In the freezing 40s we had some awfully cold Winters. 1947 was a b*gger but my best memories of it are having loads of fun in the snow. I can't ever remember feeling cold but I suppose we were just used to it.
Hot water bottles were the norm, then, and we had the stone ones with a screw-in stopper on the side. I was about 9 years old when I got up for school one morning and my hot water bottle slid off the end of my bed and on to my bare foot. The foot swelled up like a pudding and I couldn't get a shoe on so - yay! - a day off school.
I was about 15 - so 1958 - when my dad, unaided, installed central heating in our house. It consisted of heavy iron radiators in every room, pipe-fed by water heated by his coke-burning boiler - situated in a glass outhouse he had built at the back of the kitchen. It did keep the house warm but it gurgled and belched all the time and every night, when he went to "riddle his clinkers", you cloud hear the sound of his riddling all through the pipes.
