Oh, How Things Have Changed!

OH, HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED

In this day and age of technology, you only have to be about ten years old to be able to make that statement.  Imagine what it’s like from my prospective!

When I was ten years old, I could not even imagine what 2019 would look like.  Telephones had been invented but were not widely available unless you had pots of money, same goes for television, maybe someone had one but until the war’s end I’d never heard of the miracle of pictures coming through wires. But I’m not really thinking about these huge advances, I’m thinking more along the lines of everyday items that today’s households take for granted.

Paper was invented in China about 100BC, but it wasn’t until 1250AD that it reached Europe, so it’s no surprise to me that I grew up without the knowledge that paper could be used in more inventive ways than producing a newspaper or writing down a grocery list. (And please, don’t think I’ve missed out the obvious toilet paper – I haven’t – that’s what we used the newspaper for!)  Eventually, Izal toilet tissue found its way into our household but whether that was an improvement over newspaper is debatable. Izal paper was like hard-shiny-tissue paper.  It crackled when you touched it!

So, if that was what was available for rear-ends then I can assure you that the quicker, picker upper of today’s paper towels for household spills was very far in the future.  We used dish clothes or rags.

Food shopping was nothing, I mean nothing like shopping today.  When I was a child, supermarkets may have been up and running somewhere, but not where I lived.  Shopping was done locally.  

Vegetables were bought from the greengrocer, bread was bought from the baker, and the general grocery store was where you bought everything else.  The greengrocer weighed your potato and carrot purchases and then looked at you with a knowing nod as he said “Where dya wan ‘em luv?”.  

This of course indicated that he expected you to have brought with you a suitable container for carrying them home.  Usually, this was a shopping basket.  This same scenario played out wherever you shopped.  No one yet had thought to supply paper bags, and plastic bags had not yet been invented.

So, in this tremendously deprived environment it’s hard to believe that our little Covey was the first on our street, maybe in our borough, to proudly hang blue-totally-plastic drapes in our front window!

The war was over at the time of this memory because we no longer had brown sticky-tape criss-crossing the windows. But it's not a good solid memory.  I don't recall how they arrived in our front room. I don't know where they came from.   If they came from the same supplier as the doomed towels then Mum must have kept that information to herself or they would never have seen the light of day.  I have a vague recollection that we were told they were presented as a gift from wherever she worked at that time.

These were made of the miracle substance PLASTIC!  It was all shiny and very, very blue. It had no pattern, it was just blue, imagine a rather thick garbage bag but blue, very blue.  These drapes had no hem, no finished edges of any kind.  I can’t recall how they were hung because the standard method of the time was to thread a piece of string or elastic through a top casing then tie the ends to a couple of nails.   This stuff could not be sewn, and even if it could’ve been, Mum couldn’t sew. 

This is the closest approximation I can make.

There was another caveat with these valuable lengths of plastic: the windows could never be opened.  Well, they could be opened, but we didn’t dare. English windows did not or do not have insect screens so it would’ve been an easy task for anyone to reach through, give a good tug, and steal them.

I never knew where they came from, nor do I know where they went. But they must have gone, because LS recalls blue velvet drapes from which she cleverly made herself a skating skirt. Perhaps they did get stolen.  I like to think that they were re-cycled and they are still with us.

After all, it's said that plastic lasts forever.