Ah the wonderous days of glossy paper catalogues thick enough to use as doorstops and a new one delivered twice yearly.
My Mum ran 2 of them, Great Universal and Kays and her customers would have little paper cards she`d initial when they came to pay their ten shillings or whatever it was. Mum worked part time in a factory at that time and had many of her colleagues as customers but not all of them paid as they should have done. Mum took it personally and hated arrears on anything, she always paid promptly, had a thrift tin she`d divvy her wages and Dad`s wages into and the coal man, gas bill, mortgage and other bills were always settled on time so when any colleague gave her the sob story why they couldn`t pay that week`s catalogue payment my Mum always put it in herself. She always thought it reflected badly on her if she didn`t send in the full amount each week. It was the way she was.
My kid brother and I would be given old catalogues to browse, cut up or play with. My brother Tom would sit and giggle at the pictures of ladies in Miss Mary bras and girdles and I`d draw a picture of a house and stick cut out photos of furniture, curtains and other household items on it. I`d drool over pretty shoes but the only shoes my Mum ever bought me out of it were Tuf lace ups which had to do for school and home time and school holiday meant plastic sunshine sandals from Woolies or canvas pumps and in Winter it was hand me down wellies once worn by my big sis.
Nearer to Christmas, Mum`s catalogues became wishing books. Tom and I would sit on the sofa browsing the toy pages and all Mum could could hear was "I wish I had this, wow I wish I had that and so on ". She must have been listening because lo and behold, on Christmas morning, one and only one, of our wishes would be there and bulked out with colouring books, selection boxes, jigsaws etc. Apart from her underwear I can never remember Mum buying anything for herself from the catalogue, it was always something essential for one of us 4 kids or something for the house.
She ran the catalogues for years and until her older two children were married and had left home and we younger two children were teenagers and she was able to work full time and there was more money coming into the house. Her and Dad were rarities for the area, they`d taken out a mortgage on a house just after the war, the mortgage was £350 and until then they`d lived in lodgings since their wedding in 1941 and had rented a bedroom and a downstairs room from an elderly couple.
Theirs was the only owner occupied terraced house in the street for many a year, the others were rented but for the 1940`s and with such low wages, their mortgage was a big commitment especially when the house started to need major repairs or updating and their 4 kids began arriving. Mum had my older brother and sister close together and then it was 7 years before she had me and my kid brother close together but she regularly told us that neither of us were planned but not in a nasty way.
As for the catalogues, they kept us quiet for many an hour and we`d take what was left of them to school after we`d butchered them with scissors and they`d be used for paper mache made with the sticky white glue which you`d deliberately get on your fingers so you could have the fun of peeling it off later which ranked equally alongside popping tar bubbles with a lolly stick inbetween the cobbles on our street. That was until you got tar on your socks or clothes and a really good rollocking off your Mum !