Holidays

Holidays in your childhood are worth recording, and if you never had a family holiday that should also be mentioned as it will be quite alien to current expectations. Even a day trip in a charabanc to the seaside with the Sunday school, or perhaps a working holiday like picking hops in Kent will provide plenty of material. You might like to consider:

• how much time off work your father received each year;
• where you went on any holiday/day trips;
• how you travelled there and any games you played on the way;
• whether the luggage was sent in advance – perhaps by Carter Patterson;
• who you went with;
• the accommodation and any memorable landladies;
• how people dressed on the beach – including yourself and your parents;
• the bathing attire, especially if it involved knitted bathing suits that filled with water;
• the food you ate;
• your favourite brands of ice cream: Lyons, Eldorado, or die ‘Stop me and buy one’ Wall’s man on the tricycle selling Snofrute and Snocreem.

Clothes

The range, quantity and design of your clothes was unlikely to have been as great as they are today. It was more likely to be two or three outfits of hand-me-downs – functional clothes like those worn by adults but in miniature. With the absence of central heating, double-glazing, well-insulated homes and modern fabrics, clothes were of a utilitarian nature, usually worn in several layers in an effort to keep out the cold.

Even the eldest child in the family was not necessarily exempt from hand-me-downs, and especially during the make-do-and-mend war years clothes would be lengthened and ingeniously altered. Coats would be made from blankets, skirts from blackout curtains (perhaps brightened up by some ribbon), and, for the really fortunate, the odd garment or two from silk parachutes. Clothes would only be discarded when they wore out, not because you were bored with them or they went out of fashion. And any clothes beyond repair ended up as dusters, floor cloths or tag rugs. Some of the following are likely to strike a chord:

• combinations;
• liberty bodices … with rubber buttons to survive the ordeal of the mangle;
• corsets;
• bloomers;
• suspenders and stockings – using a sixpence when die suspender button fell off, and the countless hours spent repairing ladders in the stockings;
• sock suspenders for men and, for those with clerical jobs, armbands on shirt sleeves to keep the cuffs raised;
• braces;
• long Johns;
• night-dresses and striped pyjamas;
• waistcoats and detachable collars.

You might be able to describe some favourite outfits, or perhaps those you dreaded even before they got to you because an elder sibling told you how uncomfortable they were. If brave enough, you can record how often you wore your clothes between washes, even the underwear! Sunday best can also be described … and what happened if you got them dirty when playing?

Headwear

Hats were a part of everyday life and usually reflected a man’s job or standing in society. Then there were the associated courtesies, like men removing their hats when entering a house or church. You may also remember your father doffing his hat when meeting a friend or paying respects to a passing funeral cortege. Quite apart from her hat when she went out, your mother may have worn a headscarf when cleaning the house … and did she or your grandmother ever wear a hairnet?

School uniform

Children might remember losing their school hats, caps or berets – either by accident or design – or being caught not wearing them outside school and the implications of this. Wearing the school tie was also sacrosanct. Then there were the gloves and mittens threaded through the arms of the coat to save them from being lost!

Boys had to wear shorts, whatever the weather, and shoes were protected with ‘blakeys’ or ‘skegs’ in an effort to extend their life. With only one pair of shoes this was necessary, particularly if the shoes were worn for playing football … against the advice of parents! Clogs were favoured in some parts of the country; with their iron runners, these were great for sliding on the roads and seeing who could make the best sparks.

Discipline

When thinking about how you were punished at home, a few choice anecdotes are likely to spring to mind. The difficulty may be in choosing the appropriate incidents to share.

Illnesses

Prior to the advent of the National Health Service in 1948, GPs charged for their services. Some people paid 6d or a shilling a week to build up a reserve for when it was essential to see the doctor, otherwise it was a case of receiving a hefty bill. Many kindly doctors often ‘forgot’ to send a bill to their less well-off patients, but people still thought twice before calling the doctor.

Even then, some of the treatments left a lot to be desired and any stories about cupping, leeches or any similar Victorian remedies are well worth recording. In a time before Penicillin, it was a case of depending on all-purpose sulphonamides like M and B 693 and 760. Many homemade remedies are sure to spring to mind.

