Sunday 4 October 2015

A pram full of Coke!

In one day we have gone from summer to almost winter. We were warned but this has been a very sudden drop in temperatures resulting yet again in my attempting to get the heating on!

As I failed miserably I will not bang on about it again...I do have a couple of electric heaters which will be fine for the moment...do they still make storage heaters?

Staying warm is almost an act of faith for me ...so much of my life has been in the stark north!

As a very little girl I was returned to my mother at the end of the war by my dearly loved Welsh grandparents because I had a new brother!

Life in Rochdale was not easy then. Coal was hard to come by...I have no idea why but we had a baby to keep warm so one of my more unlikely jobs was to wheel his empty pram to the nearby coal yard...there was seldom coal but coke was available after having been used in the gas works...

I tried to keep the pram clean but it was very hard to get the coke into the small bags I'd been sent out with so often I just tipped what they let me have directly into the place normally filled by the baby!

Pushing a pram full of coke up a very steep hill was not easy...but it meant that for a few nights we could have a fire and be warm!

Life as a small girl during the dreadful winter of 1947 was hard....we were very often cold and my dad, then a sergeant in the army was not yet demobbed....food was rationed too...and no one I knew had ever even seen a banana or tasted ice cream...they were legends that became almost mystical in imagination!

My childhood was not unusual. It was just the way things were...there had been a war on! Rationing went on for some time...we just got used to the things we take for granted today being absent...

In school I wrote on a slate with chalk...books were few and far between. Our radio was redefusion and had only three stations..life was simple but not good...

The difference between then and now is extraordinary... Sending a seven year old child out with a pram to get coke would be classed as child cruelty today I suppose but I wasn't the only one at the coal yard...

How times have changed......

1 comment:

Unknown said...

With a heading like that, you could arouse the interest of the Devon and Cornwall Drugs Squad :-) ;-) ;-)