Joyce lived with her mum, dad and five of her nine brothers and sisters in a three-bed council house. Her dad was a labourer and her mum looked after the children.
Joyce was very bright, so while her sisters went to secondary moderns, she went to grammar school. She did well and her head teacher encouraged her to apply to teacher training college.
She enjoyed school, but she was aware of being poor, unlike her school friends. She wore hand-me-down uniforms and her shoes had holes.
One day, they all stopped to buy sweets after school. Joyce had to use the money she had been saving up to get her hair cut so she could buy some sweets and avoid being the odd one out.
By the time she was 14, Joyce was earning a little money doing errands for neighbours. This meant she could buy some of her own things, and groceries to help her parents’ money stretch further.
School leaving age was 15 and Joyce could have stayed on to do A-levels. But her mum became ill, and she left school to help out with cooking, cleaning and looking after her younger brothers and sisters.
Joyce’s mum died a few years later.
Even when Joyce started work as a receptionist at 16, she and her friends didn’t have lots of money for socialising. They would walk to the coffee shop to save the bus fare, buy a coffee and make it last all evening.
They went to a nearby club called Spangles on Tuesdays. But even now Joyce was older and had her own job, there was still a strict 10pm curfew at home.
Joyce had to go to night school to learn short-hand typing for her job. Her sisters all learned typing at school, but it was assumed that grammar school girls wouldn’t have jobs that needed typing.
I was a Mod. We were all very smart. One of my boyfriends had a scooter. You felt like the bee’s knees, going around on a scooter!
One time, she and her friends went to Brighton for a few days, staying in a B&B. It was quite an adventurous thing to do.
By her late teens, Joyce and most of her brothers and sisters were working full-time and their earnings made family life a bit more comfortable. They got a second hand black and white television, then a washing machine, and her older brother bought a record player.
Joyce got engaged to Graeme aged 20. Knowing first-hand the struggles of bringing up a family on a small budget, she and Graeme planned carefully for a more comfortable future. Joyce carried on working full-time and went on the pill, and they saved up for marriage, a house, and, later children.
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Thanks to their careful saving, Joyce and her husband, Graeme, were much more comfortably off than her parents by the time they had their two boys when they were in their late twenties.
Joyce gave up work to look after the children when they were small, Later, she started work again, taking a part-time cleaning job. Meanwhile, Graeme worked his way up to a managerial role.
Now retired, Joyce feels lucky that she is still happily married, unlike friends whose marriages ended in divorce. She is pleased that her family have done well for themselves, and that her sons are both homeowners.
Sometimes I wonder if I could have carried on at school and been a teacher, because I would have loved to have taught. But I was too young to realise how important the exams were, and life has different things in store for you.
Credits:
All images: Candice Purwin