick floor. I had to scrub this out when I reached around eight years old. If we were old enough to go to school, we were deemed old enough to help with chores around the house. These included washing up, drying, dusting, mopping lino floors with a dry mop and then shaking the dust off out of the window. We were also expected to cook, do gardening and feed the hens.

The scullery had a large copper in the corner with a fire underneath. This heated our water for our weekly baths in a tin bath in front of the fire. The sink was a flat stone one with a pump at the end to bring up water from the cistern outside the back door.

Washing clothes was done in a hand-generated ‘jiffy’ machine. White clothes were boiled in the copper with the fire underneath. We had a mangle with wooden rollers to get the water out. Clothes were hung to dry on lines in the grass fields at the back of the house.