In this interview there are additional contributions from Mrs Hall's daughter Dorothy Andrews (identified as DA), her son in law John Andrews (JA) and friend Deborah Brown (DB) Mrs Hall is identified as NH, and any unidentified questions or comments are attributed to the interviewer, Lydia Brown.

NH Our doctor came on a bike when he was called, and there was very little traffic. My father was always urging me to be careful when I used my scooter in the road, because of the traffic. It makes me laugh now. I went to bed with a candle; there was no electricity in our house. We had an ordinary, small three bedroomed house, semi--detached. To start the day dad used to bring me and mum a cup of tea in the morning and then we got up. Well Monday was wash day, and that was THE big day of the week for us. We had a woman come at nine o'clock to do the washing, and my dad used to have to get up at 6 or 7 in the morning and light the fire underneath the copper, to get the copper full of hot water; that was quite a thing. And then mother came along with her potato peeler, with a square of sunlight soap to make it into sort of soap flakes, which were heating in the water. And then she went upstairs and collected all the washing and brought it down into the kitchen. It was put in the boiler in the hot water. Dad then lifted his mangle out of his shed, which was just outside in the garden. It was one that turned over and you turned the screws at the top and you could use it as a mangle, and then when you had finished with it, you unscrewed it, and it came down and was a table, which was our kitchen table. Anyway, that was the procedure, and it was an all day event, it really was.

I can remember being very little, I must have been about ten. It was a lovely day, and I was allowed to have one of mum's dust sheets, and I fixed it up in-between the rose arch that led on to the lawn, and that was a tent for me. I can remember lying there and watching my mother peg out the washing on the line and feeling very sorry for her. It was hard for her to have to do that on a lovely day like this, and it was an all day job. When I got a little older and was at school all day, when I came home in the afternoon she was still at it. It sort of took all the time and there were only four of us, but there we are. So that was Monday.

Well, other days of course, the same lady, Norton we called her, she came on Friday for cleaning. Of course there were no hoovers or anything like that, you had a bristle or a stiff broom. A few days before cleaning day, mum saved all the tea leaves. They were all put in a sieve in the sink. The water was always going over them so that the tannin washed out. And when Norton came on Friday, mum lifted that out, and let them drain and then she scattered them all over the carpet, that was to lay the dust, and then she got her stiff broom out and Norton swept it all out into the back garden with the dust, and that was that procedure. That was another day gone.

I used to go shopping with mum up to the main road. I don't think there is anything special to say about that, except that in my bedroom, there is a plate there that mother saw in an 'odds' shop, you know that sold all sorts of funny things, and she took a great fancy to it. She said I would love to have that plate, it was 1/6d, but she said "I can't really afford it," 1/6d was a lot of money in those days. So we went on and did the shopping, but she kept coming back to look at that plate, and in the end she said, "I'm going to risk it. I'm going to buy it." I said, "Won't dad be cross?" "Yes" she said, "I think he will be, he'll say I could do something better with the money. But never mind," she said," He'll forgive me.". They got on very well .together, and it's still on my wall.

Do you remember when you first got a washing machine?

DA I do - not date precisely - but you remember when you got it?

NH Well, I hired one. There was a man who bought this washing machine, and he would lend it to you for an hour I think it might have been 10 shillings or a pound. So you got your washing all ready and he dumped it on the kitchen floor and we had it for an hour.

JA Twin tub was it Nora?

NH Yes a spinner

DA It was a Rolls twin tub. Rolls was a famous cheap make of twin tub that came out and he brought these things around in a van didn't he?

NH Yes.

DA He trundled it down the van and up into the kitchen and then it was all systems go.

NH Yes very much so; but it was good, I liked it.

DA You could just about get the washing done in an hour, couldn't you?

NH Yes, well he didn't come too swiftly on the hour either; he was very good. He sort of let us off a bit I think.

DA But I remember when you first got a washing machine (that was a twin tub) and you didn't know you were going to get it. My father ordered it, and you've got to understand there were three people in our road called Mrs Hall, this is one of them. This guy knocked at the door and said to Mum: "I've got this washing machine for you." She said "Oh no not for me, it must be the Mrs Hall at no 51 or no 1." So this poor guy went up the road, down the road and eventually came back and said: "None of them have ordered one, and I've definitely got it down for you." At that point my father rang Mum up, because we did actually have a phone which was unusual, and said: "Have you had a surprise visit today?", and told her that this thing was coming. And of course she'd sent him off all up the road with this thing, so that was when you got your twin tub.

NH What did you say the make was?

DA The early one you hired was a Rolls, but the one that you had bought was a Hotpoint.

