I grew up cold. Until I was about eight we lived in a drafty falling down house with a coal fire (and no bathroom, tin bath in front of the fire, makes it sound like I born in medieval times rather than the 1970s). After that we moved to a new house which still, unaccountably, didn't have central heating. I must have been about fourteen when we had the glorious warm dawn of radiators in every room. Previous to that it was the fight to kebab oneself in front the gas fire. I remember the freezing bathroom on winter morning, waiting for the little strip heater on the ceiling to make a few seconds under the crappy lukewarm piss of the shower (itself one of those terminally underpowered gas things) bearable.
I used to spend a lot of time at my grandparents because they had a huge coal fire and used to get cheap coal from the NCB, so could keep it going all day.
None of our student houses had heating either. That was the land of the electric heaters – those useless element things that heated the immediate 10cm in front to a temperature close to that of the sun's chromosphere, but if you were 11 cm away you were back paddling in the Baltic. About 2 seconds after switching it off the temperature plummeted straight back into the arctic. You couldn't leave them on because they ate electricity like there was danger it might run out. Which it did. Another fifty pence for the meter. It's your turn. We'd nestle under a pile of blankets like hibernating rodents. I once caught one of flatmates standing astride the toaster, wafting the warm air up her skirt. Well, it's cold in here was the only explanation she offered. Sometimes it's best not to ask. I think we eventually persuaded our landlord to splurge on gas heater which basically did the job by making us fall asleep.
People were tougher back then. They had to be in order to fight the dinosaurs.
