By a strange coincidence, I, like Kerry Hudson (I lived through fuel poverty as a child. This is how it really feels, 7 February), lived in Aberdeen with a baby in an “unfurnished, uncarpeted council flat that no one wanted on a street no one would choose to live on”, although I had a husband who was a student. We had only the one coal fire. It was 1980. We had coal delivered in sacks, but we had no coal bunker so it was all emptied out in a corner on the floor of the bedroom.
In winter, we got dressed under the blankets and laid and lit the fire. To warm up the kitchen, we put the gas oven on and left the door open for a few minutes. I would get baby advice books from the library and they would recommend a certain temperature for “the nursery” – it would make me angry. Our bedrooms were unheated, even in Aberdeen in the winter, as they had been all my life growing up in Edinburgh.
Your baby was dressed in a woollen vest, socks, babygrow, two woollen matinee coats (long cardigans), hat, gloves and a fleece all-in-one sleeping suit – and that was to go to bed. With blankets on top.
Since this was exactly what I had experienced as I was growing up, I didn’t really think about it much. I had a bath once a week and in between “topped and tailed” at the bathroom sink, using a kettle of hot water. My life fortunately was much more stable than Hudson’s.
A few years later we moved and had a house with central heating. My parents never did have a house with central heating, even though they could afford it; they had a gas fire and a paraffin heater, and always slept in an unheated bedroom.
Jane Wheelaghan
St Albans, Hertfordshire
• Since reading Kerry Hudson’s article I have been thinking about ablutions, one small part of her very affecting account. When did daily showers begin to equate with personal hygiene?
Not so very long ago, huge numbers of the population had no bathrooms, so they had to use restricted but ingenious methods to keep clean. Certainly, in pre-deodorant days, confined spaces were often malodorous, but generally speaking, I don’t recall daily revulsion in the workplace. Or were we just used to it?
Gillian Howell
Swansea
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