What normal things did you not have or not have in your house growing up?

[Fairypowder13]

We ran out of kitchen roll today and it got me thinking, growing up we never had kitchen roll in the house. I can remember visiting people who did and thinking that it was quite posh.

I grew up in a very poor home and we were always warm, clean, clothed and fed, but also lacking so many basic things. My parents always had money for cigarettes and alcohol though 🙄

I can remember having to have my hair washed with washing up liquid at times, I had very long hair and my mum never bought conditioner so you can imagine how knotty my hair would be. I did eventually get access to hair conditioner after begging my mum after I’d seen it advertised.

No cushions on the sofas.

No family holidays or day trips. Didn’t see the sea until I was 16.

No fabric softener for washing.

Never had a bed or mattress of my own, had one that was given to us until I was old enough to buy my own, it was all broken in the end but it didn’t occur to my parents to buy one.

No birthday cake or celebration, we’d get one small cheap present but nothing beyond that.

No stocking for Christmas. We’d put out one of our socks.

No winter coat, I had to wait to be given one by my older cousin.

Toilet roll- we only ever had newspaper and it used to block the toilet often so it overflowed on to the floorboards - which always stank of piss.

clean bed blankets - used to see bugs crawling on my bed .

i grew up to be a very clean adult as I hated how I was dragged up .

I didn’t grow up in poverty, DM has always had messed up priorities. When I was about 12 we got a new bathroom suite. The sink didn’t work and DM just didn’t get it fixed. Ever. She saw no reason to as we could just use the bath taps.
When the boiler broke we didn’t have hot water or central heating for at least a year. It wasn’t a priority as we had an electric shower, a dishwasher and fireplaces.

The only “spices” were salt and white pepper.
No chocolate biscuits.
Fizzy drink maybe once a year on holiday.
No aeroplane or train travel.

Mum bought some spaghetti for the first time, probably 1975. It was ever so exotic!

we never had a phone until the mid 90s! It used to be a bit embarrassing when people asked for my phone number at secondary school, made me feel poor. But we had lots of food, warm home, a holiday, presents, not loads of new clothes but had what we needed. Never had fizzy drinks (I don’t buy them now either), never had branded trainers. Had old furniture but it was fine. Had 2 birthday parties (my kids has one each year) I would’ve thought my kids were rich kids 😆😆

Lots of the things listed,
central heating
a shower instead of a bath
hand tissues
specific hand wash, instead of just using washing up liquid
kitchen roll
are things, alongside a lot of other “essentials” we didn’t have at home as children and if I’m honest, I don’t prioritise in my own home now (born in the early 90s)
i never use the shower, washing my hair in the bath with a jug instead 😳
no dishwasher or even a tumble dryer and
you would never find a branded mini roll in my food cupboard, I only buy kitchen roll at Christmas (when it has a nice print on it)
my nans house was the complete opposite of our childhood home and even though it felt posh to me then, it also felt incredibly stifling!
my friends always comment that I leave my windows open, even now at this time of year they are open, the heating goes on to dry the washing if I need to! Children tucked up warm under blankets, good homemade food and not a man size box of super soft tissues in sight and it somehow still feels like a luxurious life 😂

No pillows on our beds, no light bulbs in our bedrooms, no soap to wash hands with, no toothbrushes, no toilet roll (we used newspapers), no hairbrush (I actually remember using a fork!), elastic bands to tie up our hair rather than pretty hair bands, bath on a Sunday & 3 of us in a tub! Only the lounge was heated because my grandparents would buy a gas bottle weekly so we had some heat. No carpets in some of the house but don't worry we were the first in our street to have Sky TV!. Quite a lot of neglect really but that's alcoholic parent's for you!

