Some mates and myself were talking about how hard it was for those of us born just after the war!
My family was very poor. So poor the woman next door had me. The mice used to bring us pieces of cheese as we had nothing to eat. My father would steal potatoes and turnips from the farmer's fields and my mother would take the bone out of her corsets to make soup!
I never knew my dad to have a job. They used to say one of his insurance stamps was worth more than a penny black!
For my first ten years I couldn't leave the house as I had no clothes. Then my father gave me a cap so I could look out the window!
When I was twelve, I had to go to high school, so my father got my uniform from the Army and Navy stores.
I was the only Japanese admiral in the class!
We were so poor when I was growing up, that my mother made us clothes out of the offcuts my dad would bring from home from work at the sandpaper factory.
It was rough.
A black American comedian I saw, talking about how poor they were, said, "One day my dad answered the door & shouted back down the hallway to the mother ' It's the garbage man ' mother shouted back, 'I'll take three bags'