Tony Birch

So firewood was a necessity.

Secondly, beer bottles.

We collected beer bottles for many years.

And we used to get, I think, a shilling a dozen for beer bottles.

So, yeah, 20 dozen bottles would get you a pound.

We also collected scrap metal from a very young age.

So, again, with a lot of the houses being knocked down, we regularly collected scrap lead and scrap copper and a bit of scrap brass.

And you could make a good, you know, sort of income out of that sort of level of scrap that went into the family income.

It wasn't done so that kids could sort of just have pocket money.

Everything that you made, any money that you made...

you made a contribution to the family.

So they were the major sort of gleaning we did was around firewood, scrap metal and beer bottles.

Well, it'd be very cold.

I mean, the houses were clearly uninsulated.

There was no heating at all except for the open fireplace.

And in the case of our family, it was even more drastic.

We didn't have any running hot water.

So we had a copper, as people call it, in a lean-to laundry in the yard.

that also needed fuel, which also needed scrap wood to heat up.

So without the wood, you wouldn't have a hot wash and you certainly wouldn't have a fire.