JA I think John Bloom was the person who made Rolls. He was an entrepreneur wasn't he? Made a fortune out of it.

NH Anyway it must have been a red letter day for us.

DA When we were kids you didn't have any washing machine; we had a copper in the corner. But the only advantage over the one my mother used when she was a child was that ours was a gas one. So when Mum got up in the morning she could just turn it on underneath and in no time at all you had actually got hot water. We had a big wooden mangle out in the back yard. All the sheets had to be folded up and put through. I used to quite like doing that actually! Then, when you got the washing machine, you had an Acme wringer, that was a mini mangle if you like, but it fitted on the edge of the sink. This was a big improvement as you were indoors; you weren't out in the freezing cold. And then of course the spin dryer and everything came in didn't it?

NH Yes, then they started building these washeterias and they opened one at the end of my road.

DA Yes, a launderette.

NH At that time my husband was bedridden with TB and I had a lot of washing. You know, the sheets two or three times a week and that sort of thing.

DA That was somewhere in-between hiring the machine and having your own; there was a bit of a gap.

NH I used to take them down there, and the lady who ran it, we got very pally because I was there such a lot. She used to say, "If you put them in the machine I'll switch it on and do what you have to do." She was a big help to me.

DA We always used the washing machine with the spin dryer, but we still used the wringer because you starched everything because it was pure cotton, not mixtures like now.

NH No drip dries.

DA When it came out of the washing machine it was reasonably dry. Then it was put into this bowl of starch, then put through the wringer folded so it came out looking vaguely reasonable. Then you'd hang it out on the line. So it was a right old palaver.

NH Well, it was an all day do. I think Dorothy remembers coming home from school and I was still doing the washing.

DA You were always doing the washing when we came home, and lines and lines of it in the garden.

Did you just do it once a week?

NH Yes usually, unless it was for something special.

DA Certainly, when we were kids it was too much effort to do it more than once a week. Getting all the stuff ready and every thing. I mean just getting this thing full of water and heated up and emptying it again was a real pain. You know you had to have a bucket underneath to empty it. And take it outside a bucket at a time, didn't you, when we had the copper? And there was the old dolly thing - posser thing - that we used to pump it up and down with, and a washboard of course and bluebags. When we were clearing Mum's stuff out to move her here, we actually found one of the old blue bags she used to use. Every thing was white and you put this thing in the water. It was like a little tiny muslin bag - you swished it around and it made the water blue. You dunked all your white stuff in it and it made it a nice white colour - didn't actually make it blue!

What about washing yourselves? What were your bathrooms like?

DA Cold!

NH Well our bathroom was quite good, because my father put 'lincrusta' on the wall -the bottom half.

DA It was a bit like anaglypta paper to you - a very heavily embossed paper. You paint it on top - very heavy. You could virtually drive a tank into it and nothing went through it.

NH It looked very nice and very posh. We had a corner basin - a small one.

DA How did you fill the bath Mum?

NH We had no way of getting hot water into the bathroom. So when my mother went down to Dover Court - when her father was seriously ill and she took my sister with her - dad and I were left on our own and dad said to me (he used to be in charge of a builders merchants), "I'm going to buy a pump, and I want you to help me". We dug out a hole in the kitchen wall, fixed this pump up, and then he had to have a hole in the ceiling for the pipe to go through. I did all the clearing up afterwards - it was quite a venture.

DA How did you do it before you had the pump?

NH Dad carried it up in pails. He used to carry two pails of boiling water (terribly dangerous) up the stairs and round the corner across the landing into the bathroom.

DA What was it heated up on? Did you have a range?

NH No, we heated the copper.

DA Right, because we had running water in our bathroom in Harrow Weald didn't we? Hot and cold. But it was freezing in there in the winter. You'd go in and there'd be frost inside the glass - it was just freezing - unbelievably freezing!

NH Well there was no double glazing or anything like that.

DA Oh! It was terrible; it was just so cold. You'd get in the bath and you couldn't bear not to have water right over you. When you got out you shot out like a bat out of hell! But we only bathed once a week didn't we?

NH Yes.

DA It was always sort of strip washes and things the rest of the time. You didn't have all these showers and things like now; nobody had anything like that did they?

NH Oh, no.

DA When I moved to my first house it was a little old Victorian cottage and that actually didn't have an inside toilet. That had an outside toilet, so it was all right during the day, and I used to go to bed as late as possible. Nipped out the back door and into the loo - it was attached to the house but you had to go out the back door to get into it. I had an old sump heater that my father had for the car, and we put that in there just to keep the chill off in winter. But, I mean, if you had a sort of bad night and you desperately needed to go to the loo, you had to creep out the back door in the dark. It wasn't my idea of fun at all! I had a toilet put in eventually upstairs.