I’m 50 now and born into a poor family and I felt poor at the time too. Lived in a caravan until it burnt down and then at 6 went to live in an old cold farm house with my grandad. I remember having zero privacy at all growing up and throughout my teens. I had 3 older brothers. The toilet was a metal bucket outside in a tin shed had to be emptied everyday. No toilet roll only newspapers our neighbour would send over. No sanitary products. It was so humiliating. No toothpaste or brushes, no shampoo only fairy liquid. Tin bath that I had to share with brother until I was 12! Had to share bed until I was 16. One Tin of beans went around us all. No fridge, no toaster. One cold water tap. No holidays, no car had to walk everywhere. Parents didn’t drive but they got lifts to pub every weekend. No duvets only blankets. No cushions, no carpet,
my parents didn’t claim benefits. Never had new clothes, neighbours would leave bin bags of clothes for us on the door step every now and then. No bra. It was so humiliating. No umbrella ever, no suitcases or rucksacks. Wore shoes and when they got a hole in them my dad would put cardboard in them. Wore my uniform on non uniform days as I had no nice clothes. No skin products so put neat dettol on my teenage spots! No record player. No books but had a tv. No make up, tried to shave my legs with my dad’s razor blades and cut my fingers so badly. Got bullied a lot at school and my brothers were always in fights at school. No birthday cakes, no wrapping paper on presents. No meals out, no takeaways. No pocket money, no money, no agency.
No central heating just a coal fire, stone slab floor. I always had chilbains on my feet and veins on my legs from trying to stand by fire to get warm. No alarm clock, no hair dryer, no lampshades. No arts and crafts items. Never was allowed to go to doctor or hospital unless it was really serious. No trips to hairdresser or cinema. There’s so much more but I won’t go on. I still feel the sting of shame, but writing some of that down has made me feel lighter somehow.

I remember that we had central heating and double glazing installed in the heatwave summer of 1976, before that the (beautifully patterned) ice inside the windows mid-winter was so thick you couldn’t see through the windows and I’d put my school uniform on under the bedcovers. I didn’t get a duvet until I was about 14, before that it was layered sheets and blankets. I liked staying with my grandparents because they were posh with eiderdowns!

We had to wait a bit but when we got them.we thought we had really arrived.

Gas Fire instead Coal Fire.
Central Heating.
A Fridge
A phone
A Car
Fitted Carpets.
A stereogram.

@ArtNotDishes I hope life is better and kinder now.

All that you mentioned..but we also had no boiler..so no hot water nor heating..yet my father was a plumber...

A phone or central heating. I’m only in my early 40s

With threads like this it's helpful to mention what your friends and neighbours had compared to you to ascertain whether it was normal not to have a car in the 1970's.

We got a house phone in the mid 80's and then we were promptly cut off because my mum was terrible at paying bills she was a heavy smoker and drinker so priorities .

A piano. My family were all musical, largely through church (Methodist, so lots of singing), and it was normal for many people to have one.
So much so, that apparently i was shocked when visiting an old couple and said to my mum “they haven’t got a piano!”
re other stuff - 60s childhood so we didn’t have a fridge or a tv and only a coal fire in the living room.

I think I grew up with everything, but I'm being the opposite with my own DC. My dad was a software designer, so we had laptops and consoles before most people did. My mum had every gadget going. But we've gone more back-to-basics. We have hankies, use kitchen towels instead of kitchen roll, no dishwasher or microwave. The microwave is the one that gets most people, but I had one and it took up a whole counter, and I only used it to defrost things - once I bought my oven with a good defrost function, it went. I don't see the point in them if you have a good induction hob and oven, but the kids would quite like one

Central heating or hot water. We used fires these tiny little blowy heaters. My mum used to wash our hair over side of the sink. We didn't have fabric softener, liquid soap and certainly not kitchen roll. We had a washing machine but a clothes horse on a pulley that went up to the ceiling when the fire wasn't on in the kitchen. We had blankets instead of duvets. I lived in a room that wasn't really a room, it was the attic and my bed was beside the water tank, the constant spiders terrified me.

This was in the late 80s and nothing weird about it except...

We were loaded, properly loaded. My father drove a flash car, we lived in a huge house in a really expensive area, he had other properties, we attended the most expensive private school in the country, wore designer clothes and holidayed several times a year staying in 5* hotels.

My dad was financially abusive and a controlling misogynistic prick.

Many of the posters here appear to be describing severe deprivation and neglect rather than not having normal and routine things.

I grew up in the 60s and many of my frineds families had fridges, tvs, telephones and cars. Washing machines and ch not so much and sheets and blankets were perfectly normal until the late 70s. In place of ch homes were ordinarily heated with fires, gas, electric and coal, and verynfew homes at that time had showers, the plastic thingy on the bath taps was perfectly normal, as indeed in better off families were vanoty basins in bedrooms.

