Facilities in old, rural un-modernised cottages

extract from the memoirs of
Brenda May Wilson, courtesy of her son, Kevin Flynn

Early in 1931 when I was four years old, I was taken to live in the country - at Blackwell Cottage, near Clun. Life was simple.

• Lighting: Oil lamps provided light at night and candles lit our way to bed.

• Sleeping: My bed had a feather mattress. I wore a nightdress of red flannel, made from an old petticoat of the woman I was staying with. It was very scratchy, though warm.

• Washing: We washed in cold water in a small tin bath.

• Food: Breakfast consisted of a bowl of thin gruel and a slice of bread and dripping or lard sprinkled with salt, and a cup of tea, which I always drank out of the saucer, "to cool it". I was never told that this was impolite or bad manners. The woman I was staying with did it, so I copied her. Cooking was on an open fire.

Getting and using water

ALL our water had to be carried from a stand-pipe across the road or from rainwater butts. So, as you can imagine, every drop was precious. Recycling it was essential and meticulously practised. The village pump was too far away for anything but an outing for me as a child.

Getting water from a pump

Getting water from a standpipe

Laundry

Laundry was a major affair. Outside in the garden was the wash-house with a brick copper, various tin baths, including a full-sized one to take an adult, and a mangle.

On Monday mornings, the first task was to light the copper to heat the rainwater from the water-butts. (Once the water was hot, the procedure was very much as it was in older times, as described on the washday page.)

After the laundry was finished, the warm soapy water was used for washing the floors. The final rinsing water was heated for our baths.

The lavatory

Outside in the garden behind the wash house was the lavatory, actually a privy - a wooden bench with a hole and bucket; newspaper for toilet paper; hurricane lamp for the dark nights. It was my grandfather's job to empty the bucket and bury the contents in the garden. Rain, hail, snow or shine, this was what we used except during the night when we had chamber pots.

Lighting

Lighting was by oil lamps and candles.

Food: getting, preparing, storing and preserving

There was one shop in the village, not the selection of shops that we were used to. The meat came by van, as did bread and main groceries. (The van was the one thing that let us know that we were in the middle of the 20th century. Before then, it would have been a horse and cart.)

We had to fetch milk daily from the local farm, taking our own jug.

Yet, in spite of having to do the day-to-day cooking on the very basic facilities of the kitchen range, my grandmother also made jams, preserved fruit, and made our cough mixture for the winter (with blackcurrants, honey and vinegar - no lemons).

Picking fruit in the country during World War Two.

We never had any fruit or vegetables that weren't in season or preserved by my grandparents. Apples and onions were stored in the spare room. My grandfather made his own wine, and root vegetables were clamped up for the winter.

Anne Davey, formerly Anne Cole ((1933-2017)

Getting and using water

We had no mains water. We used rainwater collected from our slate roof into gutters which ran into our main tank inside the roof.

We also had a large galvanised tank which collected water from our flower house which had a glass roof like an orangery, but my father had to pump from this into the house tank.

There were no filters at all on the water system. We only took water from about a third of the way up the tank. Anything below that was 'settle'.

We only had cold taps. There were three - one low down in the kitchen which had a certain amount of gush when turned on, another one piped from the rainwater tank to the kitchen sink and a further one piped into the bathroom.

It was a wonderful, wonderful life which I recall very clearly.

Julia Wain-Smith