• Welcome to the new B.I.R.D. Forum. Please be sure to read the "New Member / New Registered ? Please Read" thread in the Coffee Shop. This contains some important information. To become a full member ( £5.90 a year ) simply click on your user name near the top on the right I hope you enjoy the new site ................ Jaws ( John )

From Facebook... A long read,but ahhh, the memories...........

Jaws

Corporal CockUp
Staff member
Moderator
Club Sponsor
Shove Up a Bit - 1960s Family Life

A couch, a settee, a sofa - call it what you will. We all had one. Posh folks with bigger houses had a few. We just had the one, together with a matching armchair. We had a tiled fireplace with a blazing coal fire burning in the grate. One of the few luxuries as Dad worked for the coal board, so we got concessionary coal (which was kept below the stairs and was accessed through the kitchen). It was a good old, North West, two up, two down with an outside lav and no bathroom. I digress. Back to the couch.

The couch was designed to accommodate three people, but I have seen it hold up to seven kids. The seat cushions were removable, and lots of stuff found its way down the back of the cushions. Whenever one turned up on a bonfire in November, we would go 'couch diving'. Rummaging inside the sofa lining and down the back, to find long lost bits of loose change. I remember the cry going up from one of the lads 'I've found threppy' meaning threepence. Quite a sum of money back then for a kid.

For some odd reason, Mam kept old newspapers underneath the cushions. She wasn't one of these weird hoarders that you see on telly. They were used to light the fire. In pre toilet roll days they also found their way into the outside 'petty' where they were cut into squares and hung upon a nail on the door. Mam also wrapped potato peelings with it. 'It stops them smelling' she used to say. It didn't work. Everyone's bin stank on warm days.

The couch was also a makeshift bed when I was ill. Being ill was almost a treat. Being tucked up on the couch whilst wearing my jim-jams, eating boiled eggs and toast soldiers, or better still, drinking Lucozade, of which the bottle came wrapped in yellow coloured, cellophane wrapping. It crackled as you unwrapped it like a big yellow sweet. There was also the telly in the same room. Everyone else would moan and carp on because they had to sit on the floor, but Mam would say 'It's only what I would do for you if you were ill'.

The couch was the focal point of family entertainment. It's where we watched our luxurious 14" black and white television with just two channels. BBC and ITV. We had to rent a new one when BBC2 came along, because ours only had 405 lines, and you had to have 625 lines and a new style aerial to watch BBC2. This turned out to be utter crap, but it was an excuse to rent a new, bigger telly. We hired ours from Red Arrow. They gave you a little rubber doll of an Indian (or Native Americans as we should now call them). It had holes to insert five little rubber feathers. You earned these by introducing friends and family. Each one that signed up, you earned a feather. Fill all five and they gave you £5. A brilliant piece of marketing. We filled up two dolls.

The couch came into its own on Christmas morning. It's where everyone sat to open their presents, which were then played with on the rug, in front of the fire. It would be festooned with pieces of torn wrapping paper, which would also find their way beneath the cushions. The fire would be lit with it on Boxing Day morning. The couch would also be the seat of honour for any visiting guests. 'Come on David, get up and let Mr and Mrs Roberts sit down'.

My two sisters found other uses for the couch with their boyfriends. Not that they could get up to much with us all sitting around, but they could at least cuddle up and hold hands. That was the ordeal that all prospective boyfriends had to go through. Trial by couch. That and drinking a cup of tea from a china cup and saucer without their hands shaking too much so they spilled it and scalded their privates.

Speaking of trials, the couch also double up as the dock. Any miscreants (usually me) were sat down on the couch and questioned about who they had been with, what they had done, and was it true what she had heard. I always owned up to it because, 1) It usually was true, and 2) I got treated more leniently if I owned up to it and threw myself upon their mercy. If I saw Dad trying to stifle back a laugh, I knew I was home and dry. If I heard the words 'You little bugger' Mam would usually send me to bed. The worst was when Dad would say 'I'm very disappointed in you'. Dad was my hero. I always wanted to live up to my hero. This usually was punishment enough and would reduce me to tears.

The couch also became a psychiatrists couch, where counselling sessions were held. One of Mam's friends would be sniffling into a hankie, with Mam offering advice, such as 'All men are bastards. You just have to teach them that no means no'. It's only years later the meaning of those words came back to me. I suddenly spat out my tea and burst out laughing. Everyone thought I had lost the plot, but when the penny drops, you just react.

The couch was also packed on Friday nights when the neighbours came round and Dad played the piano. All three seats and both arms had bottoms on them. Renditions of all the old favourites, like Begin the Beguine', 'Roll Out The Barrel', and 'The Whiffenpoof Song', but the one that always got the old ladies crying into their Mackeson was 'Nobody's Child'.