NH We all had to manage didn't we? We didn't have any of the luxuries that we have these days.

DA I was trying to think of what we had - well we had shampoo as kiddies. My grandmother used to use soap on her hair.

NH Yes, I think we did too.

DA Did we use soap when we were little? I don't remember - I think we had shampoo.

NH I don't remember having shampoo.

DA I know it made your hair dry, because occasionally, for whatever reason, our hair was washed with it. It left your hair feeling really dry and horrible - quite stiff. We used to save all the bits of soap - my grandmother had a little round container, about four inches across and an inch deep with holes all around the side. You poked all the little ends of the soap in the top and you sort of compressed them by pushing them down. Then you could use it - you could swish it in the water and make, in theory, bubbles in the bath, or you could use it to wash your clothes. We were pretty filthy probably! What did you have John?

JA Very much the same - we didn't do the cleaning we do now because we didn't have the clothes did we? Didn't need wardrobes because you didn't have clothes to put in them. I mean, you had a Sunday outfit and you had a school outfit and that was it basically. I had one pair of wellington boots and a pair of shoes.

DA Yes we all had wellies, 'Clarks' sandals in the summer and lace up shoes in the winter - that was it really - and a pair of plimsolls for school.

JA Nothing was ever cleaned - there was no dry cleaning, it was all just brushed down and the clothes washed once a week in the boiler.

DA Yes, it was school uniform and Sunday best really, and maybe something to play in if you were lucky.

JA Everything was much dirtier, because you have to remember there was no central heating - it was all open fires.

How did you do your cooking before you had a proper oven?

NH We had a gas stove and a top burner - nothing special.

JA I think wash day was Shepherds Pie or something - the weekend thing cooked up quickly. There wasn't any time to do any heavy cooking on a Monday was there?

NH Cold meat on Monday and hash on Tuesday.

JA Fish on Friday was it?

NH Sometimes.

How did you keep food fresh before you had a fridge?

NH We had a tiny kitchen on the back of the house which was the sunny side so the little larder in the corner used to get hot. We had a big sort of flower pot with water in and we had to keep changing it and standing things in it. That was to keep it cool - milk in particular was a bother. We had no special fridge or anything like that.

DADidn't the pantry have marble slabs in?

NH No that's later. When I was a child we had a an indoor coal cellar attached to the house. So subsequently, my father built an outdoor coal cellar and turned the coal cellar indoors into a pantry. Although it got no outside air coming into it, because we were semi detached, it didn't get as hot as when it was on the back of the house.

DA The one you had at Harrow Weald when we were kids was under the stairs - I think you had marble slabs in that. The thing is, you've got to realise that Mum went shopping every day of the week.

Everything was fresh?

DA Everything had to be fresh. Summer was the worst thing - keeping things cool then. Things like milk were always put in water and put into the larder as it was cooler there. Grandpa, he had a biscuit tin, because his bungalow was down by the river Thames. It was up on sort of stilts because his garden used to flood. Underneath there was room to store stuff and he actually sank a biscuit tin into the ground. He kept all his milk and stuff there because it was nice and cool. So that's what he did, but it was very hard keeping stuff fresh; and stopping the butter melting was impossible really. Very difficult. We used to salt beans and things like that. Dad used to get isinglass which was a clear liquid which you painted on the eggs. It sealed up the outside so you could keep them for absolutely ages and ages.

JA You had to always break the eggs into a separate cup because you could never be sure if they were rotten or not. During the war you might only have one egg a week, so if you put a bad egg in with another one you lost them both. We'd often have a boiled egg each, break the top off and they smelt of gas, sulphur dioxide [more probably hydrogen sulphide].

DA What you could buy then, and Mum always used to, was these big blocks of salt. We used to slice it and bash it with a rolling pin - then we used it for things like salting the beans - layer of beans, layer of salt, layer of beans. We kept them through the winter. We had apple trees in the garden because of the war - four apple trees and raspberry canes. All the things were preserved by bottling. We used to make do, everything had to be preserved in some way.

Did you keep meat in any way, or did that have to be delivered every day?

DA No, you couldn't really keep meat could you Mum?

NH No, you bought that as you went along.

DA The meals were very simple and always followed a pattern. I could tell you the pattern now: Roast on Saturday, cold meat on Sunday, Monday was it hashed up, so that was three days done. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday was things like liver, sausages, stew and fish. That was basically it every week so you just went and got it all the time.

JA No bowls of fruit or anything; it had to be what was in season. No exotic fruits at all, only apples, occasionally oranges but I never saw a banana until I was grown up. We didn't even know how to eat them, as we'd never seen one.

