Hobson's Choice

My gawd, you're old

I'm not quite such an old codger but you post reminds me of what were simpler days in 1960s England.
The downside was the filthy conditions and terrible pollution that was the norm in much of South Yorkshire and the massive number of men who died from lung disease, but the sandwiches were pretty good.
As for home cooked food, my dear old mum was a rubbish cook so a  McD at the end of the road would have been heaven.

Young Fred... Still, it's nice that the sandwiches were good.

As a child of the fifties, eldest of 3 boys, life was great in NZ.  Hardworking dad whose money paid the mortgage on the large 3 bedroom farmhouse which sat on a quarter acre block on the edge of town. 
Mum cooked great meals, never went hungry. Great cook and I learnt much off her as to how to making a meal out of nothing. Ran cattle and sheep on the empty paddocks beside us.Killed and dressed them ourselves. Had huge garden. One of our jobs was to look after the garden, cut kindling wood for the coal range ( which was our only source of hot water and for cooking), fill coal buckets mow lawns etc.
Meals were not to a specific menu but Sunday was always fish and chip night ( either takeaways or dad cooked it with help from us boys) so mum could have a night off. Friday was corned beef and veggies.
Dad was a keen fisherman so the large chest freezer was always full of fish and meat along with chicken as we had a large chicken run with 15 chooks. My job to look after them including killing, plucking and gutting.
As for allergies I developed an allergy to bee and wasp stings after a bee and wasp stung me on the back almost simultaneously.
Our laundry was a copper which we heated water in and a hand cranked mangle to wring the clothes out before hanging them on the line. Outside loo with the can picked and replaced once a week.
Inside toilet put in along with a proper laundry later. The old mangle was made into a winch later on for winching dad's boat onto the trailer.

In my travels I have eaten things that any person these days would not countenance.  Still like my fried crickets, grasshoppers and jellied ducks blood when home on Laos.

Cannot see any of the new generation doing such as we did or, even understanding it all.  Loved it, with all it's ups and downs and often hard work and hard times. I would venture to say it made me into the person I am today with a positive outlook on life, and a thirst for adventure and knowledge.

The "everything was better then" syndrome is probably as old as humankind (complaints about how bad the youth is are known from ancient Greek philiophers). It stems from the fact that our amazing psyche and memory manages to get rid of the negative and keep only the positive aspects - thus the "Good Old Times" are better now than they ever were.
I, for my part, live in the here and now - and am grateful for it!

A German humorist (I forgot his name) once said:
"Everything was better in the past - even the future!"

Well, I dunno, Beppi. I'm with Stumpy on this, and I know he will agree with the link below, about how children were taught to look after themselves. Today, many children are still taught self-reliance, even in Western countries; but there's simply too much "mothering" by our communities. The term "the nanny state" sums the situation up pretty well - as does the term "the snowflake generation". But it's fair to ask, rhetorically, where did all the bad people come from?
http://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2015/ … -from.html

You're quite right (Beppi) in noting the tendency to forget the bad things that happened years ago and remember the good. But in cities especially - and towns - there's a lot more danger "out there", at least in my personal observation.

I am with you Gordon. There is, in my humble opinion, too much mothering these days and this in turn affects self reliance. This would then, surely, affect those 'mollycoddled" children to such a degree that they would be at a loss when a situation arises which they have no answer for.

There is a tendency to forget the bad over a period of time but for the likes of myself and Gordon those bad times are still in the memory bank.

stumpy wrote:

There is a tendency to forget the bad over a period of time but for the likes of myself and Gordon those bad times are still in the memory bank.

I surprised my mother when she was about 80 and living in England as an immigrant, by assuring her that my childhood out in the bush (sheep farm on the Darling Downs in Queensland) had been reasonably happy. Boring, but happy enough. Not miserable, on the whole, though like Stumpy I can remember some of the deprivations. Our nearest doctor was a couple of hours away at the end of a winding road that meant we arrived sicker than when we left home. In the rain, it was impossible to drive, so our parents had to cope on their own. None of us died, quite, but I recall all five of us enduring a night-long drive to the nearest hospital five hours away because the baby had what turned out to be peritonitis. Parents coped without calling (non-existant) emergency services, and children learnt the art of coping from them. 

Kids played in the dirt, and ate a lot of it, and got worms and septic sores, but they all coped. All of us put up with toothaches until our annual trip to the dentist in the city, who injected us with needles the width of a knitting needle and we cried ourselves to sleep with the pain of the novocaine. Children contracted polio and were crippled for life... The lack of medical care was probably one of the greatest deprivations.

