Can you share with us, Elaine, one of your earliest memories please?
My earliest memories is living with my nan and granddad and having a bath in a tin bath. There was m, er my brother, my sister and myself and we all bath, had a bath in the tin bath. [Draws breath] Erm, we didn’t have any hot water so it had to be, boiled or in a boiler. Erm, and when the water, we’d finished with the bath the water then was put down the yard to swill the yard. [Draws breath] I lived with my nan till I was six, I had a bedroom of my own, er, mum and dad and my sister and brother was in one bedroom and nan and granddad in another bedroom.
When I lived at Preston Road we had erm a baker come, every day a baker come with a big straw basket with the bread in. There was no sliced bread, it was all a tin loaf, a bloomer, no cakes, just bread and that was Mother’s Pride. The milkman, we had the milkman, the milkman used to come with glass bottles. It was glass milk bottles. We had, we didn’t have supermarkets, we had shops on the Coventry Road, and we used to go to the grocery shop [draws breath] and we used to get butter, but the butter wasn’t in a packet, it was in a big piece of butter and they used to cut so much off, and pack it like a s, like a pack of butter. Then there was the butcher’s and then there was the greengrocer’s.
And the street itself, what was the street like?
The street was nice, it was, it was quiet. I say quiet, but just four doors up from nan and granddad, near the Coventry Road, there was a place called Slaters. Now, Slaters, they used to bring the milk there and they used to, erm… [Tut] sterilise it and, ready for the milkman to come, well, the dairy to come and fetch. So I can always remember that smell of milk, it was quite erm, erm, a soury smell, I always remember that, but otherwise, it was a nice road. Nice, knew a lot of people in the road because nan and granddad had lived there for quite a few years because before they lived, they lived in Wroxton Road and then before there they lived at Blakesley Hall. So erm everybody knew nan and granddad.
