Odd things - do you remember your mum doing these in the 60s?

[Waltons]

Putting a drop of water on a tin can before opening it, because if an air bubble came up through the water, the can might be blown? (I think that was the reason?)

The only bottle of olive oil in the house was absolutely TINY, and labelled "Olive Oil. BP". I think it cost a fortune, and was kept in the first aid cupboard. For earaches, perhaps?

Anyone else have outside toilet blocks at school?

Yes, ours were earth closets, a wooden bench with a hole in it, crap fell through periodically cleared by some unfortunate night-soil man.

Ours had just been painted when I started at the infants', my dad told me Miss Pryce, headmistress, had a green bottom because she sat on it when the paint was still wet.

My Mum called the cat Vesta she loved the chow mein so much.

Fruit salad in a can. Boik.

Milk bottles on the doorstep and the birds pecking through to eat the cream! And the cream in lumps on your cereal. Yuk.

The 'pop man' coming round to my Nan's house in his truck and you'd take one of the spotty bottles back empty and get 10p off the next bottle. Always got the cherryade and had to make one bottle last a week.

And he sold beef and onion crisps too.

My Mum used to iron her hair and sit in a cold bath with her new jeans on to shrink them.

Yes to frost inside the windows and getting school clothes on before bed!!

Well you make me feel ancient or at least ridiculously old fashioned.
I buy meat by the half or quarter animal from the farmer for the chest freezer.
I have a sack of potatoes in the outbuilding (with the freezer).
I do not throw away leftovers.
I keep butter papers for lining cake tins.
I own a big steel jam pan.
I still buy tinned fruit cocktail (it goes in jelly pots which I make for the DCs packed lunches), and mourn the absence of two fruits (which was tinned cubed of peach and pear in syrup and was a fortnightly treat growing up with evaporated milk on the top.
I sometimes put Dettol in the bath but do regularly put it in a bowl of warm water to soak me feet (esp if we've been out hiking).

I am also a big fan of the MN chicken: I think a lot of the thriftier things from the 60s all tie in.

I do not miss dried orange juice, being forced to have a spoon of castor oil if unwell, or children's disprin which didn't dissolve so you had a weird tasting grit in tepid water.

I used to sit in the bath with my Jeabs on

And a favourite but silly game was sticking your tongue on the frost on the inside of the windows.

I still do the butter wrappers, dripping, big sack of potatoes etc.

It's funny how those types of things are coming back in to vogue.

The same way that nylon and plastic everything was seen as better for a while. My Gran still thinks cotton is common.

We didn't have a television until I was about 9. On Sunday afternoons the whole family would sit and listen to "The Navy Lark" on the radio.
Everyone I knew had a television before we did, including both sets of grandparents!

We didn't have a phone till I was 18 and went to live away for a few months. There was a phone box at the end of the road and I had to arrange for boyfriends to ring me on that at an agreed time. It wasn't unknown for someone to knock at the door to tell me there was a call for me at the phone box!

At my primary the infants and girls toilets were inside but the boys were outside (for Y3 onwards or younger boys at breaktime). Was still like that in 1996 when I went back.
Y3 boys had to drink their milk outside, too.

When did Calpol etc come in? Whenever I had a headache in the 70s (a lot, given the lack of drinking water except with lunch and supper...), I got a quarter and later a half a paracetamol. And Phenergan for a really bad cough, which was lovely and red and sticky and alcoholic.

Arg whole pig memories. Trying to suppress memory of the "head cheese" my mother made with the brains

When I went to teacher training college in the early 1970s my landlady still had a party line phone. You had to press a button to make a call, and I used to worry that the neighbours could hear my calls.

Born in the early sixties, the only child of older parents everything in our house was dated. Top loading washer. (Single) with a manual mangle.
My job on a Monday after school was to turn the mangle of the last load, it would be pegged out the following morning. The water from the machine would then be used to wash front and back paths and kitchen floor " lovely drop of suds" mum used to say.
Coal for in the back room, front room for best only. No heating anywhere else.
No freezer except a tiny icebox in the cream coloured fridge.
Bath on a Sunday before tea and a strip wash before bed every night.
Hair washing kept to once a week but if I pleaded or was going out then sometimes twice a week. We used the milk saucepan to wash our hair .

White knee length socks until I was 15 and then for school American tan tights, I was taught how to mend them.

Mum used to wear a Playtex 18 hour all in one corsalette with a hook and eye gusset. They were hand washed and rolled in a towel and dried indoors as they were ' personal' . Mum even wore them on the package holidays in Spain that they went on in the early 70's.

Dr Whites sanitary towels with a belt you had to wash when you had a bath a dry in the airing cupboard.

Making Vesta meals for me and Dad when Mum was in hospital having her veins done.

Happy Days.

Eternal Beau design for virtually everything in the kitchen

We had 'shame' in our family cousin got pregnant and had quick registry office wedding. They split up after about 18 months and were listed in local paper when their decree nisi came through
Apparently a cub news reporter was sent to local court, compiled the lists and they were published regularly.

Rediffusion TV for many years my mum was paid a bit of money by them as she had one of their wires attached to her house.
She also had little dustbins that she put her potato and vegetable peeling in and these were collected, but she cannot remember who by.Probably a legacy of people keeping pigs?

