My father, also 90, always refused to use soft loo paper! There were always two rolls in the bathroom once soft paper became available - one Izal, one soft!
I remember no hot water in the taps, boiling a kettle for washing up and morning ablutions. There was a "geyser" over the bath which my father would light with ceremony on Sunday evenings
. No central heating, we had a fireplace in every room, but we usually only lit the "back room" one where we all lived. The front room was only used when it was warm enough, never with a fire. If it was very cold in winter school holidays we occasionally had a fire in the bedroom so we could play there.
When I started work I worked at the Continental Telephone Exchange. The only places "abroad" that could be dialled were Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels. All others had to be connected by an operator. (The number of the Hilton Hotel at Heathrow was Skyport 8000, and Phillips Electrical in Holland was Eindhoven 60000.) Then I moved to Bedfordshire and worked at Rootes in Dunstable, where I used a manual adding machine - like one of those old-fashioned cash registers but then I had to pull a lever down a quarter-circle for it to calculate. We had no car until 1964, and no TV until 1967.
My Gran lived in a house with no bathroom, just an outside toilet. And yes it was cold!!
