many years ago,78 in fact,I was born to a working class family in the town of Preston lancs.   The house was a two up and two down and was situated in the shadow of the prison wall, my house was terraced,and on the corner of Catherine St and Swan St and the pavements were stone flagged and the streets were made up of granite sets jointed with liquid tar which used to soften in warm weather, and got us kids in no end of trouble as the streets were our playground,and the tar stuck to our clothes and onto our hair which had to be cut out.  We had no bathroom and our toilet was outside in the far corner of the yard,and a metal bath hung from a nail on the wall which was brought in every Saturday night for bathing.   I had four sisters, Gladys, Ellen,  Brenda, Ruth.and my father,his name was John or jack as my mother sometimes called him used to work in the building industry,but was often out of work due to ill health so money was always short but like everyone else in the community we managed one way or another,very few Prestonians were born with silver spoons,or brought up in cotton wool,we were a hardy lot,we had to be in the 30th and 40s.  Nearly all of the terraced houses were owned by landlords/ladies,and most of the properties were indeed slums,we didn't have health and safety to look to our welfare, and the landlords spent little or nothing on maintaining the properties they owned?and in addition to the appalling squalor of the properties were the vermin that thrived inside bed bugs and mice were the order of the day and if one house had the vermin you could guarantee the neighbours either side had the same problem,we went to bed with the aid of a candle " we had no electric "and as soon as we blew the candle out that was the signal for the bugs to surface  an go about there business, and you could see how active they had been by the little red bite marks on your skin when you got up in the morning, modern folk reading this would feel appalled by this,but we thought it normal.               

To be cont:.