You may also remember the preoccupation adults had with ensuring you were kept ‘regular’. If your parents were forever forcing something down your throat, or applying some concoction or other to keep you from death’s door, perhaps some of the following may be familiar:

• bile beans;
• senna pods;
• iron ‘jelloids’;
• syrup of figs;
• Radio Malt,
• Sidlets Powder,
• zinc and castor oil;
• goose grease applied liberally to your chest at the first sign of a cough;
• mothballs in a muslin bag round your neck to clear the sinuses;
• sasparella to clean the blood – especially popular in the spring;
• penny royal, especially for girls as they started to develop;
• arrowroot biscuits.

Hospitals

Any broken bones or injuries requiring stitches might have necessitated a visit to the hospital, but there were also potentially fatal illnesses around such as polio, whooping cough, TB, meningitis and scarlet fever. Even if the nature of the illness meant that visitors were allowed, it was not always easy to accommodate the rigid visiting hours, especially as most people were dependent on public transport. With few homes having a telephone, a reference number was often allocated to the more serious cases so that local newspapers could print the patients progress, and emergency announcements sometimes interrupted a film being shown at the cinema.

Visiting children was sometimes discouraged in case it was too upsetting for them when their parents left; it was not unknown for children to be strapped in their beds to prevent them running after their parents. If you were hospitalised during your childhood, or perhaps had a sibling who was, you may want to record the experience and the austerity of the place, especially the control exercised by Matron.

Dentists

Visits to the dentist also had their share of horrors.

Pets

If pets played a part in your childhood, they should be included, especially those treated as one of the family. If you had dozens of pets, you might like to draw special attention to the more significant ones. And what were they fed – leftovers from the table, or perhaps the cat was lucky enough to have ‘pieces’ bought from the fishmonger or the cat’s meat man? You can also include some of the more unwelcome guests here, like cockroaches, flies, spiders, etc.

Travel

For most children travel meant shank’s pony, unless they were lucky enough to have a bike. Transport in your childhood is sure to stimulate a memory or two, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t start right at the beginning:

• prams, perhaps of the Silver Cross variety, being shared with one, two or more siblings;
• bicycles with stabilisers;
• go-carts;
• horse and cart – or scrounging a lift from the milkman or other delivery men;
• buses – single-decker or travelling on top of the double-decker;
• charabancs – especially for holidays to the seaside;
• electric trams – with the overhead power supply and trailing metal runners on the roof that often became disconnected and had to be realigned;
• steam trains – which sound romantic but that often left smuts in your eyes;
• ferries and steamers, especially on holiday;
• cars – for the lucky few, and perhaps the thrill of sitting in the ‘dickey seat’.

If your father owned a car, did you feel privileged or assume that this was normal? Alternatively, describe the excitement of your first ride in a car – it will make for incredulous reading by those used to families with two or three cars today.

Difficult times

Childhood can be painted as an idyllic picture, but your experience may have been far from that. It might have been a case of frequenting the pawnbroker, borrowing from friends, the ignominy of the means test and watching bailiffs take whatever they wanted, or moonlight flits to keep one step ahead of the landlord. There may also have been excesses of drink, physical violence or other horrors that made your childhood a nightmare.

When writing about difficult areas, care needs to be exercised, particularly if some family members may be offended.

Points to ponder

Assuming you didn’t live in one of these places, describe the excitement of:

• your first visit to a large city;
• your first visit to London;
• your first visit to the country;
• your first visit to the seaside.

Top tips

• You don’t have to include areas of your life about which you feel uncomfortable. You can skip over it, explain in the introduction that this is a selective autobiography, or write something like, ‘… the next couple of years were quite difficult, and are still too painful to write about now.’
• Use all your senses by introducing smells, textures, tastes and sounds into your writing. Photographs of your childhood may be in black and white, but there was nothing dull about that bright red polka-dot dress you wore for your seventh birthday. And if the sound of the cricket ball smashing through the kitchen window still haunts you, describe it.