Things you thought were normal if you grew up working class

[Anycrispsleft]

Inspired by that "thought it was posh, turns out it wasn't" thread, I wondered if anyone else remembers stuff from a working class childhood that you thought everyone did and actually no it was just us?

Mine is playing with stray dogs. I was an adult before I realised that approaching strange dogs is meant to be dangerous. In my estate there were two strays (and one owned dog that would escape his garden) and they would chum along with us when we were out playing. We'd feed them crisps. (Luckily for the dogs I think we figured that crisps were more appropriate food for dogs than chocolate, as they were more salty and a bit like meat.) It would never have occurred to us not to befriend any other creature of the street. There was precious little else to do, why wouldn't we add a dog or two into the pack?

@ParkheadParadise

I can remember my older sisters having a show of presents when they got married. My mum and aunties would all make the food my dad went to the off-license for the drink. My sisters would proudly display their 50 towels, 10 toasters and 5 irons. All the neighbours came. Nobody does that anymore.

I seem to recall wedding receptions with the presents on display. Weddings were not an all day event either, usually a sit down meal mid afternoon then home, no disco, evening do and stag/hen nights consisted of a drunken night out with a few friends, none of the arguments about extortionately expensive 5 day 'weekends'. Wedding night often spent in her parents' house too, that must have been a passion-killer.

Yes to the pop man!
A real treat was a Cadbury's finger of fudge .
Putting money in the tv to get it work.
Mum sending us to the shop (Happy Shopper) to get electricity/gas cards to put in the meter. Even though mum had the electric fire on all the time!
Bag of pork scratchings at the pub was an amazing treat!
We had banger after banger of cars that were no doubt dodgy MOTd by dodgy Dave in town where everyone went. Where every car passes!

@middleager

Making toast under the grill in the oven. My parents never owned a toaster and I had no idea it was a normal piece of kitchen kit till I was an adult.

This. I remember scraping lard off the dirty grill pan.

If I'm toasting something like a hot cross bun I still like to use the grill, it seems to give a better texture than a toaster.

@RaelImperialAerosolKid

I remember at my grandparents house we had ripped up newspaper instead of toilet roll. And electric wires from appliances were just pushed into the sockets and held in with matchsticks - those were the days !

I had totally forgotten electric wires stuck in the socket - we held them in place with a plug from another appliance.

Izal toilet paper - like shiny paper. There was no absorbency whatsoever.

Going to bed with a hot water bottle, wearing knitted bed socks. Freezing cold Lino floors. You were dead posh if you had fitted carpet or central heating.

@Loveacheekysausage

Buying clothes off the shop lifters who would knock on to sell it.

In the school where I taught it was quite funny to see a sudden influx of certain garments, a ram raid at Gap was a common saying! More likely to be fakes from the market.

@callmeH @ParkheadParadise I remember the “show of presents” too - either in the parents house, or actually on display at the reception. Guests used to check their present was displayed and it was a feat of diplomacy deciding which gifts were given prominence in the display, family arguments often occurred.
Also it was normal for a young woman to collect a “bottom drawer” - an accumulation of household goods ready for when she married and set up her own home. This sometimes even started before she even had a boyfriend (or “was courting”as we called it).

If you had Tupperware you were posh.

@curtainsforyou2

Sharing a bag of chips after going swimming

We used to buy a pasty with our bus fare, get on the double decker when it was waiting for a change of crew, go upstairs and hide under the front seat, this was in the days of two person buses. I'm sure the conductors knew we were there, or it must have been a surprise to see us come down stairs at our stop!

@ImAlrightThanx

Going to the supermarket at 6pm and straight to the reduced to clear sections before hitting the bread aisles for the 5/10p loaves.

My late OH who died a year ago could spot a reduced label at a hundred yards until the day he died and we weren't at all short of money. Reading some of these posts I'm sure that childhood experiences inform our adult selves, I still dislike spending money on my self for anything other than necessities, OH used to get really annoyed when I admired something but wouldn't buy it because I didn't 'need' it!

Buying furniture and other household bits people had thrown away, from the tip. From about age 9, been encouraged to wear a very short skirt to go to the tip or anywhere else where their might be haggling, to get a better price.

Renting where you lived, either from the Council, a local estate or business. I only had a couple of friends whose parents owned their house.
Changing out of school uniform and into "working clothes" the minute you got home as you only had one set of uniform. I cringe when I see kids out playing in their uniforms after school.
Keeping stuff for "best" that hardly ever got worn/used.

@Flaxmeadow

I think you've misunderstood the concept of working class....

Yes there is misunderstanding of what "working class" was.

