I’m sure how many of you can remember the time when every bus had a conductor on it, as well as the driver… It was nice to know there was someone there who could be relied on in an emergency, wasn’t it? The buses always seemed to run on time then too, something we don’t see a lot of today.
Do you recall the milkman who came to your door every morning in his electric cart with the familiar whining noise from its motor, his white knee-length jacket and his peaked cap, making him look like the captain of some ship. Again, it was always nice to see him wasn’t it? To be able to chat to him, get cheese, cream and butter off of him and to have your milk in nice glass bottles, often filled by him at his dairy, in the next street. Or, for some of you older folk (like me!), you didn’t get your milk in a bottle at all — the milkman brought it in a large churn with a long handled ladle hanging inside it and he poured the stuff straight into your jug, either while you held it, or because you left it out on the doorstep, the night before.
Go to the petrol station 50 years ago and you didn’t have time to get out of your car before a nice bloke would come trotting out to fill your tank for you. He would then lift the bonnet on your car to check if you needed water in the radiator or oil in the sump and finally he’d remove a nice clean piece of cloth from a pocket and polish your windscreen for you to make certain you could see clearly. For this gush of service, you paid … nothing. It was all part of the service in those days!
I remember the time too, when the family doctor came to you, as a matter of course and at no extra charge, so if you were feeling distinctly seedy, you could call him in and remain in your nice warm bed. He used to prepare many of the medicines he prescribed for you too — no exotic drugs, with each individual pill wrapped in hermetically sealing foil either — pills came loose, in a cardboard box and no other protection, while liquids came in a glass bottle with a cork stuffed in the top, that he had filled himself.
Most of us survived this outlandish treatment too, even though what the doctor prescribed was somewhat less powerful than the manufactured stuff we get today and contained little more than some well-known herbs, a dash of opium and a lot of alcohol. Such prescriptions that had been used by doctors for many years, their efficacy based on trial and error until one particular mixture was found to help one particular illness, just as it had been since the days of the ancient Greeks!
Another man who came frequently to our house was the coal-man. He turned up, every few weeks in his big truck (or ‘lorry’ as we used to call them in England), piles of bagged coal already stacked on the tray, so all he had to do was turn his back to the sack, reach up and behind himself, grab the top two corners of the sack and hoist it onto his back. He’d walk up to the door where the coal was stored until needed and he’d lean forward and let all that dusty coal pour out, over the top of his head and down into the dark hole before him. I don’t know what the average lifespan of a coal-man was, but I can’t imagine all that coal dust did him a lot of good.
I think it was a relief for everyone when things like central heating and air-conditioning crept into our lives, it was suddenly so much easier to keep the house clean, while also being an end to the hard work of getting in buckets of coal every day. Not only that, but the modern equipment were so much more efficient than a tiny grate in one room, with a couple of pieces of slow-burning coal there, sending most of its warmth up the chimney, rather than about the rooms of the house.
We’ve come a long way since the time of the various people I have mentioned above, and everything is much more efficient than it was then, but I sometimes wonder, are we actually any better off? Our kids dying from drug overdoses, almost every country in the world is at war with somebody, apparent global warming is set to destroy everything humans have worked for and mistrust has become one of the only ways we can associate with our fellow beings? I must admit, I have my doubts!