50 Today

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at the Today programme for allowing me to take part by blogging and reading other 50 year olds on 28th October. They were fun to read and evoked many happy memories. I'd also like to wish them all a very Happy Birthday for Sunday. I am going to spend my birthday at a meal surrounded by 20+ family members and am sure i will have many more happy memories of that day. Thanks again Bev Traill

I do realise how much easier my life is compared to my parents. They didn't have a fridge or freezer when i was young only a cold store. Shopping was done daily and it was not unusual for me to be sent with a 10 shilling note to the local shops for my mum to get meat and veg. i do remember once on arriving at the local shop only to find i had lost the money and list and was so worried about returning home and owning up to this, it was alot of money to lose.Washing, hoovering, bed making (having to make beds, tucking sheets in and blankets) are all alot easier now and mum would have gladly welcomed these mod cons then having a family of 7.A freezer would have been a godsend with a large family. But at least everything we ate was fresh, no artificial colourings or additives and i'm sure we were not fussy eaters, was due to the lack of choice of food available then. We didn't have snack food that kids now are eating between meals. We wre always so ravenous by dinner time, we just ate everything put in front of us.
You mentioned whether we remember any significant times. Living alongside a naval port, i distinctly remember when the falklands war broke out. My husband and i had friends who were in the navy and remember them going off to war. We wre selling our first home and wanting to buy something a bit bigger. We found the perfect house, unfortunately the gentleman we were buying from was coming out of the navy and going to work as a civilian on the oil rigs. But because of the Falklands there was a question as to whether he would be able to leave the navy. We waited patiently and it took nigh on a year before the sale went through , the navy finally released him and he went North. We are still in the same house 26 years later and glad we waited.
I do remember during my childhood that winters were wintery and summers were very hot.I remember running around in fields and collecting grasshoppers in jars and winters when it was so cold you toes really hurt and if someone trod on your toes when they were so cold it was agony. My boys say they have never known it that cold and down here in the south have only experienced snow a handful of times in their lives. Global warming?

This is me at Junior school.
Me playing cricket in our back garden note the cushion as we had no money for proper stumps. With 7 in the family we had quite a good match.
Me aged 5 at infant school.
I was a Brownie and did go on to become a girl guide aswell.

This was taken while my dad was recovering from his anuerism last year.
Last year with my eldest son - Stuart
This was taken on Gosport promenade overlooking Portsmouth Dockyard.
This was taken while we lived in the New Forest before my younger sister was born. The photographer would visit our home once a year to take family photos.
Our Christmas spread at tea time, me in the forefront, my father looking very skinny. We had two deaf and dumb uncles who would visit and take these magical photos with an Instamatic camera. Both my fathers parents were deaf and dumb and many Aunts and Uncles.

50 Today

I can remember that as soon as i was old enough i knew the only way i could have new fashionable clothes was to earn some money. We only received presents christmas and birthdays, there were never any little treats during the year. I now occasionally treat my boys to the odd bit of clothing or DVD, game etc, but we were never given this as money was short. So as soon as i was old enough i got myself a paper round and did that for about 18 months. It was spread over quite a large area but i enjoyed it, i loved the peace and quiet and time on my own as that was a premium in our household. Then i managed to find a job at the weekends working in a shop that was based on the shore where the majority of our customers where yachtsmen. We sold everything in this shop, we sliced meat,cheese, we made up fresh rolls, sold alchol,cigarettes,sweets, weighed out veg. The yachtsmen would come in with a huge list of provisions they needed, we'd then add up the bill in our heads, no tills to do it for you! I worked there from 9.00 - 5.30pm Saturdays and 2.00 - 5.00pm Sundays. I'd race home from work on Sunday as that was the night there was a disco held at the local community centre. I enjoyed spending my hard earned wages on clothes and buy singles. At that time i was aDavid Cassidy, T-rex and David Bowie fan. My half of my room would be covered in posters taken from the Jackie magazine i use to have each week. Before Jackie i use to have the Bunty comic. I can remember evenings sat in front of the T.V cutting out the doll on the back page and the clothes to hang on it. I have in my attic still some of my old Bunty annuals. All of them have an inscription in side. Mum would write the year we received it for Christmas. I still can't believe that the last time i received this annual i was 14!! can you imagine a girl of 14 nowadays reading the Bunty.
We were lucky living a stone's throw from the beach , all school holidays were spent with friends there or if the weather was not kind my friends and i would sit in our bedrooms playing our singles, learning all the lyrics and singing along. the real treat was being at my friend carole's, her mum would bring us up a glass of lemonade with a dollop of ice cream in it - heaven!! Sadly Carole is no longer with us, she died 4 years ago leaving a husband and two daughters. She died of cancer- she never smoked or drank, was a wonderful person, it was a real tradegy. I still keep in touch with the 4 other girls that i spent my teenage years with. One of them is married to a celebrity and lives in New York but she hasn't changed and we still laugh about the times we had.
In my later years my taste in music changed. I went to Knebworth and saw Lynyrd Skynyrd, Peter Frampton and listened to The Eagles, Ozark Mountain Daredevils. I still listen to this type of music today. All in all i enjoyed my teen years.I look back with fond memories of those care free days.

