I was born in 1952 and from my childhood and teenage years I lived in various police houses. One of them was an extremely ancient Victorian police station which had water that was not laid on and we had to use a pump.

In my early life I remember my mum always being really distressed about doing the washing and getting it dry. Some of the places we lived, we had to start off with something called a Baby Burco, which is like a boiler that I think you plugged in. It must have been electric, and you had to actually pull the washing up in it and then get it out with one of those wooden tong type things, then it had to go through the wringer into the machine basket and then go out on the line.

We always had loads of washing drying around in the kitchen it was always on a wooden airer. My dad absolutely hated it, he hated being around washing but he just had to put up with it because we couldn’t get anything dry. I always just remember wash days as being extremely fraught and they took over the whole house and we had to hang the washing out whatever the weather was, and it often froze to the line.


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