DA Oranges and bananas were almost non-existent when we were young. Stuff was delivered; we had a greengrocer who visited once a week; he came round. The butcher used to deliver. We had a butcher at the end of the road, but the butcher Mum got her joints from, he came and delivered because he was down in Wealdstone.

NH My grocer called on Tuesdays when I was a child, Mum always used to have a list ready.

DA The big event for me in terms of shopping was the advent of supermarkets, because when I was little there were no supermarkets. You went down and bought whatever you wanted, and everything came in plain wrappers. Sugar came in blue bags.

NH Well, you were served.

DA You were served; you went with your list. I can see the shop now. There was this huge mahogany counter, all along the front were these boxes of biscuits loose; they weren't in packets. If you wanted butter she went out the back and got the old butter pats out, patted it up and weighed it up for you. If you wanted sugar she had a big bin of it, and she filled it into the bags and weighed it. Everything was bought loose basically.

NH Do you remember her name ?

DA Well, I know the shop was Sagrose... Oh, I remember, Molly. That was how it was done, and then supermarkets arrived. It was a minute little shop. You can't believe how small it was, makes Somerfield look like really huge. It was very small wasn't it, when Co-op came? Do you remember that becoming a supermarket?

NH No, not really, I don't.

DA I do, and that was the first one near us.

JA I can remember, prior to that supermarket when I was young, you had to queue in Sainsbury's for everything. So you'd join a queue for your butter; then you'd join a another queue for your bacon; then you'd join a queue for your sugar; then you'd join another queue. So mother would always put me in another queue; there'd be about twenty women and me. All the little boys and girls were put in these queues, and the fearsome thing was that you were terrified of arriving at the head of the queue without knowing what you wanted! I mean, I could only reach the counter!

DA Or your mum might have told you what you wanted, and you hadn't any money, either.

JA Well she wouldn't tell me, she'd just say: "Stand in that queue", then she'd go to another queue.

DA You can't believe how laborious it was.

JA And the theory was that she would have her queue done and come to me. I used to live in absolute fear that I'd arrive at this counter and look at this women and she'd say: "What do you want?" and have no idea! Of course what they did was pass you by, I didn't realise that as a child. My mother would come and then she'd take over and I'd be sent to another queue. Shopping could take hours, literally hours.

DA And you always had to pay at the cashier, you didn't pay at the counter. There were all these women serving you, and then when you'd finished you went to the end of the store and there was someone sitting in a little booth.

JA If you went to the 'Home and Colonial' you did the queuing again at counters. Then they would put it in a ball.....

DB Those little things that went round the ceiling - I remember them.

JA It would go whooshing round the shop and arrive inside a mahogany booth where a lady sat - the lady cashier. Then, when you'd finished all your shopping, you'd then wander over to this other queue to pay. Then you'd go back to the counter to get your goods.

DA It was an air thing, wasn't it, that sent it off? It was great!

DB A little tube.

JA It was quite unbelievable, I mean those things whooshed around the shop. They were either balls rolling along in a sort of bamboo trackway, or they were pneumatic in so far as they flew along with air.

DA You do occasionally see them now - I'll tell you where I've seen one. It's in existence now and being used - C&As in Watford. - which is where you're really likely to go! They built a new C&As and installed one of these things for getting change so they don't have to have so much money in the till. It's a fearsome sounding thing, and when it used to clonk down it really makes you jump doesn't it?

JA I have a little story: When I went to work for the GPO, I worked in a telephone exchange. They used to have one of these systems upstairs with all the operators, and downstairs with all the engineers. The idea was that when somebody rang up and complained that their telephone didn't work, you put this little docket in this machine and shoved it over the thing. It went upstairs and ended up in this wire tray you see. A little old lady was there (always very nervy) who would pick it up and do something about it. Well, if you really wanted a bit of devilment, you were bored, you put in, say half a dozen one after another, they'd end up cannon balls, boom, boom, boom! This women used to have a nervous breakdown! I always remember that, that was quite funny.

NH You were a horrid child!

JA That was just a time , you know, lots of young men with nothing to do. Another thing was to go round the switchboard, and there were little holes where they would pass the cards, 'cause it was a manual switchboard. It wasn't like electronic or anything. When they were wrong, and we were repairing, you weren't allowed to go to the front because there was a sexual problem here. They'd pass the cord through, and you'd work from behind, so they wouldn't actually see you and you wouldn't see them, and then you'd push it back through the little hole. Well, sometimes the blokes would smoke and blow some through the hole. Of course , some of the ladies were getting near retirement, and a slight flash of smoke would indicate the board was going to burst into flames, I suppose. So that was another worrying thing.

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