As part of the Now & Then project, members of the Have Your Say team went to meet with older people to discuss aspects of life and to highlight the differences between their lives as youngsters and the youngsters lives of today.
Life was hard for us but when you are young you don’t really think about it, we didn’t know any different. But looking back it must have been even harder for our mams’ and dads’.
Kate Smith.
It was a different life I remember my mother taking in washing for other people to earn a copper or two.
Margaret Porter
Yes my grandma used to take washing in and when it got to Friday and it was dry and ironed, she used to go and pawn it for a couple of days.
Edith Hesketh
Do you remember Bella Nixon? My grandma washed for her. Her husband took his overalls off on Friday nights, after working down the pits. Do you remember those grandad collars? Well he had those on his shirts. She’d scrub and scrub and scrub to get them clean.
Lena Egerton
We still had some fun though, when I was young there used to be lots of places we could go for a bit of entertainment, dancing or the picture house and there was usually a shop nearby where you could call in for a drink afterwards. Not booze, I mean like orange juice or something.
Mavis
Oh yes, you thought you were in the money if you could sit in Granelli’s one night and have hot Vimto for a penny.
Edith
The Butler cinema was on Butler Street. We used to shout, “Put a penny in the gas!“ when the picture broke down.
Ada
There was plenty of street entertainers too, They’d play the spoons or the bones. There’d be a man with a horse pulling a roundabout, and you could have a ride. How they got money we don’t know, because nobody had any money.
Joan
But mostly we’d make our own entertainment. When we were very young, we’d play games like leapfrog, alleys or we’d swing around the lamp post with a rope.
Mavis
