When I was growing up
I am a Baby Boomer. I am proud of that fact. I was born in the mid-1950s and I come from a working class family background. My dad worked for London Transport as a bus conductor. My mum worked part-time in an electronics company. We lived on council estates in St Mary Cray and in Orpington. Money wasn't exactly overflowing but my parents tried to make our upbringing as happy as they could. We were the typical family of the time.
As a kid, I played out in the streets near our house until it got dark, then I went indoors for my tea. There were no computers or computer games to keep us indoors and away from the fresh air back in those days. I had a scooter but it never had an electric motor attached to it. The thing was propelled by my right or left foot (I am ambidextrous in both hands and feet) and the scooter had a brake pedal for the back wheel, albeit useless. Then I had a bike, firstly with guide wheels, and I would ride for miles after they were removed but I had to be home by dark. Times were safer then but, if any kids did 'go missing', the word that was put about was "They've run away to join the circus". And we believed it.
A trip to Orpington High Street with my mum was usually the highlight of the week. If mum could afford it, we'd get a bus back along to Cray Avenue, but we still had a distance to walk to home from there; there were no 'Toy Town' buses frequenting every street. Single-decker buses only kept to main roads, as did double-deckers. Maybe I would get a treat of a small Matchbox car if mum had enough change left in her purse. I was never brought up to keep whining "I want, I want, I want". If the money wasn't in my mum's purse, which was more often than not, I went without. It was the way things were and we all accepted the situation.
We never had double-glazing, central heating or even air conditioning in our houses. We just huddled around the open fire in the living room during the cold winter months, or the gas fire after flames from the open fire set our chimney alight. We just opened the single-glazed rattly old Crittall windows if we wanted fresh air to cool us down. Water was heated via an old coke boiler in the corner of our kitchen.
My dad let his driving licence slip after the Second World War, so we never had a car. If we didn't want to walk anywhere, which was rare as walking was the norm, we'd have to go to the main road and wait for a bus... in all weathers and without the luxury of standing or sitting under shelters at the stop. Either that, or I used to get a saddle or crossbar ride down the road on one of my brothers' bikes. Exercise was playing on the swings and a crazy, dangerous, rocking horse that could seat six or eight kids or trap just as many underneath in the local recreation ground.
We only had two television channels before I was ten years old; no Sky, no Virgin Media and certainly no streaming. Television was monochrome, otherwise known as black and white, but we did have proper comedians that we could laugh at. All of our meals had to be eaten at the dining room table and not on our laps while being seated in front of the telly. And the TV coverage was never 24-hours; if we wanted to amuse ourselves indoors during the day on our summer holidays, we'd reach for the nearest jigsaw puzzle and sit quietly trying to do it at the dining room table. We made our own amusement.
Music was not streamed; that was never heard about. My family had just an old radiogram, a combo that played vinyl records on one side and a radio inserted in the other side of a wooden cabinet. The cabinet remained in our living/front room and the radiogram or record player could only be played if my parents were not watching the TV. Everything on the radio was either Medium Wave or Long Wave; it would be another ten or fifteen years before FM was introduced.
Until we moved to Orpington from St Mary Cray, we never had a telephone. Prior to that, my mum and dad didn't think that we needed one; they just went next door and used theirs. Mobile phones were science fiction although a throwback from the Second World War meant that some people owned Walkie-Talkies, a sort of precursor to the CB Radio, and they were able to communicate with other like-minded individuals in far flung places. The internet was still many years away from being invented.
Pocket money was never an option for me. My parents believed it was an unnecessary expense for an already overburdened household income. I earned 2s 6d (which, in 1971, became 12.5p) a week shoeshining my brother's work brogues; I still don't know if he worked out if such a payment was tax deductible. Knowing him, he'd probably already found out. Then, when I was old enough, I got a paper round at my local newsagent's. That earned me 15 shillings to start with (75p) per week, rising to 17s 6d (87.5p). Alongside that, I had a Friday evening and Saturday morning job with the local greengrocers, which entailed delivering boxes of fruit and veg to houses around the neighbourhood on a Granville-style 'Open All Hours' trader's bike, as well as spending some time in the shop refilling the fruit and veg bins with spuds, bananas, cabbages, cauliflowers and so on. I got 22 shillings (£1.10p) per week for doing that. By that time, I needed some dosh to feed my new-found habit of going to watch Cray Wanderers whenever they played at home. All paid for by my own efforts; 'The Bank of Mum and Dad' had never been invented at the time, not that they would have any funds for me to sub from, anyway.
Punishment at school used to be the cane across the backside or palm of the hand. Or the slipper. Or the ruler rapped over the knuckles of one or both hands. I was fortunate enough to never receive such punishment when I was at school, although I was no saint and did come very close to getting whacked on a number of occasions by the sadistic teachers. Yes, even in the 1960s, we still had to endure Dickensian values in educational establishments.
I lived at home with my parents until I was about 25 years old. Yes, I had girlfriends and I went on dates, but then I met my first wife, got married, moved to deepest, darkest East Anglia and nearly bankrupted myself with the flat rental. Up until I left home, I had been paying about a quarter of my wages to my mum and dad for my keep. What a shock to the system when I found out about having to pay for gas, electric, water and rates (which preceded the Council Tax) among other outgoings. I was married to a woman who wasn't bothered too much about finding a job and, trying to juggle my outgoings with my modest 9-5 income while supporting my wife and her financial 'wants', continuing in that vein was never going to work. Buying a flat or a house was not on the cards; even if I'd managed to get a mortgage, the monthly payments, let alone the deposit, would have finally seen me locked up in Newgate Debtors Prison in London, had it still been in existence.
It took me over thirty years of living on this planet, plus a divorce, plus changing to a killer of a shiftworking job before I could even consider going into a building society and asking for a mortgage. The shiftwork pay allowed me to squirrel away enough money for a deposit on a flat. I couldn't set my sights on anything higher like a house because the mortgage I was offered wouldn't stretch that far. But I found a flat that I fell in love with, bought, moved in and lived there for 14 years. I was in no rush to move. And then along came wife number two...
Between our salaries, we managed to get a mortgage for this house where we currently live. It is not posh but it is also not ramshackle. And it is ours. We have lived here 26 years now, as I type this, but because of my wife's serious ongoing disability and illness, we have recently decided to look for a bungalow. Our mortgage is now paid off through sheer determinedness so, the way to go is to sell this house and buy a lower-cost bungalow from the proceeds of the sale. We will have an almost 100% equity available when we do find the elusive bungalow and sell here, so we do not plan to take out another mortgage so late in life. We have earned this right by hard work and clever management of funds; nobody has ever given us a hand up; we have got where we now find ourselves by our own efforts. And, if jobs needed doing about our house to keep it in good repair, they had to wait until we had the money to do them.
My life to get to this stage has not been easy and I have never had any handouts. I would seriously advise youngsters of today to ask their Baby Boomer elders to provide a timeline of their own backstory before they make assumptions that us old 'uns have had it dished up to us on a plate. I'll guarantee that everyone who came after the Baby Boomer years will find what they hear absolutely eye-opening and mind-boggling. And hopefully, my account above will go a long way to helping to get the facts straight for future generations to learn and fully understand.
Trevor Mulligan