Although we lived in a newly built house, the only source of heat was the coal-fire in the living room, the concept of central heating in Council homes not even having been dreamt of in the 1950’s. Because they ate up electricity, and in turn devoured Dad’s wages, electric fires and heaters weren’t used in any of the other rooms – and definitely not in the bedrooms. For a time, we kids shared two double-beds in the biggest bedroom. Getting ready for bed on winter nights was always a bit of a ritual for us. The first part of the ritual concerned the hot water bottles. They weren’t pukka hot water bottles, of course, but old lemonade bottles filled with scalding water from the kettle. And they had to be filled very slowly lest they cracked open. How we all managed to escape serious injury from them I’ll never know. Once the bottles were slipped under the covers into the middle of the beds, the next part of the ritual was to get undressed in front of the coal-fire and then dressed in our nightclothes, over the top of which we’d put on old jumpers and the like. By that time, the bottles would have warmed the beds a little and were sufficiently cooled down to let us put our feet on them without being burned. And so to bed. Our slumbers would be interrupted at regular intervals as, one by one, the bottles rolled to the bottom of the bed, eventually slipping out of the covers and clunking to the floor. There would be a more welcome interruption later on when Dad sneaked into the bedroom with an armful of heavy coats that he would place on top of our sleeping forms.
Whatever else those freezing nights did for our childhood psyche, they helped to form a bond between us, a bond of hardship that would never be broken.