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‘I still have a sense of nostalgia for the old days’

Feb 02, 2019

Brian Lee recalls his mother using an iron like this one to press clothes. Source: Pixabay

I am often amazed at the progress that has been made in the world since I was a boy in the late 1930s. What was it that held ideas back until those days, what happened to cause the giant leaps forward we have made in the past hundred years?

In the ’30s, my mother used cast metal irons on the gas stove to press the wash. Now you’ll find electric irons that practically do the job on their own, working out the temperature, spraying water onto the garment and even switching themselves off when you’ve finished! Many fabrics these days don’t require an iron at all, they dry just as flat after a wash as they were new.

Perishable foods, like meat and milk, were stored in a small box my mother kept in the pantry. It was more of a cage than a box really, with wire mesh sides, where she put foods, before draping a damp cloth over the top to keep it all cool. Now we have fridges that make and crush ice to go in drinks, can connect to the internet when they detect a low level of produce and even call the local supplier to have replacements delivered. They’re now efficiently insulated too, unlike the air-cooled meat cabinet my mother used!

Car engines received fuel via the carburettor and the spark needed to ignite it came through a coil, all of which was okay, but not nearly as efficient as the injectors and electronics of today. Even tyres are completely different from those of the ’30s and ’40s, with their inner tubes and cross-ply wire carcass. Nowadays they are tubeless, made of synthetic rubber that lasts much longer and incorporates radial carcasses giving a much safer ride.

Even our homes in those days were cold and damp compared to the air-conditioned comfort we enjoy today. They were poorly insulated from the cold of winter and many of them were even built without a damp-course, so ground moisture could creep up into the rooms above. They were draughty and most of them gained their only heat from a small fire burning in the grate of one room, a fire that fed most of its heat up the chimney. I remember waking up on many a winter morning to find a layer of ice around the top edge of the bed sheets, where my moist breath had frozen in the night, and then having to get up, and go down to the kitchen for a kettle of boiling water to take back up to the bathroom, so I could wash my face!

Only one home near us possessed a telephone and that had a shared line, with three or four other users on it, so the owner often had to wait for half an hour or more until the line was free. He/she also had the added inconvenience that many of their neighbours would come at all sorts of inconvenient times, to ask if they could make some emergency phone call! Nowadays most of us carry our telephone with us, and we can also use it as a computer, a camera, an encyclopaedia, an alarm clock, a universal position indicator, a text transmitter and a gaming machine to fill in those boring times when it’s not being used as a telephone.

Just about everything else in our lives has taken the same leap forward, like the synthetic materials most of our clothes are now made from or the cleanliness we now enjoy in the food supplied to us (remember those old photos of butchers shops with hundreds of turkeys hanging outside the front window?). The way virtually everything is electric or electronic now, instead of the old sources of energy — oil, gas and human strength!

On top of all this, virtually everything we buy today is much cheaper now than it was when I was growing up. It may cost more in cash terms, but if you rate the cost against the number of hours the average worker has to labour to pay for things, it is cheaper. Then, a bottle of scotch would cost more than a week’s wages, but now a man could buy one after working for only about half an hour! Yes things are much better in many ways, but I still have a sense of nostalgia for the ‘old days’.