We lived in a world of casual racism and homophobia and misogyny and class prejudice and xenophobia; but it was casual, and only rarely malicious or personal. These days those three caveats would never excuse the five sins preceding them; and I think the world is a poorer place because of that. Over to you, Stumpy...

We made our own fun. Always plenty to do like running around with the neighboring
mob, playing in the deep drains along the roadside, climbing the huge trees around the cemetery. Making a trolley for the Christmas derby.

Sickness was something that happened and was taken care of by mum. Never went to a doctor unless dire circumstances dictated it. And the doctor visited.
Home remedies. Bread poultices for boils, a tablespoon of treacle and powdered sulphur as a blood tonic. Comfrey leaf sandwiches, sulphur dusted into open cuts.
My brother ate coal chips from the bucket and yes we all ate a lot of dust, worms along with raw unpeeled veggies.

Racism never figured in our lives. Mum spoke Maori to the old Maori ladies who bought blackberries and watercress to our house to sell. Mum was born and raised with Maoris. We went to school with Maoris, Dutch, English, Swiss kids. Had them over for weekend stays and this was reciprocated with us staying on their farms. Played sport with them.

Unfortunately racism, homophobia and misogyny are prevalent these days so all those along with the way we all have to be so 'PC' tends to make us loathe to comment for fear of being jumped on from a great height and humiliated for a point of view. Walking on eggshells.

Simpler times... More innocent than today...

The world (the middle class Western world, I guess) is a far more sophisticated place then it was when I was young. Stumpy and I played in the dirt without apology, and climbed trees without worry - either our personal worry or our parents'. We made tree-houses out of cardboard and any spare planks we could find - not because we thought it was fantastic fun, necessarily, but because there were no TV sets or computer games to lure us inside.

Even as teenagers, we settled for a simpler life than teenagers have today. A few years ago I wrote a blog-post titled after a hit song of those early days. The words probably look unrealistic and quaint to my granddaughters. "Holding hands...?" - oh, Grandpa - please!
https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2013 … -show.html

I'm not a great fan of Hallowe'en, and don't like fancy-dress costumes in general. But I tolerate them, and they're fun for little kids. According to newspaper reports, some snowflakes in the public eye in the USA have taken exception to "cultural appropriation" and all sorts of harmless disguises on the grounds that they are offensive in today's world. Here's a link to a Daily Mail opinion-piece that hits the nail on the head.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl … lakes.html
And here is a summary of the crap that is now reckoned to be taboo.
'The Office of Scolding Justice Warriors has decreed no Indian chiefs, no hula girls, no Southern belles, no Daniel Boone, no geishas, no ninjas, no gypsies, no mobsters, no terrorists, no Cleopatra. Pirates offend one-eyed people, you can't dress as a hobo because it makes light of the homeless, you can't dress as Quasimodo because it offends hunchbacks, you can't dress as an escaped mental patient because… it offends Kanye.'
Well, the last bit is a joke, but the rest of it is quite serious.

I am not a fan of Halloween either. Big here in Laos for the last 5 years and getting bigger. Just a money maker for costume shops. Our youngest daughter loves it.

Sophistication and all the attendant  'worries' that the 'PC' crowd along with the media come up with, and who swoop on such rubbish, has made a mockery of parenting these days. A good clip around the ears or the wooden spoon on the bum did not do us any harm, (Gordon would agree)and I am sure it did not turn any of my friends into child beaters or social misfits who would end up in a life of crime.

I,for one, would not like to be a parent these days. Too much of a worry.

And I'm sure Stumpy will remember getting clips around the ears, and a spank on the bum when warranted, meted out by adults who weren't our parents, too! Especially in smaller towns and villages, all adults assumed the authority to enforce good behaviour from children. As for school, well, being punished by a teacher was only half the total sentence: we got the other half when the news reached our parents.

Times have changed, and physical punishment is often (usually?) reckoned to be unacceptable these days; but I don't think it did us any harm. Look at Stumpy and me - paragons of virtue by any standard! Sometimes in shops I shout at kids who are misbehaving excessively, and I'm almost never pulled up for it. Usually the parents are embarrassed enough to give their kids a clout themselves.

Both my grandmothers used the old ear twist on us !! Maternal grandfather whacked us on the back of the hand with the flat of a knife if we reached across the dining table.