Working class used to mean the industrial districts. Coal mining, textile mills, steel works, factories and all the industries connected to that. In the UK these were centuries old community's were used to managing, and budgeting, on low wages and in some ways we had a healthier lifestyle than the better off do now. Food for example was always simple with less choice but home cooked, healthy and nothing was wasted. Fresh air and exercise was encouraged. Many mines and factories had night schools for hobbies, musical groups or book clubs. Police, social workers, nurses, teachers all lived in the same working class areas as industrial workers did. Most people lived in some type of council housing and we respected the NHS.

It wasn't perfect but it wasn't the loutish, racist, sweary, scruffy, booze addled thing some make it out to be either

Quite.

I lived in a big house, my mum used to cook exotic food every night from scratch. But I remember loving my mates cozy council house far better, and her mum made Turkey drummer for tea. She lived on a street where as I lived in the sticks and I wanted a house with lampposts outside. Honestly I really had no idea what I had.

The blackout is like a scratch card and you pay to have a square. If your square is scratched off you are a winner.

WC does not always mean living in a council house. There are plenty of WC people who live in other sorts of housing. Now and in the past.

Some WC people even own their own houses. Imagine that.

@callmeH @ParkheadParadise I remember the “show of presents” too - either in the parents house, or actually on display at the reception.

I had a show of presents, at my mums house about two weeks before the wedding. We had been given the same thing by two people so made sure they were in separate groups for looking at the gifts “the is the lovely tea set from aunt Georgie/aunt Rene”.

@Allmyarseandpeggymartin

Being brought up to believe that “you’ll Labour all your life so vote Labour” I genuinely thought that anyone who voted conservative was evil

To be fair my parents still think this, it was only when I met perfectly nice normal people through my job in a bank when I was in my 20s that I realised that conservative voters weren’t automatically bad people

Haha I remember the big tv at school being rolled in for us to watch something. When it came on Margaret Thatcher was on and all the kids started booing chanting get her off, we must have been about 7 at the time 😂😂😂

A family day out on a Sunday was to the big outdoor market. Even better if the additional flea market was on too!
Everything was bought from the market.
Clothes, meat joints,sofa, towels, bedding, confectionery (usually out of date) & dairy goods. Cakes like custard tarts & sausage rolls that'd been left out all day.

Our dogs used to be let out all day too (70s) and one day they came home with another dog - not a stray, just someone else's dog they had made friends with - nearly all the dogs used to be out by themselves. He spent about half his time at our house from then on.

Occasionally random sheep would roam about too, when I was little my dad went out to investigate strange banging in the shed in the middle of the night, it was a huge ram, no idea how it got in there. It was furious and knocked him down.

@ClearMountain

I heard one of the older girls comment on my reaching out, and I was mortified! That happened to me several times when I was in my late teens. Posh people I met through college and university commenting on my lack of manners because I’d never been taught. We didn’t have a table to eat at so I had no idea about passing dishes or waiting till everyone was served. I’d never been taken to a restaurant so I had no idea about when to order or what to do with your empty plates. In the end I got a library book about etiquette to educate myself. Now I follow an etiquette expert on Instagram and I still learn stuff that I should probably have known since childhood.

How very rude of them. I thought a key rule of etiquette was not to embarass others. Perhaps you should point them towards the expert on Instagram.

@ParkheadParadise

I have photos of me and my siblings I was about 2 sitting on my dads knee and he has a fag in his mouth. My dad let us light a fag for him. It was all normal.🙈🙈

I have a photo of me as a tiny baby, maybe a month old in a carrycot, at a relative's house. My dad is sitting next to me, smoking.

Viennetta (we very rarely had it and I thought it was a mega treat if we did)!

A family day out on a Sunday was to the big outdoor market. Even better if the additional flea market was on too!
Everything was bought from the market.
Clothes, meat joints,sofa, towels, bedding, confectionery (usually out of date) & dairy goods. Cakes like custard tarts & sausage rolls that'd been left out all day.

Oh dear, we still do this! The Sunday market is the best day out and everyone enjoys it. Never buy much but I do like the stall that has M&S vests and pants with the labels cut out - what bargains! And there's a bakery van with amazing pasties.

Lol at booing Maggie Thatcher. I remember kids singing “we don’t want no poll tax” in the playground at primary school - they had no idea what it was.

Glad someone mentioned “the bottom drawer” proper confused DH to be when my aunt asked him if we had started one (we had)

Yep - we had some great songs about Maggie thatcher too. The one I remember best involved drawing a scribble on the palm of your hand, and singing ‘here’s Maggie thatcher, throw her up and catch her, (rub hands together) swish squash squish squash here’s Maggie thatcher (display palm).

Pretty dark when I think about it now, but age 6 or 7, having no clue who she was, it was a pretty fun song.