Ron Milton (b.1907) 
Margery Milton (b.1912)

In 1912 I should be five, when we moved to Priesthills. I think the house was built and my dad bought it new, no-one else had lived in it...I think it was built by Greaves, local builder. It was a real family house, front room and a living room, a biggish kitchen, which was called the maid's kitchen originally and a scullery off. There was a long passage from the back of the house right through to the front door with a separate staircase up and one thing we had which a lot of people as that time did not have was a bathroom - we were very lucky.

There was a big bedroom at the back over the kitchen and the two other bedrooms and a box-room with a long landing. It was a biggish house and it still wasn't big enough for a family of eight. We had to sleep top to toe, the four lads did. I know I had to get up, when I was about seven or eight to light the copper fire and get the water boiling for the washing. Washday was always on a Monday and it was an all day job. You had a mangle that you had to turn. The family was ten including Mum and Dad.

Things were washed, they were rinsed, blued, starched, then they were mangled and they were hung out 'cos there was no other way of drying them. 

You had a knob of blue that you put in the water to get the whites whiter - it was in a sort of little bag that you had to squeeze into the water until it was sufficiently blue. All that's incorporated in your soap powders today - so they say. There was a big line in the scullery from one end to the other. You'd lower it down, put the clothes on and then pull it up again.

Quite frankly I haven't got a lot of memories of my father, I saw very little of him - he went in a room by himself for a lot of the time. Those days children were seen and not heard. Outside, no doubt about that. In Priesthills Road there were waste spaces where they built on eventually and we used to have that to play on. They left you on your own, you could be in those days...you had to be in by nine o'clock at night.

These letter boxes, you'd tie a bit of string to the handle, walk some way down the road, someone would come to the door and there'd be no-one about of course. Just larks, nothing really serious. Where we lived, at the bottom of the garden there was a fence and over that was the fields so when there was hay-making we used to go and play in the fields among the hay. And a bit further on the station...just over the bridge was another field and at the bottom of the fields was Sketchley Brook. Oh yes we used to - summer - take a bottle of water or a bottle of pop and something to eat and go and spend most of the day down there.