The thought that some young women weren't purchased sanitary products and had to make do is dreadful. That is neglect in my book. My mother was born in 1936, hers in 1912 and both had sanitary products - grannie spoke of poor people in her generation using rags. Awful, just awful.

I guess we were pretty lucky - we always had a phone because my father was a doctor, likewise a car. I do remember moving into a house and the furniture was mostly given to us by grateful patients, so nothing matched! We had a coal fire in the living room and I can't remember how we got hot water. Had central heating installed when I was 7. My mother got her first washing machine when I was 12.

I don't own a microwave and wouldn't want one, nor do I use kitchen paper (what is it for really?), fabric conditioner, liquid soap or shower gel.

When I were a young un, we lived in a shoe at the side of the road, and lived on bread and dripping butties for dinner....

My parents were poor OP when I was a child. We used to live on the peabody estate in London. We had no bathroom in our home apart from an outside toilet. There was a block which had baths so my mum would take me across the estate for a wash. We did have a sink but I was obviously to big to sit in it.
As I grew older I remember we had no heating or hot water. I had to wash my hair in cold water and because it was very cold, my hair froze. The thing is, I wasnt unhappy. Just thought it was normal. I have fond memories of the estate as there was a great community spirit. This was in the early 1970's. My life is very different now but I never take anything for granted.

No phone, no colour tv, no central heating, no eating out, no crisps, no conditioner, no fabric softener, no automatic washing machine and not much love

Born late 50s.
We had no bathroom until I was 7, and a tiny scullery. Baths were in a tin bath in front of the fire in the back room of our victorian house, which was eventually demolished.
No central heating just a coal fire even in our new council house early 60s, with a huge coal bunker in the garden.
No duvets, we had blankets and candlewick bedspreads with hot water bottles, and I don't remember ever being cold in bed.
Mum had a twin tub, and we had a fridge but no freezer.
No teabags when I was younger, always loose tea made in a tea pot with a strainer.
No home phone until I was 13, and it was always locked!
Dad always had a car, the 1st being a Hillman Husky so have fond memories of Sunday picnics in Epping forest to get out of Tottenham where we lived until I was 7.
We always had an annual holiday usually to Devon or Cornwall.
Always had home made/knitted clothes until I was around 13.
No shower, just a rubber attachment that went over the bath taps and usually leaked!
No fitted carpets, tiled or wood flooring with rugs.
No convenience or foreign food, but we ate well. Home made meat pies and puddings, roasts, stews (rabbit, chicken, beef and lamb), liver, ox tail and fish.
We were no different from our neighbours/friends, it was the way things were back then.

My thread is on the mumsnet Facebook page and lots of people are commenting saying that they don’t believe this is true or assuming that I’m very old. Also people are saying that I wasn’t clean.

It most definitely is true. Also, I DID have a bed and mattress aswell as a coat. But what I said is that the bed was given to us, and it was just never replaced, I had it through my entire childhood. I replaced it myself when I was 18 and had a full time job and by then it was broken.

I also did have a coat but it was always one given by an older cousin. Point being that I never really things of my own.

My dc have brand new beds and I always take them to get new coats at the start of Autumn term.

Also people seem to think I’m crying because we didn’t have kitchen roll 🙄🤣

I asked what ‘normal’ things people didn’t have. So for me most of the things on my list were normal for most people but they weren’t things that we had.

Why do your DC need new coats every autumn? When DS was 4, he was bought a coat from M&S for age 5-6. He was average sized and it lasted from reception until the juniors. Ditto dd. I can still see them, DS in his navy and yellow fleece lined coat and dd in her dusty pink one with pale pink fleece lining. Both linings removable so the coats were useful throughout the year.

By the time DS was 7, DH had made his first million.

I do not recall ever eating fruit at home as a child

I'm one of those awful boomers, 1948, so grew up in the 1950's one of my friends accused me of being 'posh' because we would have fruit in the house even if no-one was ill! It was only apples and oranges, maybe a few pears but it was quite unusual in our avenue of council houses!
A lot of the posts on here about not having certain things seem to ignore you can only have what's available! I don't recall having conditioner in the 1960s, there was something called a cream rinse in sachets so maybe that was similar. Most shampoos had a very medical smell, Vosene was one I remember.

I recall being very excited if we saw a product in the shops that had been on Tomorrow's World, the first time we encountered a microwave was in a pub when we were asked if we wanted our pasties heated up!