The back lanes in between the rows of Council Houses were ideal places for children to play. We were even allowed to play out at night in the lamplights and told not to wander off. If we were feeling daring, we might have a game called “Knocky Nine Door�?, pull the thread we had attached to a letter box and then run away and hide, when someone answered the door.

Skipping ropes were popular, also bouncing small balls against a wall. We sang various rhymes with these games. The boys played football and marbles, the girls Top and Whip. The wooden top was chalked with a pattern on the top of it.

Washing the family clothes took all day - always on a Monday.

The washing machine had to be filled with buckets of hot water. The handle on the top of the washer had to be pushed endlessly back and forth to agitate the clothes to get them clean. Then the clothes had to be rinsed and put through the mangle.
Other loads of clothes had to go through the same process. Finally the water was drained away by a hose attached to the washing machine. The scullery was always full of steam. The washing could be hung across the back lanes to dry but we did have a back yard.
I dreaded the coal man coming.

He would open the sacks of coal and pile them up into a big heap outside the coalhouse door in the back lane. Never on a Monday! Two of us had to shovel the coal into buckets and then tip them through the door at the top of the coalhouse. There was another door into the coalhouse in the backyard. It was hard work removing the coal; my sister and I had to help the same as the lads in the family.

The living room was the only warm room in the house. We would pull the couch up to the coal fire and your cheeks could burn but your back would be cold. Mam would sit and do her proggy mats there. I tried a few times to help, but it was hard work on your fingers. My main job was cutting the rags up into strips ready to be worked into the mats.

Mam had a treadle sewing machine. She did plenty of patching and mending on it. I remember when my pinafore dress got too short for me, she put pieces of material into the shoulders to lengthen it, never mind that the armholes went down to my waist. I had to go to the Senior School dressed that way. You could always pick out the children who were not well off.

Our bedrooms were not heated, no duvets then or double glazing. No fitted carpet on the floor - just oilcloth with a piece of carpet near the bed if you were lucky. On really cold nights when ice formed on the inside of the windows, we piled our coats onto the bed to keep warm.

One of my brothers kept birds’ eggs under the bed, a hobby in those days, now it is illegal. The eggs nestled in cotton wool in wooden boxes. You had to put holes in the eggs with a needle and then suck the liquid out or they went bad inside. I loved to look at them, so delicate and all sizes and colours.

The local Picture House showed three different pictures a week, with two performances a night. The queue would form in the back lane for the second house to go in. It was good value with a ‘B’ picture or cartoons first, then the news, and trailers for the pictures showing the following week before the main picture came on. If the reel of film broke in the middle of a showing there was much stamping of feet and whistling until they fixed it.

Oh Happy Days!