I find it impossible, as someone in their early sixties, to describe how modestly we lived in when I was a child, to someone in their twenties or early thirties now.
I lived in the north of England in the seventies and we weren’t poor but there were six of us. Ice on the inside of the bathroom windows.No central heating. Dad grew veg. Us children had two pairs of shoes each; school shoes and a pair of gym plimsolls. That was it. If we went to a birthday party, we polished our school shoes.
We wore hand me downs from our older siblings. Mum let down our clothes at the hem and the sleeves. We had a nice Sunday joint but then every single ounce of leftovers were made in to cottage pie, pasties, just gravy to have over Yorkshires, mulligatawny soup, and when that ran out, we ate beef dripping on toast. Having been a teenager during WW2, my mum saved bits of string, bits of soap, brown paper, and tin foil. Everything was re-used.
We went on holiday to the seaside for one week a year. We felt sophisticated when the waiter at the hotel served us with a tiny glass of fruit juice as a starter. Or a serving of tinned grapefruit!
We went to the zoo once a year, and took a picnic of bread rolls and boiled eggs with salt and pepper in a twist of grease proof paper. and that was it as far as leisure was concerned. I think I went to the cinema twice in my entire childhood, and a friend’s parent took us. We never travelled abroad.
On Sundays, we went to church in the morning, ate Sunday lunch and then there was literally nothing to do all afternoon. I used to colour-in a lot! We didn’t have new toys, we had a collective box of toys containing battered and broken toy cars, marbles, a pack of cards and a couple of jigsaws and that was it. It was never added to!
Even if you had money, there wasn’t a lot of choice in the shops to spend it on. We shopped in little private outfitters. I vividly remember visiting a local book shop because I won an English prize at school, and I could choose a book, and the children’s section was pretty limited, whereas now we have come to expect child-friendly shops and products! We spent a lot of time at the library.
I remember my mother’s excitement when the first supermarket arrived in town and she brought home a tin of tomatoes and a very “exotic” packet of spaghetti! 😆. And frozen peas!. It’s just impossible to describe the rich range and choice of goods available now as compared to then! For example, we washed with a bar of Pears soap for everything! We had the same brand of shampoo for my entire childhood and it was drummed in to us to use it very sparingly!
Children grow up now with so many toys and clothes and books; it’s unbelievable! I chuckle when I see people buying special bed linen for Christmas for example as it seems so extravagant! My upbringing was helpful to me because I could stay at home when my dc were young and live on a shoe string and it didn’t really seem like hardship!