Mary Maughan
For our one holiday a year we went to South Shields. There were shuggy boats and marquees, you could get a meal for sixpence and the village brass band would sit in a ring, and it was tuppence to have a dance to the band. It was with Sunday school, you got a bag of mixed buns, and mother would send teacakes and home-made pies.
Alwyn Lewis
There was a rugby field just outside our house and the girls used to play rugby with us. They used to wear clogs. There was one girl lived on this dirty old street called Becca Lewis. Becca Lewis was a great big rough girl – we used to think she was a woman, but she must have only been in her teens. She used to play rugby in her clogs and we were afraid to go near her.
Mr Patten
When you got home you maybe got a meal or you had to wait until the father came in from his job. If you didn't get a meal when you got in, you took off your school clothes, as you couldn't afford to soil those, and you went and played outside again. Well, there were apple trees, pear trees and plum trees in your district somewhere, and you would have to get them some way or another. Everything like that was fair game, and it was always fair game to tease the keepers and those people who had apple trees and things. Even if we couldn't eat them, it was a question of being clever enough to steal them from the owners. Your status was improved if you were the one to steal the most.
Mr Harrison
I used to see fights at school and there was a fight in the streets every night as well. We used to play in the pit pond and it was full of dead ducks. You had to shove them to one side while you were swimming.
Polly Lee
We used to call in at the greengrocers and get straw ropes off orange boxes. We couldn't afford proper skippy ropes. If you saw anybody with skippy ropes with handles on you thought they had plenty of money. The straw skips didn't last very long though, they'd soon break. You sometimes used to sneak a bit off your mother's line, but when you were skipping double you needed a long rope.
Florence Hannah Warn
We did not have any pocket money, but sometimes we ran an errand for someone and received a halfpenny, so we would buy some sweets, and for a farthing there were lots of things one could buy. There was a strip of toffee called Everlasting, which it was not; a braid of liquorice which broke into strips and were called Shoe Strings; a slab of black toffee called Wiggle Waggle, which blackened the tongue and lips. Bull's eyes were marbles of sweet which could be eaten, but when rubbed on a rough wall, revealed a flat surface with rings of varying colour, hence bull's eyes. Sweet shrimps, white or pink fondant mice – we girls were a trifle squeamish about eating these – for a farthing you could get six pretty little boiled sweets called Rosebuds.
D. G. I. Lodge
My brother had diphtheria when he was two and my mother was expecting another baby, so I went to stay with my aunt and uncle, who was a doctor. They had no children but longed for a child. I stayed and I stayed, and then one day I said, ‘I think one father and one mother and one little girl is best,’ and from then on I stayed with them.
One night my uncle woke me up and put me in a dressing gown and carried me to the front door in his arms. It was a dark night. The clouds were low and misty. We couldn't see anything. Then we heard the migratory birds going over. It was the most wonderful sound I've ever heard. They were flying so low and seemed to go on for ever. It was amazing. Curlews and sandpipers, redshank, all piping and calling to one another. I know nothing to compare with that.
Ray Head
I went to work for the Post Office in the City of London. Hounslow was an agricultural town in those days, a little rural place. Most people living there worked on the land. Most people working in London still came from the area close to the City – I was an exception. Most of these people walked to work. There were thousands of houses in Lambeth, Southwark, Whitechapel and Dalston, and all the inhabitants used to walk to work in offices which were really clerical factories. Everything was so labour-intensive. Typewriters were only just beginning and the telephone was a luxury for the very, very few, so everything was written by hand. In the banks, all the ledgers were done by hand and there was a great deal of clerical work to do.
I used to wear a stiff collar, tie, trousers, heavy boots, a bowler hat and an umbrella. You needed heavy boots because they soon wore out with all the walking. The people higher up wore top hats. The atmosphere in the office was pretty formal. Contact between men and women was very limited. We were kept apart and we dined in separate dining rooms. There was no palliness with the bosses. We were very humble. In spite of all this, we were happy. It almost felt like a club.
Ronald Chamberlain
We lived in Canonbury in Islington. It was a very nice, lower middle-class area, populated by clerks, post office people, bankers and people who worked in shops. My own father was a clerk in the Post Office. He earned a modest income, about seven or eight pounds a week, and he brought up three children on that. He was always very particular to be well groomed and well dressed. He wore a bowler hat and never wore shabby clothes. He never worked in his shirtsleeves and there were no Christian names used at work. They were very dignified in the office. He was a very modest man but he had a very high sense of propriety and conduct. All Post Office people had that attitude to their work. I remember being out with my father one evening and we saw a postman who had finished his work and he was slouching and rolling – he had obviously been drinking. My father was enraged by this. He went up to the postman and said, ‘Pull yourself together, my man! You are a civil servant and so am I, and in the Post Office, you can't behave like this!’ That shows the attitudes of the day. My father originally worked six days a week, but in 1906 or 1907 they gave him the Saturday afternoon concession and he was able to come home in the middle of the day.
Mildred Ransom
After a period of hovering, I decided to learn shorthand and typewriting. I went to a commercial school in the City and in intervals of hard work I sometimes contrasted the cold, gas-lit, smelly classrooms with the scents and beauty of the Tropics. I don't know that I regretted them. I felt rather that I was satiated with sun and beauty and I wanted to stretch my brains and learn endlessly and make a path for myself through the clamour and hideousness all round me in this perfectly revolting school.
From this seat of learning I went to a copying office in Bedford Row and I am deeply grateful to it. It was the worst of offices and the clerks were habitually kept till 11 p.m. Payment was made by results, which meant that you were paid half the value of the work you did; naturally the two partners kept all the fat and gave out only the badly paid stuff to the clerks, and then generously handed out a meagre half of what the latter had earned to them each Saturday. I earned five shillings my first week. Later I rose to the amazing salary of fifteen shillings, and one day I meekly approached the junior partner and asked if she thought I should ever rise to £1 a week. She looked at me with utter contempt and said, ‘Never,’ and then turned to more practical matters.
Sometimes my fellow clerks and I sat in idleness when the partners were busy, working hard because there was not enough work for everyone, and the partners had to be overworked before they would hand out anything to the clerks. At such times I used to urge insurrection and try to get them to demand better conditions, but it was very little use. A more popular effort was the recitation of Aesop's Fables Revised. The favourite moral was ‘You cannot pretty much most always tell how things are going to turn out sometimes’. But I was grateful to the office because