Some of the stories I can remember/know:
- My maternal grandmother grew up in a house with servants [her grandfather was the chief constable, so they must have had a good standard, middle class life]; my paternal grandmother was sent over a hundred miles from home into service when she was thirteen.
- A family friend, Gretchen, was tormented horribly at school during the [first/”Great”] war for having a German name. She told me about walking along West End Lane to get to school when it was a lane. She remembers farms, fields and cows; by the time I walked along there in the late 1980’s, it had long been a part of fairly-central London. Hampstead may think it’s a village, but it’s not! She told me about the chocolate shop on the Finchley Road [Lessiter’s] – about how exciting it all was, having Swiss chocolates that beautiful almost within reach. I bought her a small box for Christmas one year [the prices seemed to a penniless student to be still eye-watering], and even now I can remember how delighted she was. A small gesture from me had fulfilled a childhood dream.
- Another friend, Ethel used to deliver milk on a horse-drawn cart. Her husband Gus cycled to Blackpool and back in a day, and London in one day [about 175 miles]. I know that’s do-able, but think about the roads in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, bicycles with no gears and solid metal frames. And then imagine doing it with only one arm! I think that generation was significantly tougher!
- A family friend only last year moved from her family home, into a bungalow, and now for the first time in her life has indoor plumbing. She can also afford to heat her home, now, so hopefully will have a long and comfortable older age! I can remember visiting her mother and seeing the range in the kitchen [only source of heat/hot water, but I think they had got an electric cooker by the late 1970’s?], and being fascinated by it as a child. Having lived in a home with a Rayburn as the heat/hot water/cooker, I know they may look romantic, but unless you have central heating, an immersion heater and a separate oven, it’s not all that much fun!
- Factory shops: I can remember when it was a shop, attached to a factory that sold some “first” quality items, but mostly “seconds” – Potteries-made stacks of dusty plates, but better quality in many instances than the items that make it to “proper” shops today. Now the “factory” shop is ubiquitous, and full of shiny items of much poorer quality, and almost all of it made in China! I can remember when production seemed to all move to Portugal [and there was a drop in quality when that happened], but now it all has the made in China back stamp. There’s nothing wrong with cheap crockery, but I haven’t noticed the prices dropping in line with the quality. We got a set of Royal Doulton gold-edged china from the Daily Mail [tokens to collect a few years ago], and off all the bigger plates/soup bowls there wasn’t a single “first” quality item, and many wouldn’t once have been sold even as seconds; they would have been in the 10p bin or smashed.
For instance, I can remember turning hay with a pitchfork, helping dad after Henry Strelau had mown the hay using his “antique” tractor. I can’t remember if he was a refugee or a prisoner of war, but I remember him being a lovely man, and I loved his little tiny tractor!
The other side of the coin: things that would have taken days of research before can now be Googled in seconds, and I love that trying to re-contact a friend produced an email from Rapanui – she’s travelled there in thousands-of-years’ old technology [Polynesian double-hulled canoes], but contacted me from her iPhone!
I can access music instantly from iTunes or Amazon, but I’m old enough to remember making and receiving compilation tapes for/from friends; trying to get that gap between tracks perfect, and lowering the stylus onto the LP as gently as possible to avoid an audible ‘touch down’. I know that youngsters today share playlists, but somehow the effortlessness of it seems to make it a bit more soulless; you didn’t spend hours recording a c90 cassette if you didn’t really care for a person – you were giving love as well as songs they may not know!
So, I’m glad I’m old enough to know someone who walked down lanes past cows on farms in Hampstead, and had a granny who was a below stairs maid at 13, and a granddad who was 5 when the “old” queen died, but I’m also appreciative of being able to learn things so much more easily, and have access to long-dead jazz musicians (and bands of the sixties) on YouTube, and send and receive photos in the blink of an eye. I love my blog; I loved watching cheese mature in caves [Cheddarvision - watch speeded up version here] I’m glad I’m old enough to remember only having three television channels, and the introduction of Pong as a widely-available computer game, but young enough to be able to watch over sixty TV channels without any trouble, and marvel at the ever-improving wonders of CGI. [CGI won’t change the memories of the awe I felt when watching Star Wars at the cinema.]
And whilst it was lovely being served in a grocers shop, I’m a real fan of someone delivering my purchases to my door! [Coincidentally, my mum used to do just that when she worked in her parents’ shop.]
I feel very privileged, and extremely lucky to have arrived on this planet at a time when I could experience a childhood that was pretty laid back [and TV-free!], with toys made by my grandfather and being allowed to visit friends/roam wherever we liked with picnics of jam sandwiches, a tree-house and a garden big enough to run about in…
But also I’ve seen technology outstrip the wildest dreams of many of the science fictions authors I grew up reading; that’s a great time to be alive!
And on that note, it’s probably time to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; here’s to the future, whilst never forgetting the important parts of the past!
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