early life as a baby boomer - our house

From about 1953 we lived in a small terraced house in Yorkshire that was one of ten, arranged in two facing strips of five. They were built around the early part of the century and intended for workers of the nearby Lakeland Laundry. Ours had been sold to a private owner. We referred to these houses as ‘the blocks’. For example we would say, ‘I’m just going to play around the blocks’ which gave our parents some reassurance that all was well and we wouldn’t be far away. No one worried much about the safety of their children, as long as they were aware of the dangers of the main road and other hazards. Even those concerns were mild as there was so little traffic then and sometimes you could sit for ten minutes, waiting for the next car to come into sight. Photo left is the front of the house. The upper window is where the fabled ‘cuckoo’ lowered his gifts to us. (See cuckoo posting).

We had two main rooms downstairs and a tiny kitchen. The front room or sitting room was ‘for best’ and had: a moquette covered suite; a china cabinet for our few treasures; dining table and chairs and a bookcase. It was only used on very rare occasions e.g. when special visitors were due such as relatives from Derbyshire or at Christmas time. The back room or living room had: an old black enamelled fireplace with oven; two armchairs; a treadle sewing machine; a ‘utility’ sideboard with a wireless on it and under the window, a bath - more about that later! The kitchen was tiny, about three feet wide and ten feet long. We had: a pot sink at one end; an electric cooker in the middle and a kitchenette at the other. The kitchenette was a common piece of furniture then. It was like a small, painted welsh dresser with cupboards top and bottom where we stored our few cooking utensils and provisions. We had an electric kettle but that was it for electrical appliances – no fridge or washer. The picture (1966) below is the back of the house.

The tiny window, bottom left, was the kitchen. Upstairs were two decent sized bedrooms and a small box room that was my bedroom (top left). Outside was a small, stone outhouse divided in two. One side was the coalhouse and the other the toilet (no inside luxuries in those days). Dad had built a shed over the front of the outhouses to give more privacy and protection from the weather and to provide useful storage space. It was a multi-functional place. In there we had: an electric boiler; a mangle and a dolly tub. The dolly tub was a galvanised barrel used for doing the weekly wash. Usually on Mondays, mum heated a few gallons of water in the boiler to fill the dolly tub. If the weather were nice she would put it outside for more room. The dirty clothes went in with washing powder and the clothes were pummelled with a posser. That was a sort of long stick with a bell shaped piece of copper on the end, which you pulled up and down in the dolly tub to agitate the clothes. If she were washing white items, like bed linen, she would put a dolly blue in to make the clothes look whiter. It was a small stick with a little cloth bag tied to the end that contained some sort of blue colouring. After she had ‘possed’ them for a while, she ‘fished’ them out with a stick and ran them through the mangle to squeeze out the surplus water. If the weather was dry they were hung outside on the washing line. In winter they were hung over the clotheshorse, which was put in front of the open fire in the living room. The washing would eventually start to steam as it dried. It was tough luck for us if we were sitting there, as we would be totally excluded from any heat reaching us from the fire. There was no central heating then.

We had a decent sized garden at the front where dad grew fruit and veg. There was a small garden shed where dad bred a few budgerigars. We had a blue one named Paddy in the house and mum taught it to say a few phrases such as ‘who's a pretty boy?’