The rent was 17s 1d

There weren’t any shops actually in Ashton Street, though there was one on the bottom cor­ner, but it was always shut up. It was full of furniture but no one seemed to live there. My mum did her shopping at the top of Ashton Street until they were bombed. On the corner of Liverpool Street was a grocer called Pudney’s, where she would go to get her groceries once a week; but she would walk down to the London Road and through the market daily. We didn’t go to the Western Road, that was an outing if you wanted something special.

In the late 1940’s the rent for our house in Ashton Street was seventeen shillings and a penny and there was a hell of a row when it went up to seventeen and four pence, I can remember how annoyed my grandmother was. We paid the rent to a private landlord. I think only one woman in the whole street owned her house.

There were quite a few children in Ashton Street, and we played in the street most of the time, there was no traffic about. It was funny when my mate’s elder sister was courting, because her boyfriend had a car and when he came to pick her up on Sundays we would all line up across the road to see the car.

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