[West Ender]

I was born and brought up on Blackburn Rd. in West End. When I was young there was a huge oak mantle in the living room, one of those that went from the floor to the picture rail with a big round mirror set in it. In the sitting room was a very large, ornate, black cast-iron fire surround with inlaid blue and white picture tiles. Each bedroom had a small cast-iron fire place and so did the kitchen.

In the 1950s my dad decided to "modernise" the house and he ripped them all out, replacing the living and sitting room ones with hideous "contemporary" tiled things - which we thought at the time were so smart. In today's values those despised fireplaces, which were all Victorian and are now very desirable, would be worth £thousands.

There was still a rack in the kitchen up to the time my parents moved to Blackburn in 1966 but the Belfast sink, again worth a mint today, was long gone and had been replaced with a modern, much smaller thing.

We never had the tin bath but our bath was one of those big iron ones on legs - again, that went, too old fashioned!

I have vague memories of gas brackets (unconnected) on the wall next to the stairs when I was very small. I can remember my dad taking them out and replacing them with electric wall-lights that were just like today's uplighters. There was also a gas tap next to both the 2 main fires downstairs and we used to connect a gas poker, with a rubber hose, to them to help light the fires. It's a wonder we weren't blown to smithereens - or gassed.

My mum had a mangle, when I was little, and a copper boiler - lit by gas. She also had a "washing machine" that was a metal box on wooden legs. When filled with hot water, detergent and the laundry, the wooden lid was closed and you turned a large handle on the top which moved a paddle on the other side of the lid. Half an hour of elbow grease agitated the washing enough to get it clean - after collars and cuffs had been scrubbed with Fairy soap. Doing the washing took half a day, nearly always Mondays, and the house was full of condensation until the next morning.

Cleaning materials were Brasso (I still use that), black lead and steel wool, large scrubbing brushes and soda crystals, beeswax polish and a Hoover vacuum cleaner that looked like a petrol pump and sounded like Concorde.