Punishment was meted out by any adult when we transgressed the unwritten law, whatever it was. All part of the learning curve. Punishment = pain which = a thought process as to what caused the punishment. This process was the learning curve.

Can remember being escorted home by the local Chinese orchardist who found us busy eating his apples. He had a bag of apple cores to show dad who paid for them and then it was into the bathroom for a lesson in why such a thing is a no no.

Could never do that these days so recalcitrant kids can be a parenting nightmare. The simplistic lives myself and Gordon enjoyed are virtually extinct now. The pressures on parents, which filters down to the children, combined with the fact that kids seem to have a knowledge of what they can and cannot do, is a strain on any family.

This is for Christy, who liked my blog about holding hands in a movie show. Ahh, they don't write them like this any more! (It's the little screen on the left. Brings tears to my eyes, today!)
https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/961366/Tom … +About+You

"We lived in a world of casual racism and homophobia and misogyny and class prejudice and xenophobia; but it was casual, and only rarely malicious or personal." [from my post #9 above]

Stumpy - what's your take on the "casual racism" etc that I mentioned there? When I was a kid, there were slang-words for people from other lands and of other heritages that are today considered to be racist and offensive. I would never use them today, because they would be considered crass by anybody - but back then they were never (in my hearing) used as insults, face to face.

At my boarding school in Brisbane one of the boys in my dorm was Jacky McDermott, always called "Jacky" because that was what all male aborigines were called and he was half-aborigine. "Nigger" Brown was so-called because he had brown skin; I've no idea what his racial make-up was; we weren't interested enough to ask. The two Jews got away with no nicknames of any sort. I was called "Pablo" because my mother was supposed to be Mexican (she wasn't, and it's a long story...!). "Tubby" Holmes was tubby. And so on... None of the nicknames was used contemptuously, although I suppose they could have - at first - been taken as contemptuous. Chris Nearhos was the only Cypriot in the place, and he was called "Chris"; his swarthiness was never referred to. It was all pretty random, and not nasty in the least.

My point is that none of us grew up with racist opinions, or brought up our children to use racist terms. Yet these days - from what I read - kids like we were would be forced to go to special lectures designed to shame us. And I don't believe that does any good. What do you reckon? Anybody?

Your paragraph on 'casual racism sums up my thoughts too. As children we used slang words to describe those kids who were from other countries, but never to their faces, just amongst ourselves. This may have been a way to gain favor and to sound knowledgeable amongst our group. They were not spoken in an angry racist way, more as a description. Again, I would never use them today.

Fat kids were often nicknamed 'Tubby'. 'Bones' was another we used to describe a rather tall skinny schoolmate. I can recall a school mate who had polio and had large braces on his legs which caused him to walk like a drunken sailor. His nickname was 'Hoppy' and he took to it with pride. We all looked out for him. The names were used in a descriptive way, never in an angry vengeful way.

I can honestly say that I never heard my parents, grandparents or their friends use any nicknames in a racist or contemptuous way. I would think that if us kids did that then we would have received the appropriate punishment, and rightly so.

Further to my post #17 above... Below is a link to an item that I once posted on my old blogsite, and which is evidence of the harmlessness in earlier times, of one of today's most offensive words. It tells of another  Nigger Brown, a sporting hero of nearly a hundred years ago, revered by my father's generation in his home town. It will amuse you, Stumpy, I think.
https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2013 … wn_21.html

Thanks for that Gordon. I do remember that quite well. Even went there to watch a game when I was staying with a friend in Toowoomba.

Fred wrote:

... your post reminds me of what were simpler days in 1960s England.
The downside was the filthy conditions and terrible pollution that was the norm in much of South Yorkshire and the massive number of men who died from lung disease...

Fred, you did well to overcome whatever your family's handicap was. Here's a story you might relate to. This week my wife and I will be breakfasting (at a cheapo caff up the road) with a couple a wee bit younger than us, who were brought up much the same way as you were, probably. His father was a miner up near Middlesborough somewhere; her father a bit better off but not much. He (our friend) was lucky enough to be a natural footballer, and good enough to be paid five pounds a week at age 17. She was "under the gun" aged 16 when they married. She said her father wept in despair when she confessed to being pregnant. We were reminiscing the other day, the four of us, and shaking our heads at the simple lives our families led back in the early 60s. The wife and I haven't come far from our respective beginnings, but the other couple now own an expensive condo on the beach and spend their lives wandering around the world as their fancy takes them.

