What do you remember- seems impossible now

[SWar]

Anyone remember the fire sirens going off.  We used to stand in the street and watch the firemen racing in to the fire station on their bikes.  They were usually fit young men employed locally.

Policemen used to have whistles and there used to be little blue boxes on poles with a telephone in for them to call the station for assistance.

Sue

[Barbara348]

Hi, this post has really taken me back (farther than I want to admit to really)

I lived in a 2 up/ 2 down terraced house with my Mum, Dad and 4 siblings.
It had all the other conveniences of life in the late forties, i.e. toilet up the yard and shared by other families. Not too much to eat either, a lot of the time.

But what I remember most of all in those hard-up days, was the excitment generated when my Mum said that the Gas man was coming to the House.

The reason for the excitment was that we had a Gas Meter into which money had to be pumped to allow us the Gas supply and  the Gas man was coming to empty the Gas Meter.

He used to tip all the contents of the Meter onto a newspaper spread on the Kitchen Table, count up what was owed for the Gas used and leave the rest for my Mum.

After the Gas man was gone, Mum used to give us kids enough to go and buy sweets and maybe a comic.

A fleeting memory of being rich for a few magical moments.

Barbara.

[rosiemagic]

Does anyone remember buying cooked meet and cheese from Woolworths?  (of all places!)

RM 

[fifer1947]

Does anyone remember buying cooked meet and cheese from Woolworths?  (of all places!)

RM 

Yes and they had great cheese! 

[IndisVanyar]

Being saluted by the AA man on his motor cycle when he saw the AA badge on the front of my parent's car.
Trolley buses on the A6 south of Manchester.
The paraffin heater (remember the smell?) used to heat the icy cold bathroom in winter - and we children were allowed to light it! No 'elf and safety' malarky then.
The horse drawn 'rag and bone' cart with the donkey stone for doing the front step.
Carcasses of animals hanging next to the queue in the butcher's shop.
The first supermarket to arrive in Hazel Grove (mum didn't abandon her local shops though - we still phoned with the grocery order and it was delivered asap).
And my great feeling of unfairness when the Corona door to door delivery van came down our road and my mother wouldn't allow us to buy from him when he stopped to deliver to the next door neighbour! (However I still have all my own teeth so she had a valid point!).

And seeing a farmer broadcasting seed by hand when we lived in North Yorkshire in the late 1980s.

Nell

[bennett]

Sawdust on the floor of our local Co-op shop.
Can't imagine that these days.

Remembering with such fondness,my two brothers making a go-cart
from orange boxes,whizzing down the hill,
the only brakes were their shoes.

Going to the park with my friends,and our dolls prams,
with a picnic of jam sandwiches and a bottle of water,which we used to fill up
from the park taps.Staying out all day.

Having to sit next to a girl at school who had nits,(Shame)
she had to have her head shaved,so she wore a woolly hat,tied underneath her chin.
She must have been hot,no wonder she had a red face.

Playing in the churchyard amongst the graves,playing cowboy and indians,
although I was a girl,I loved playing the boys games,you could tell I had two brothers.

Love this thread, and what lovely stories from other Rootschatters.


Bennett

[Seoras]

Building our own bonfires and lighting them.Setting off our own fireworks and chucking bangers at each other.Being allowed to stay on when the adults had gone and the fire had died down so we could all stick a spud in the embers.Elf and safety would have had fits.

[Rishile]

Aaaaah.................memories........................

TV: turning it on via the set (no remote control)
      waiting for it to warm up
      2 channels
      no daytime tv - just the little girl with the blackboard and scary clown
      after the National Anthem at around 10pm (!) waiting for the little white dot
      to disappear before turning it off

Typewriters: learning to touch-type on a medieval heavy/clunky machine.
                     ("tabulations"!) 
                     then golfball
                     then "word processors" where one line of type showed on a
                     display that you could correct errors on
                     carbon paper

Telex machines: (think Match of the Day sport results click-clacking across the
                           screen)

Gestetner machines: in my early working days in hospitality, used to type
                                  restaurant menus from typewriter onto paper, then place
                                  it into a Gestetner - basically wrapping the paper around
                                  a drum and turning the handle which would print the
                                  menu off onto pre-loaded card at the bottom of the
                                  machine.

and I could go on..... 

Great thread!

Yes, I remember all of these things.  And telex machines - Cheetah or Puma.  An early version of email I suspect

[HeatherLynne]

Yes I remember all those ^^^ too!  Although I had forgotten about Gestetner copiers til you mentioned it!  They worked by typing onto the special paper (which was actually very thin wax) on a typewriter with no ribbon so that the keys cut little stencils of each letter!  If you made a mistake you had a little bottle of liquid waxy stuff to paint over the error so you could re-type that letter once it had dried.  The waxy liquid was a fluorescent pinky/orange colour I recall 

When I first started working as a secretary for a solicitor we used to have 'live' conversations over the telex machine between the London and Reading offices.  Normal practice was to type your message offline and cut a ticker tape so that once the message was finished you could transmit it faster than normal typing.  I remember loving the live conversations - my first experience of Instant Messaging!   (this was in about 1981).

Oh the revelation of being allowed to type Board Meeting minutes on the senior secretary's word processor once a month!  Saved so much time and stress as typing on special quality foolscap paper and taking several carbon copies without making any typos was horrible    The machine was an ICL8801, a huge monster built into its own special desk that was about  a yard and a half wide!

Office workers today don't know they're born!     But then again in those days your work wouldn't be stopped for two days by a computer virus 

Heather