If people couldn't afford to buy a piano, there were other musical instruments around which cost less and took up less space. When I started to play the concertina, twenty five years ago, my mum's reaction was "Oh, we had two of those, one on either end of the mantlepiece". It turns out that one of them had been with one of my mother's uncles, in the trenches of WW1.
My mother also remembers her father reading novels to the whole family. This would have been in the early 1930s. She also remembers looking after her younger brothers whilst her father was on night shift in the steel works and her mother was off down the pub with her friends!
As for 1950s children - we played out; made rope swings over the beck and fell in, roller skated up and down the road on skates which didn't have rubberised wheels and which made a huge noise, whittled sticks into lethally sharp arrows and shot them from home made bows, made dens in the woods, roamed around the Cleveland Hills until it was too dark to see, pinched fruit from the allotments and wandered home as night fell .
I was usually sent to bed before "Journey into Space" on the wireless but my older sister told me what was going on so I knew all about it. We played cards and dominoes and on Saturday night we would have bread with hot dripping from the Sunday roast, which my mother cooked early because the gas pressure was awful on Sunday mornings.
Oh dear, I've gone all sentimental, sorry. What I really believe is that people lived by the seasons so went to bed much earlier than we do. But in the hours between work and bed, the only difference between then and now is heat, light and the box in the corner of the room. Oh, and this clever little device which I have on my lap, making in possible to watch the aforementioned box at the same time as communicating with people all over the world!
Jen
