“Well you were lucky to have a room! We used to live in a corridoor!”
“Oh, we used to DREAM of livin’ inna corridoor. Woulda been a palace to us. We used to live in a water tank in a rubbish tip. We’d wake up ev’ry morning having a load o’ rotten fish dumped all over us. House…….”
“Well it wasn’t really a house, it was just a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us!”
“We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go live in a lake.”
“You were lucky to have a lake! There were 150 of us living in a shoebox in middle of the road!”
“Cardboard box? You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We’d have to get up 6 o’ clock in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down at the mill for 14 hours a day, week in, week out, for 6 pence a week, and when we got home, our father would thrash us to sleep with his belt.”
“Luxury. We had to get out of the lake at 3 o’ clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work 20 hour days at the mill, for tuppence a month, and when we got home, our father would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle IF WE WERE LUCKY!”

“Well of course we had it tough. We used to have to get out of the shoebox in the middle of the night and lick the road clean with our tongues, eat half a handful of freezing cold gravel, work 24 hours at the mill for 26 years and when we got home, our dad would slash us in two with a bread knife.”
“Right…..I had to get up at 10 o’ clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work 29 hours at the mill and pay them for permission to come to work, and when we got home—-our dad would kill us and bury us and dance about on our graves singing HALLELUJAH!!!!!”

“You try to tell the young people today that…..they won’t believe you.”