I was born in London in 1947. Finding accommodation in London after the war was close to impossible so my parents lived in my grandparents house. My mother’s wedding dress was made from white parachute silk and made by a neighbour. Fortunately my grandmother worked in a military store !!! My grandfather worked in the London docks and their rented house was very typical of a working family house at that time. A small terraced house with no bathroom so the kitchen was used for all washing other than a weekly bath in a tin bath on the floor. Their house early in the was was bombed so they just found an empty house nearby and moved in. It was some years before they found who owned it but my grandmother always saved money for rent so they could pay when the owner turned up - which they did eventually.
Everyone shared the same water for the weekly bath as there was no built in hot water supply. It all had to be heated in pots on the gas stove. No bathroom meant the lavatory was a small room only accessible from the rear yard (no real garden but we did have a small area of grass at the back of the house). Outside lavatory meant the call of nature in the night resulted in the use of a pot under the bed. There was no bedroom for me and no room in my parents tiny room do I slept in my grandparents room and the smell of the pot in summer was, to me, a normal summer smell.
My father was in the Royal Air Force during the war and then joined the Metropolitan Police. Nobody had cars of course but my father got a loan from police to buy a decent push bike. My grandfather never had his own transport and worked in the docks about three miles from home. If he was feeling rich he used a bus for work but mostly just walked.
Now into the 50s and yes life did get better. In 1953 my father was offered a flat in a small block built for Metropolitan Police officers. For me I remember the major pluses. The first was I had my own bedroom and the second was a lavatory inside the house. The third was actually having a bath built in which was fed both hot and cold water via fitted taps. Amazing.and I had clean bath water.
Around the same time all food rationing ended but life did not change very much. I went to a school about a mile away and was quickly taught how to cross the main road and walk there. Nobody went to school by car and as most parents were off to work before school started most kids just walked on their own. During school holidays we had plenty of places to play and they were normally in the wreckage of bombed out buildings although some parks with small children's play areas appeared. I fondly remembered a wonderful climbing structure rather like metal scaffolding. That was around 15 feet high. As with the swings and other exciting features it was just built on the concrete surface. No sand or anything to break a fall. It was a great learning idea. You very soon learned not to fall off !!!
I did experience sand though as, unlike many, my father’s job plus my mother working as a secretary meant we could have a week at a holiday town on the south coast.
This all sounds rather dire but I actually had a great childhood and compared with many. I was well looked after by my parents and grandparents and our life was definitely better than the generation that had to live through WW2. We did not seem to have the material pressure that we have these days. No problem with not having the latest mobile phone (we had no home phone and knew nobody with a phone to call anyway). Few people had cars and when my father first had one it was a 1936 model. We were still the first family in the 21 flats in the block to have a car and once a few more families in the block had them us kids lost our playground as it was made into a car park !!! When the flats were built the builders never thought about normal working people having cars so it was never included in the plans.
The first time I was in a aeroplane was when I was 20 although I had previously been out of UK on holiday with my parents but that was taking our, now more recent, car by ferry to France. We had no TV of course. That was for rich people. Eventually one house in our block of 21 had a TV and as it was police accommodation everyone knew what everyone else earned so that led to wondering what sort of fiddle the people with the TV had going as nobody else could afford one !!!
I now have children, grandchildren and my first Great grandchild. If it was back in the fifties neither my wife or I would have survived to today as she has had cancer and that would have been terminal. I have both heart and lung conditions and keep taking the tablets so I doubt if I would be pushing 80. OK the kids have different pressures today but that mainly seems to be worried that their mates have a better phone than they have. My parents were wonderful and I have no bad memories of childhood. It was what it was but to say life was better in the 50s. Rubbish. It was just different and looked back on through rose tinted glasses.
A couple of early pictures of me and one of my parents. One with grandfather. Note the permanent “roll up” cigarette in his mouth Nobody thought about any danger with smoking around kids or, indeed, smoking anywhere. As was normal at the time he died very soon after retiring. The second was with my glamorous mother. Shenlivedintonher 90s but sadly my mother had some mental health issues in her later life and that resulted in her deciding that she desperately needed the space taken up by family photos so they went in the bin before my sister and I were aware of what was happening. The final picture from my parents wedding show's how well people improvised at the time. Mum is wearing the dress made from a parachute
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