The Early Years of a Baby Boomer

Life in a back-to-back terrace was educational, with the outside toilet up a dark passage behind the houses.

I had to run up the passage trying to hold and shield a candle to find my way, most times the candle would blow out, more than once I’ve opened the door and someone’s already sat there in the dark.

Bath night was another major operation. First taking the old tin bath down from a nail, hanging outside the front door and then filing it with water boiled on a pan on an old black lead fireplace which also served as a cooker and heating for the whole house, In dark winter nights we would sit in front of the open fire listening on the radio to the Billy Cotton Band Show or The Goons,

All sorts of strange things would run from under the fireplace on a morning - cockroaches, black clocks and silverfish. All heading towards a homemade rag rug made out of any old material cut up and stitched through a mesh base. No axminster in them days. There was very few overweight people in those days as we lived on a diet of fat and bread with salt on, tripe, haslet, black pudding, pigs trotters and polony.

I remember the family of lads who lived next door fighting each other in the garden on Sunday afternoon because one of them had pinched the sheep's eye out of the sheep’s head stew and it wasn’t his turn for one, with their mother looking on a shouting at them to stop it, whilst feeding a baby sat on her knee from a Guinness bottle with a teat on the end.

It’s a good job we had free school milk and cod liver oil capsules, otherwise we would all have the rickets.