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.