I have just realised i haven't mentioned where i live. For the last 36 years i have lived in Gosport, Hampshire and love living so close to the sea. It's a 5 minute walk to the beach. My husband is a mechanical engineer but has a passion for british motobikes and has always got a restoration project on the go.
I was born at home just up the road in Fareham. In 1960 we then moved to a small village called Damerham near Fordingbridge where my father was the 'village bobby'. It was an idllyic place to spend those formative years. we had to walk through a cabbage field to get to the village school, one classroom for the infants , another for the juniors. I was taught to knit at infants which just wouldn't happen nowadays. At the back of our house was a field where we spent many hours playing hide and seek around the haystacks and at the front was a field with a stream running through it. My elder brother and i use to wade through this stream with our jam jars catching minnows. Towards one end of the road was a dense wood where we would play cowboys and indians, me being the squaw left in charge of the den while my brother and his friends went hunting! we'd run on ahead using chalk to mark arrows on the trees and leave others to try and track us down. Nearly everything we did involved being outside, it was a wonderful life.
Our next move was to Andover and then by 1967 we were living in farnborough.In 1968 we moved to Basingstoke for a couple of years were i started senior school and in 1971 moved to Gosport. I remained in Gosport because i married a Gosport man but my parents still made a few more moves after that. They are now retired and live in West End a village near Eastleigh. All of our family still live relatively close, about a 20 mile radius

50 today

My name is Beverley and i am one of five children. My parents had 5 children under the age of 7, i am the second eldest. I have three brothers and one sister. My father was in the Hampshire Constabulary until he retired. He started in the force as a Police Constable and worked his way up to the rank of Chief Inspector. How he managed to study for each promotion exam with five young children in the house i really don't know. My mother was kept so busy at home with us she never went out to work. There was never much money to spare although they were lucky that the police provided a house for most of his working life until they purchased a house in the new forest just before he retired. As their family grew so did the size of the house they provided until we had a 4 bedroom house though there still never seemed enough room, we still had to share a bedroom, so never any peace. Each time my father got promotion we had to move so found ourselves moving around hampshire almost every 2 - 3 years.It was hard starting new schools but we soon got use to it and being so close in age we all had a brother or sister to start a new school with which helped.
Understandibly there was never any money to spare and i can only remember going on two holidays, once in a caravan to Milford on sea and the other to Butlins Holiday camp.I can see now that my parents must have gone without so much just for us. Christmas was my favourite time. we all had a huge sack of presents, one main present something we really wanted and lots of small gifts, annuals colouring books and pencils etc. Each week we all had our own choice of comic, mine was the Bunty comic but it was great because once i'd read mine i could then read my brothers comics aswell, the Dandy, Beano. as i was an avid reader i loved this.I use to buy a paperback book every week go straight home to my room and lay on my bed and read it in one hit then have to wait until the following saturday to purchase another. I read The Chalet school books, Famous Five, all the E Nesbit books anything really. I still read 1 or 2 books a week now.
How different things are for my two boys ( one is 18 the other 22,still living at home).At christmas there would be a tin of Rover biscuits on the side but we were not allowed to help ourselves to them, we had to wait until we were offered one. For tea on christmas day we would have tinned salmon and salad with bread and butter! Normal tea any other day would be bread and jam. My boys laugh when i tell them but i realise you can't expect them to appreciate how lucky they are when they can go to the fridge and help themselves, the fact that there are always cake and biscuits to hand and not just on special occasions, they have never known any different.We use to have a bath only once a week on Sundays, the girls went in first then the boys, all using the same water( boys were always dirtier). We use to have my dad's police overcoat and mum's coat put over our beds at night in the wintertime because our rooms were so cold, ice on the insides of the windows!
We use to have to go to Sunday school and then were not allowed to play out or have friends in on sundays. Must have been hell for mum as we moaned all day about how our friends were allowed out to play, why couldn't we, but sundays to her meant all being together. I actually really enjoyed sunday school. I loved the songs we sang, the stamp we were given each week to put in a book and especially the sunday school teachers who invited me to tea. I would have coconut madeleines, meat sandwiches, biscuits, it was areal treat. i probably endured the teacher banging away at her piano and singing along with her knowing the laden table was waiting for me afterwards, probably not quite the right attitude but i was young and hungry. My brothers and sister all agree that one lasting memory is that we were always hungry.There was never any seconds and our plates were always empty. We had set menus thoughout the week, roast on sunday, bubble and squeakwith brawn on Monday, fish on Friday, mince on saturday. I will always remember my brother morgan thinking i had finished my meal one day when we had half a boiled egg with our salad, i turned to talk to my mum and on looking back at my plate my egg was gone! He'd pinched it. I was most upset.
We all had our chores to do. My father made a rota out and it was taped to the kitchen cupboard. One of us would fill the coal bucket another would have to clean all the shoes for school, washing up, wiping up, cleaning the grate out. There were so many chores and they had to be done to get our pocket money.
I have so many happy memories of my childhood and can now fully appreciate what our parents did for us. They must have saved all year for christmas and they made sure we got what we wanted and had wonderful times playing games and cards as we didn't have a television for many years after alot of people had one.Does anyone else remember the thrill of eating your Christmas pud and hoping you would bite on a sixpenny bit. But mum still managed to make sure they we all got one each. We couldn't afford to be fussy about what we ate, because if you didn't like it there was nothing else. My boys can be fussy eaters but food is more varied now and i know it's my fault for having so much choice in the house, if they don't like one thing there is always something else to choose from.So i don't think you are born fussy eaters it's the way you are brought up - i hold my hands up to spoiling them.

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