I must remember to ask them if the sandwiches were good, though, back then.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl … banks.html
I used to have one of those money-banks when I was a kid. I never associated it with a real kind of person, any more than I associated toy pirates with real people.

The taboo word is undoubtedly offensive today, and it was unwise of the shopkeeper to use it on his placard; but I hope he manages to sell all the ones he has in stock! Stumpy?

I had one of those too.Never looked upon in a racist derogatory way. It was just a gret solid money box.

When each of my brothers were given one on their 5th birthday we had 3 in the house. Lasted for years, good sturdy construction.
The "N" word is clouded with racist connotations these day, offensive and not to be used.

Our school also gave us a cardboard money box for the Dr Barnado's children's homes. Handed in at years end. This did instill in us a saving culture.

stumpy wrote:

Thanks for that Gordon. I do remember that quite well. Even went there to watch a game when I was staying with a friend in Toowoomba.

I'm wondering what year you were there, and how much the footie culture had changed since I left Toowoomba for good in 1963. Dad and I used to be devoted to the exciting All Whites team - to Mum's mild disapproval, because the All Whites were an all-Catholic club and Mum was at war with the Micks. (As with so many ethnic nicknames, "Micks" was a dismissive term rather than insulting - although there was no doubting the mutual hostility.) My parents were in a "mixed marriage", which in T'ba meant between Micks and Proddies - nothing to do with race. Here in Cayman, a mixed marriage is between native-born Caymanians and immigrants, regardless of colour or race. It's a messed-up world.

I started this thread by giving the example of "Hobson's choice" in respect of home meals, but in those simpler times there were other areas in which we had little choice. I seem to remember only having one pair of shoes, as a young boy. Could that be right? Didn't I have one set for best? Maybe, maybe not. Mum used to make my clothes when I was very young - I've seen the photos, and they weren't pretty! I got my first store-bought suit (made of some shiny material - nylon, perhaps?) when I was seven; and I didn't get another one until after I went to boarding school at age eleven.

The only non-alcoholic drink in our house was water, besides tea (which is water - yes, yes, I know...!). There was no choice of "pop" drinks - that came much later. The only barber to cut our hair was a hopeless old coot we knew as "Dad", and the other parent was our doctor except for something really serious.

Living in the Queensland bush no doubt reduced our choices to a minimum, but even in the towns we didn't have it much better. Does anybody else remember the paucity of choices, back in The (so-called) Good Old Days?

Our mum made our clothes too, usually by  resizing clothes from others. My first suit for our College School dance was made from dad's wedding suit. I was 12 then.
Had a shirt mum made from a flour sack which had "Champion Flour" across the back.
These days you would pay a premium for something like that.

Shoes were hand me downs too. Haircuts were done by a local barber who had a small salon at the local pub. Our maternal grandfather would sometimes cut our hair with a set of hand clippers when we visited him. At least they were sharp enough not to pluck the hair out of our heads!!

We had water as a choice but mum made lemonade when given lemons by our neighbor who had 3 large trees. Ginger beer too. All good.

Well there's spam, spam, spam, spam
Egg, bacon and Spam
Egg, bacon, sausage and Spam
Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam
Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam
Spam, Spam, Spam, egg and Spam
Spam, Sausage, Spam, Spam, Spam, Bacon, Spam, Tomato and Spam
...and Vegamite on toast.

stumpy wrote:

Had a shirt mum made from a flour sack which had "Champion Flour" across the back.
These days you would pay a premium for something like that.

Oh come on! Now you're just showing off!
No, no, I believe you, Stumpy... It made me laugh. We were never that poor!

When I started work in an office after leaving school at age 17, I boarded with a woman in Brisbane, with another three fellows. On the tram home each evening I would get off a mile short of my destination to save a penny on the fare, This on a wage of 6 pounds six and six, back in those days. A colleague of mine here in Cayman was on three pounds a week for the same sort of job, on the Isle of Wight in England. Cripes. How the value of money has changed!

No offence taken Gordon.

We were poor in the early days, hence large garden, chicken coop, killing our own meat etc.
At 16 my first job was on a dairy farm, one pound a week, 7 days a week. A weekend off a month which was the morning milking on Saturday and be back late Sunday afternoon for milking Monday morning.

We weren't poor, but we were cash-poor. Dad's mother owned the farm, and he managed it. Mum told me that when he married and had children, he got one pound a week plus keep. I guess the pounds are what financed our holidays at the seaside, although one of the pairs of city-dwelling grandparents might have helped, I suppose.

