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.

In the 60s & 70s...
No washing machine (in a household of 7!)
No freezer
No central heating
No phone until I was about 14
No shower

And individually, no warm winter clothes. I hated winter. Neither I nor my dsiss ever had a bike. My dB had a bike, which was a source of much resentment. He was allowed out when a teen. We weren't. Boys can't get pregnant.

We usually had a week by the sea in summer though.My dm paid for it. Df thought it was a ridiculous waste of money.

I left at the first opportunity and never went back.

Oh god, I forgot about the period stuff, my mum gave me a period belt and big thick sanitary towels, I was a tiny, tiny, 12 Yr old, ffs I was traumatised, it took some friends to point out that you could buy thin ones with sticky backs.

The worst one was menstruation products. I would use toilet roll. We lived in the middle of nowhere so I couldn't get to a shop even when older, except when I could leave school premises at lunch time in sixth form. I used to walk to the supermarket near the school to buy tampons and I could tell my friends were a bit weirded out by how I always coincidentally needed to buy them.

Oh I also purchased my first bike aged 28, never had one, learned to ride one at that age.

We used wadded loo roll as well. Awful.

I remember being very jealous of certain foods other people were 'lucky' to have, that we didn't, when growing up. Findus crispy pancakes and those pizza slices they did (do?), viennetta, potato waffles, heinz beans with sausages in the same tin, micro chips etc.

I spent the first half of my childhood in Gilgit Baltistan, so

Mains electric
Running water
Central Heating
Bedrooms, we all slept in the same room
A bathroom, there was a communal toilet a few doors down, you would use a bowl to wash.
A kitchen, communal kitchens were the norm/street food unless you were fairly wealthy

We did have a tv, but use was limited as we could only use it when we ran the generator.

Fridge or freezer, washing machine, central heating, phone, hot water that wasn't via the coal fire, TV, shower, upstairs bathroom, inside toilet. Yep, we were poor.

Oh, and we had Izal toilet paper or torn up newspaper

Central heating
Hot water was available only first thing in the morning and at bedtime
Record player/ tape recorder (until relatives gave us some old records, and another relative gave us kids a tape recorder)
Colour TV - we got our first TV when I was seven or eight, a second hand B&W one. No colour TV until I was about ten, and it was a wonky second hand one.
Paper towels
Snacks between meals
Looking back, we had very few toys to play with indoors, though we had hundreds of books, and skates and bikes for outdoors (no helmets - they were unheard of back then)
Sunscreen (hence many bad sunburns)

Someone mentioned a bra. I wasn’t allowed a bra either. I mean I did eventually get one but it was way later than needed. I was just told I didn’t need one.

We didn’t have a laundry basket either. All the dirty washing just got thrown in a heap on the kitchen floor.

We didn’t have glasses to drink out of either. So we drank cold drinks out of mugs or tea cups.

we were relatively well off (until my dad died) but we didn’t have:

a shower. Those hose things that went on the bath taps or a jug was as good as it got.

a freezer. Just the ice box in the kitchen fridge. Nowhere to put a freezer. 70’s new build, largish house but tiny kitchen with a hatch to pass things through to the dining room.

Snacks- no crisps, chocolate, or anything else in the house. Snacks was a slice of bread and butter. Occasionally we’d get rich tea or ginger biscuits for visitors- strictly rationed to 1.

no tumble dryer.

no video, camera, computer or similar that we take for granted now.

no supermarket. The bread van came round, so did the fruit and veg van and butchers, or you went to town and went to the bakery, butcher, greengrocer etc.

”foreign” food. No Chinese, no Indian. Spaghetti was exotic as it got. I didn’t have fruit and veg other than the norm until I left home- peppers for example. I think I had a boil in the bag curry about 15. The only pizza I remember was the frozen findus French bread stuff.

no takeaways either. First Chinese, Indian, Greek, Turkish, all after I left home.

I had forgotten about them being called continental quilts!

Is it not partly depending on when you were born?

I was born in 1960, we didn't have a car or a phone or central heating but then neither did any of my friends - because it was normal back then if you didn't have a lot of money. We had a twin tub washing machine, a black and white TV, and only went on holidays because my dad worked for BR and got free tickets for all of us.

But again, this was quite normal sixty years ago. Many of the things that are normal now hadn't even been invented!

op I can relate to most of the stuff you mentioned. I didn’t start buying kitchen roll until my mid-late 30s and still feels like an indulgence /luxury.

redskyAtNigh
I've never bought kitchen roll. Perhaps it was being brought up in a house without one, but I genuinely don't understand what you would use kitchen roll for that you couldn't use something else instead.

if you had eg something sticky (am thinking chocolate spread or honey) to wipe up or someone got sick or the dog peed in the house it just means you don’t have to waste a cloth and they can be composted. Handy for Christmas when the house is full!

