My Granny's sister in Canada sent over baby all in one padded suits for me and my brother.
They were filled with eiderdown
My Mum sewed me a rabbit fur muff too, fur inside to keep my hands warm
We had rabbit fur courrans too for in the house.
It got so cold that there was ice in the toilet bowls, and folks used those wee flying saucer shaped parafin heaters in bathrooms to keep the pipes from freezing up. I still love that smell of warm paraffin
Comfort and care.
Not a lot of birdsong though, nor the next year either
I was wee enough that I could see the birds in the privet hedges, lot of them died; probably from hunger, thirst and cold. They lost their grip on the twigs when they died, but they got caught in the twigs and lay in all funny angles, like fishes in a net.
I found a dead kitten one morning in our garden, my Dad couldn't even get a spade into the earth to bury it. So we just scraped out under the hedge and covered it up with leaves and snow.
Lots of falls and accidents too, and life was tight money wise for a lot of people. If you didn't go to work you didn't get paid, and if you didn't get paid you couldn't pay your rent or rates, and there were no barclay or mastercards then so there were a lot of worried folks about.
Some of the elderly struggled on their pensions as it was; many couldn't afford the fire on all day.
My Dad and his brother brought home sticks from work for the old ladies in our street, just to make it a bit easier. One of his friends owned the wagon works, where they repaired old wooden sided railway wagons, and he brought sacks of offcuts from old railway sleepers. Saturated in pitch they burned really well, sometimes you got odd coloured flames from them though
and the smell was unmistakable as they burnt.
All those fires burning every thing folks could find left the lums full of soot. It's a scary sound when a chimney goes on fire, it roars and shrieks, but chimney sweeps were having problems getting up to the roofs, so it happened. Worse still when the burning soot came down the lum and fell out over the hearth. We were in a friend's house when the chimney went up and the children were thrown outside and told to run to the bottom of the street because the burning soot inside was bad enough, but the stuff coming out of the lum was red hot cinders. I still cringe just watching films of volcanoes erupting.
Good old days ??
Aye, maybe.
I miss some things, but I'm quite contented in the present
M
Caught the steam train home to Sussex and the journey took about 16 hours, frozen tracks/points, snow drifts and a 6 mile walk home from Brighton, Coast road completely snow blocked, no buses/taxis...