It's good that you and I seem to be feeding off each other's reminiscences. Our memories aren't the same, but complementary. One of the large differences between us is that you were a farmer's boy and I was a city-bred mother's boy. I had as little to do with farm-work as I could get away with. I observed, but didn't get involved, at least voluntarily. I have never milked a cow, for instance, or castrated a lamb. This blog-post below touches on a few of the observations, if you're interested.
https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2014 … fence.html

Great hardship ...but you are good example for all...

Poor? The kids of today wouldn't believe it! Here's The Four Yorkshiremen sketch from an English TV show of the 1960s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

Here's a piece of information that the younger readers might not know about. Even Stumpy might not know about this. In my childhood, when we rang someone on the phone, we did actually ring! Out in the bush, we were on what was called a "party-line" - twenty or more little sheep farms connected by a single telephone line, with each farm-house having its own unique Morse-code unit/number. We didn't have those new-fangled dialling phone-sets, only a speaker "set" attached to the wall, with a movable handle on the side. Our number was 2-S; "2" was the number of our exchange (i.e. the several phones on that particular party-line), and "S" our house's number. "S" in Morse code is three dots, or three rings of the handle, with a very small interval between them. One neighbour was 2-U, which required a caller to ring dot-dot-dash -  two short rings (one circuit each), followed by one long one (three circuits without stopping).

Looking back, it seems almost beyond belief that such a primitive system existed at a time when we drove cars and listened to the radio (sorry: "wireless"!). But it had its advantages. If we were visiting a neighbour and heard three short rings, we answered it. If we were away on holidays, a neighbour would answer it and tell the caller where we were. A second neighbour could also answer, and the two could chat away about life, the universe and everything. Maybe one of them would call the local operator and remind him, so he could tell anybody who called from outside the area. There was no fee to pay for party-line calls.

And of course at the end of each call, we literally hung up - put the earpiece back on its hook on the side of the set.

We also had a "party line" even in town. 6 others on the same line. Farms in the area were the same with often 10 or more sharing the one line. Calving time was the time when farmers trying to contact a vet had priority over any social call. Same when calling doctor is someone was injured or sick.

Yes, thanks for reminding me about priorities. I remember occasions when conversations were interrupted by emergency-calls!

Here's another something that will remind old codgers of how we lived. I remember the days before surgical gloves were worn by food-servers. Does anyone else? In my first job, in Brisbane in 1957, my lunch was a sandwich or two made to order by young men with no gloves. The knives they used were razor-sharp, which inevitably led to a few cuts - as indicated by the spots of blood on their white aprons. Ten seconds away from the production-line while they slapped a band-aid on and wiped the knife with a well-used towel, then back to work. Those were the days before AIDS was discovered, and nobody worried much about hygiene.

Those were the days my friend. Now, it's not just AIDS.

Gordon Barlow wrote:

Those were the days before AIDS was discovered, and nobody worried much about hygiene.

Those were also the days of much more frequent contagious diseases and a far lower life expectancy.
I'd rather live today, when I can have a measured overview of risks I take and decide on appropriate measures. (I don't wear gloves when touching food - washing hands is sufficient.)

I may not be up in the years as some, as I was born during the 80’s, where everything had to be bigger and better.  Traveled everywhere in the USA except Alaska and Hawaii( though my mother was raised in Hawaii and spent the rest of her teenage years in England).  My early years were spent running barefoot in Florida, poking sticks at alligators, jumping from the tallest tree into a river, and riding my grandmothers arabian horses.  Teenage years were spent working on the family farm and using dialup to explore.  Graduated in Boston where I then moved to Oklahoma to care for my bed ridden (now deceased) mother.  I believe the mass increased population and technology has made all of us, especially the younger generation, so much more aware of the world.  That’s a good thing, but too much and it can be overwhelming given the instant demands from social networks.(peer pressure)

Gordon Barlow wrote:

Here's another something that will remind old codgers of how we lived. I remember the days before surgical gloves were worn by food-servers. Does anyone else? In my first job, in Brisbane in 1957, my lunch was a sandwich or two made to order by young men with no gloves. The knives they used were razor-sharp, which inevitably led to a few cuts - as indicated by the spots of blood on their white aprons. Ten seconds away from the production-line while they slapped a band-aid on and wiped the knife with a well-used towel, then back to work. Those were the days before AIDS was discovered, and nobody worried much about hygiene.

Our late mother worked for a local catering company. In all those years I never saw her, or anyone else wearing gloves when making sandwiches or preparing food.