When Dad was out and Mam was in the kitchen, occasionally the couch was moved back to make room for my two sisters to 'bop' to their records. Bopping is that dance where the girl twirls underneath the boys arm, like those old black and white films of American G.I's at a dance. They even taught me how to do it, but I was just too short. On very rare occasions, Dad would come home from the pub and see the girls bopping. He would smile, change the record and have a little dance with Mam, and tell us 'This is proper dancing. You get to hold your little sweetie-pie'. Everyone would groan and say 'Oh, Dad!!!'.

I always feel that when you move into a house, it doesn't truly become home until you carry in the couch and set up the telly. Only then does it become liveable. The couch is the most British of institutions, and the glue that holds a family together. They can be used to hide behind when the Daleks came on Dr Who, they can be kissed, cuddled and made love on, they can hold a rackload of kids to watch Blue Peter, they can be used for a lovely afternoon siesta, a whole plethora of things.
The couch is the place of tears and laughter, fear and love. It is comfort and refuge. It is the epicentre of that which we call home. The couch is the true British hero - as Tiny Tim might have said '...and God bless them, every one'.
 

ogr1

I can still see ya.....
Club Sponsor
Apart from the piano...Bob on.(y)
Some homes are still like that in the
Northwest. I still sit on the settee today
& won't touch the single chairs...Strange.
 

Jaws

Corporal CockUp
Staff member
Moderator
Club Sponsor
Apart from the piano...Bob on.(y)
Some homes are still like that in the
Northwest. I still sit on the settee today
& won't touch the single chairs...Strange.
We had the Joanna but not the outside bog..
What we did have in the first house I I can remember we lived in was gas mantle lamps and a big hand pump to get hot water upstairs
The water would be heated in a big old wash tub thing and then you ( well my mum, I was about 4 - 5 ) had to pump it up to the bath by hand !
 

ogr1

I can still see ya.....
Club Sponsor
Outside bog...The joys of having a dump
in winter and newspaper bog roll.
Which reminds me......
I must invest in an indoor loo and that nice soft bum wipe on a roll.
Alexa I think it's called?
Some say it even plays music??
A very talented puppy imo.
 
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slim63

Never surrender
Club Sponsor
All of the above apart from the outside bog.........................

And waking up with ice on the inside of the windows but still warm under a foot thick quilt you could hardly kick off & hoping the fire had stayed in all night while you had a quick splash & dash

Black toast for breakfast done properly on a fork over the fire the plastered with dripping & a bit of salt, most of which ended up down the back of the sofa (I am convinced this is why they were so combustible)

knocking slack into lumps before the consession coal came then having to shovel the last half a dozen bags in as the coalman couldn't lift them over the greedy boards, an you always had to watch the sly sods, count the bags in & make sure there wasn't a weight on the scales

Then we moved & ended up with 2 living rooms, not that I was allowed in the "kept for best" front room except at xmas when someone would bash the shite out of the joanna & that was the only time I really didn't want to be in there
Joy of joys we had central heating or so I thought when I sussed out what the big cast iron things on the wall were, but no they ran off the fire in the front room that was only open at xmas so it was back to ice on the windows etc

B&W telly , 2 channels from Radio Rentals with a slot on the back for ya cash & it always ran out just at the interesting bit of the one thing I wanted to watch before going out skinning knees & climbing trees

Even the bad lads wanted to be milk monitor as you could nick the cream & blame the birds if you remembered to first nick a straw
 

Squag1

Can't remember....
Club Sponsor
My Da was a cop and I remember having the "great coat" thrown on me in bed on cold weather, and the ice inside the glass.

We lived in the barracks, must have been 100 yrs old. The noise from the rattling windows in windy weather was so loud.

One night a journeyman blacksmith was put in the cell. He kicked the door for hours. They took his shoes off and then had terribile difficulty getting him back in. And he still kicked the door.
No window in the cell.

There were no lights in that area :eek: can you imagine. I was only about 9 I'd say, and I was holding a torch so the two cops could deal with him. Health n safety!!

Cooker was paraffin. I remember a metal bath on it on wash day to heat water!
 

Squag1

Can't remember....
Club Sponsor
At primary school having pee up the wall contests in the outside lav. Then our daily 1/3 pint milk bottle with the inch of ice at the top.
Outdoor toilet in primary school - competition was to pee over the wall.

One day a kid was eating aniseed balls all morning so at break time he was peeing purple.
We were all standing looking on in wonder.
 
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