Service Wash

An old bag is folding clothes.

Old Bag

I can remember when pants were pants. You wore them for twenty years, then you cut them down for pan scrubs. Or quilts. We used to make lovely quilts out of Celanese bloomers. Every gusset a memory. Not bras. They won’t lie flat. We didn’t wear bras till after the war, round her. We stayed in a polished the lino.

I didn’t see an Oxo cube till I was twenty-five. That’s when I got my glasses. And we weren’t having hysterectomies every two minutes either, like the girls these days. If something went wrong down below, you kept your gob shut and turned up the wireless.

We never got woken with a teasmade. We were knocked up every morning by a man with a six-foot pole. It wasn’t all fun. We’d no showers. We used to club together and send the dirtiest one to the Slipper Baths. We might have been mucky but we had clean slippers.

And it was all clogs. Clogs on cobbles – you could hardly hear yourself coughing up blood. Clogs – when times were hard we had them for every meal, with condensed milk, if we were lucky.

And no one had cars. If you wanted to get run over, you’d to catch a bus to the main road. And of course, corner shop was the only one with gas, so you’d to go cap in hand if you wanted to gas yourself.

For years we had to make our own rugs. We used to stitch mice on to pieces of sacking. We weren’t always making jokes either. I once passed a remark about parsnips and couldn’t sit down for a week.

Oh, but I shall never forget the Coronation. 1953. We all crammed into the one front room and starred at this tiny grey picture. Somebody had cut it out of the paper – nobody got television till the year after.

I think we were more neighbourly. If anybody was ill in bed, the whole street would let themselves in and ransack the parlour.

And we didn’t do all this keep-fit. We got our exercise lowering coffins out of upstairs windows. In fact, if people were very heavy we used to ask them to die downstairs.

It wasn’t all gloom. My brother went to Spain, which was very unusual in those days. Mind you, that was the Civil War, and he got shot for trying to paddle.

We couldn’t afford holidays. Sometimes us kids would take some dry bread and a bottle of water and sit in the TB clinic, but that was about it.

We had community spirit round here, right to the end. The day they demolished our street it was like the war all over again – dead bodies, hand sticking out of the rubble. The council should have let us know.

That’s me done, best be off. Got a bit of cellular blanket for my supper, don’t want it to spoil. Ta-ra…

Cast

Old Bag

Victoria Wood

First shown on Victoria—Wood As Seen on TV, on BBC2 in January 1985.