Excellent memories. I was born 1962 and so some of mine are probably early seventies too. I loved the tea cards and actually still have my completed books. My mum had beehive hair and used to take work doing punchcards at home which was very early computer work. We has a Fine Fare with green shield stamps which I spent hours sticking into books. Also coop stamps.

Mum would give me cheese, apple and brown bread for school lunch and we had that revolting warm lumpy school milk. Teacher would throw the board rubber at us if too noisy and there were always the same few boys spending the day facing the wall.

Mum would give my sister and I orange segments with white sugar to dip them in and sometimes a bone and a hairpin to pick the marrow out with ewwww. Pomegranates and a pin kept us quiet for hours too. If we voiced boredom we were given a duster. We were allowed tonride our bikes eight houses up and eight houses down and if mum couldn't see us out of the window there was hell to pay.

As a baby I am told that I was outside in the garden in my pram with my face rubbed with lard! Apparently one day I kind of fell out and was swinging from my harness.

We didn't have a washing machine for ages and used to fight for the best position by the fire.

we had a telephone which was pretty posh but it was a party line so we shared it with the neighbours

I remember pomegranates and pins!

My Mum and Gran used to cover themselves in cooking oil to sunbathe!!!

I can remember my mum boiling tripe for tea, it was horrible. Another meal was sugar sandwiches followed by fruit, tinned cream and a slice of bread. Also kippers with bread because of the bones was another meal

with suntan cream we used to use cooltan which was rubbed on our shoulders, eyelids and nose, no slathering of factor 20 like nowadays, I also remember the oil and vinegar concoction which people used in the 70's when you went to Spain

We had those lovely fleecy warm sheets and satin trimmed blankets on the bed that made it impossible to move under. Pillows were filled with chopped up bits of foam and would occasionally split at the seam.
My mum had a glass swan shaped vase that came with different squares of tissue paper to pop into the water to change the colour. How fancy!
Spider plants, everywhere. Except for the space the massive cheese ? Plant took up.
Oven ready meals that came in sections with a space for the sausage, chips in another bit and a dollop of beans in its own little compartment. Think we went to a special freezer shop for them.
A chest freezer the size of a car.
The dread if you fell over because you knew the manky ancient tin of germolene would be dragged from the medicine cabinet.
Tinned hamburgers. I'm now veggie.
Taking pop bottles back to the shop for the 10p.
Asking your friends 'are you on the phone' not that you could afford to phone them but just because it was quite an exciting thing.
Remember a lot of dancing by my mum to 'let's get physical' and exercises that involved chanting " I must, I must, I must improve my bust'" accompanied by a curious show of her arms in the air and lifting a boob by magic.
Being sent to the shop for 5lb of locals. Basically muddy potatoes that probably had more mud than potato. Them being wrapped in newspaper.
The noise of the football results being read out ( Liverpool 1- bromsgrove nil, Swindon - 3 , Stoke - 2) and I presume my dad was checking the pools to see if we had become rich. That was read in the most boring tone and seemed to take all day.
Monkey magic.

Angiers Junior Aspirin. Orange flavour. No childproof lids in those days. Just an orange plastic cap that pulled off.

We had an enormous rubber plant that received more care and attention than we did
At some point I had a cassette tape of fitness exercises set to music narrated by Peter Powell. To 'keep young and beautiful' Peter chanted ' I must, I must improve my bust'

Mum letting me buy Opal Fruits or Spangles once a week.
Sunquick concentrated orange juice, bleargh.
Canned orange juice, ditto.
Mirabelle comic
Not being allowed 'pop' or hienz soup.
Wrestling on the tv, the women shouting 'kill 'im''
Sindy and Paul, who had to put up with moulded hair.
Cleaning out the mincer plates for Mum with a toothbrush under the only tap (cold)
Real bristle toothbrushes
Dansette record player with a stack of 45s on it, mostly Roy Orbison (loved his voice)
Friar's Balsam to inhale over a bowl of hot water for a cold
Mum's Singer 201K sewing machine which worked wonders
Gibbis and Shaddocks (sp?) on tv
Football results "Fife.....four, Forfar.........(always a pause here).......five."

The Singing Ringing Tree was mentally scarring. Loved 'White Horses' especially the theme tune by Jackie. Another frightening TV prog was Marrianne Dreams AKA Escape into Night. Had to watch from behind the sofa. Used to scream for DMum to switch the telly over when the Doctor Who theme tune came on. Remember DDad lighting fireworks in the back garden one by one on November the fifth and his cussing in the dark when the match was damp or the roman candle fell over or whatever and I I remember Jumping Jacks. They were twisted and you lit them and they banged and jumped and banged again you never knew where they were going off next. So dangerous when you think about it. They were banned of course but I remember them vividly as well as the Catherine Wheel nailed to the clothes post.

Agree with a PP. Our parents never played with us. We were a by product of the marriage only and not indulged in any way or ever asked to make any decision ever. We were very well behaved and knew not to speak unless spoken to. We were loved though but we had very little compared with today. I remember it would take a couple of hours to get warm enough in bed to fall asleep. Some aspects of my childhood were downright abusive but not by design.

We had an enormous rubber plant that received more care and attention than we did
my mum too eastmidsgp - it was my job to bathe it's leaves with cotton wool dipped in a mixture of warm water and milk - What was that all about, it's not even an attractive plant!?!

I tried to help Mum by hoovering our rubber plant
It was quite....holey...by the time I'd finished
😂