I was born in 1965 and I never had a birthday cake
either. My mum used to make fruit cakes, sponge cakes etc but nothing ‘fancy’. No icing or buttercream and a Victoria Sandwich was always filled with the cheapest and nastiest jam.

No shower, just the awful rubber tap thing. Hot water had to be put on so we could have a bath. No heating upstairs. No tumble dryer, the clothes were never dried properly and always smelled a bit. Black and white tv and no video until the later. No car until I was 12. I was born in 1979. One of my friends in primary school didn’t even have a bath, they strip washed and washed their hair in the basin, that was quite unusual for the time I think.

No dishwasher (DM still hand washes everything)
No conditioner - was it even available in Ireland in the late 60s and early 70s?
No shop bought clothes or fruit/veg - mum made all our clothes and dad grew an astonishing variety and quantity of fruit and veg in the garden

Same - I had one birthday party and had a cake for that. There's a photo of a birthday party for one of my siblings with a cake visible on the table.

In general, not much acknowledgement of birthdays really.

A toilet seat. Anything in our house that got broken, stayed broken and everyone lived with it. I've no idea why but it was just the way it was.

The thing that makes me angry, looking back? It wasn't because we were poor. I mean, we were, but my mum's cocklodging boyfriend who lived with us was a sodding plumber!

I know what you mean OP there's a difference between not having things because it was the norm, and not having things because a parent didn't think your needs were important. Eg we didn't have boxes of tissues and kitchen roll because they were expensive luxuries, but we also didn't have breakfast foods in because my mum didn't eat breakfast (she would smoke and drink tea instead)

Central heating, a shower, bedroom carpet.

We spent a long time without a sofa and carpet in the lounge. We had to use an old bed as our sofa and a garden chair. This wasn’t poverty but MH. We weren’t allowed visitors, we weren’t allowed outside. I missed a lot of school. At times we lived in squalor.

I would think its still pretty common to not have a dishwasher. I dont have one and neither do most of my friends/family

We never had cakes or biscuits in the house, or crisps , and never had chips at home ( whereas bff’s mum used to cook her own chips almost daily). Fizzy drinks were a very occasional treat, and squash limited to one glass a day- we mainly drank tea or milk. We did have orange juice as teens but I think that was when my brother and I were both working and contributing.
We did have holidays abroad, but only because my grandparents lived in Spain for a while, so we were able to stay with them. Otherwise we did have some UK hols, but not every year and mostly camping or a few times in a b and b.
All our furniture was secondhand, Xmas and birthday presents were often homemade and much more modest than those my own DC have. Most of my clothes were sewn by my mum. We lived in London so had good access to museums etc but couldn’t afford theatre.
DH’s family were working class, his dad worked in a factory in the northwest, but they were able to manage so that MiL didn’t have to work until her youngest DC was at secondary school. They had more regularity than my family did, a weeks holiday in UK every year. But they didn’t have a car so that limited things and there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in their town.
We were both well fed and adequately clothed, and used to limited heating and hot water, and a very strict eye kept on waste!

I learned at 19 having bought a bike with my first week's salary at my student job.

I "had" DB's old bike when I was little but the dog chewed the saddle which was never fixed (I just got moaned at for leaving it out) then tried to dabble with another of DB's outgrown bikes but it was heavy with flat tyres. No knowledge/ resources to maintain a bike made avaliable.
One Christmas I was asked if I wanted one, basically DM had seen a pretty one in Halford's window, but I said no because I realised that she wasn't going to take me anywhere where I'd learn/ be worth using one. So that of course meant I must never have interest in having a bike again.

What I've realised with age is that I could have what interested DM. I could have pretty dresses, but not correct PE kit. She wasn't good at sport, had no interest in sport, so why squander money on buying such fripperies as the school's expected PE kit when you could blunder on with some mis-matched items that were close to being nearly right? (Funny how DB always had what was required for sports coz male...)

Changing your mind was not indulged... no matter how many years passed. I had a new coat when I was 12. It was the last coat I had until I was 16, and I went coat-less for 2 winters rather than wearing something embarrasingly outdated. But I chose it, and hadn't outgrown it, so I was expected to wear it for years and years after that choice.

One that's occurred to me in recent years is that DM has never booked a holiday. DF booked them prior to his death and after that all of DM's holidays were booked by friends. My last holiday with her was at 12 (booked by family friends). After that all my "holidays" were school trips, some more holiday-ish than others, but some years it was just 3 days of camp. It wasn't a money thing, it's organisation. Every holiday she has had since has been booked by a friend.

She was a war-child and wasn't reliably financially secure until her 40s. Money wasn't the issue by my childhood, but it did contribute to some odd "all fur coat and no knickers" decisions which were more about her odd comfort zones, internalised misogyny and areas of interest than practicality and logic and matching the needs of (female) children.