"Uphill barefoot in the snow, in my father's pajamas."
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2021 12:15 pm
It's a contest - grumbling about conditions you grew up with: Who had it worst?
I'll start the ball rolling with this photo of a 2-room house I lived in as a child, early in the war.
The house must have looked slightly better in the 1940s. This picture was taken almost 70 years later. There's no chimney! There must have been some heat source - ? - but I don't remember it. Certainly there was no electricity anywhere in the village. Our radio ran on a glass-jar battery and it was my job every so often to lug it for charging to the little post office, where I guess they had a generator. Later we were able to move to the bigger 4-room house on the property which had a coal-fired stove for heat & cooking and, I think, coal-gas lighting in the two lower rooms. No running water. Unheated bedrooms upstairs. Fortunately, away from the city, we were no longer being bombed.
(I'm trying to make this sound bad but I know we had it very easy compared to what many people have gone through.)
ETA: My mother had what I think of as some social pretensions. Can you imagine how she must have felt living here? But she rolled up her sleeves and got on with it. That's what we all do.
I'll start the ball rolling with this photo of a 2-room house I lived in as a child, early in the war.
The house must have looked slightly better in the 1940s. This picture was taken almost 70 years later. There's no chimney! There must have been some heat source - ? - but I don't remember it. Certainly there was no electricity anywhere in the village. Our radio ran on a glass-jar battery and it was my job every so often to lug it for charging to the little post office, where I guess they had a generator. Later we were able to move to the bigger 4-room house on the property which had a coal-fired stove for heat & cooking and, I think, coal-gas lighting in the two lower rooms. No running water. Unheated bedrooms upstairs. Fortunately, away from the city, we were no longer being bombed.
(I'm trying to make this sound bad but I know we had it very easy compared to what many people have gone through.)
ETA: My mother had what I think of as some social pretensions. Can you imagine how she must have felt living here? But she rolled up her sleeves and got on with it. That's what we all do.