I was born in 1953. For the first four years of my life I lived in a miners’ raw in Cowdenbeath.
It was a terraced block with a coal fire in the living room, a cooker and a sink with a shared outside toilet and wash house.
After that we had a house with a bathroom inside: luxury.
Well not quite. It still had only one source of heating – a coal fire in the living room.
My abiding memory of growing up was of being cold in winter. All the time.
It was a miserable existence.
There was a coal fire in the living room. No heating elsewhere in the house.
When we had no coal a paraffin heater heated the living room. The fumes belched out of it.
We just cooried around whatever source of heating we had.
I recall frequent headaches and my poor mum being terrified we would knock it over.
She told us the horror stories of paraffin heaters setting fire to houses.
At night it was so cold we didn’t want to go to bed.
When we did it was with juice bottles filled with hot water and every coat and blanket in the house covering us.
In the morning the frost was inside the windows.
The patterns were very pretty but it was a constant reminder about how cold it actually was.
We would put our clothes under the bed clothes to try to warm them up before getting dressed.
Nothing noble about a childhood blighted by cold
This is not a woe is me story.
There is nothing noble or uplifting about poverty.
It was disgraceful then, it is disgraceful now.
But we were not alone.
Many people growing up at the same time ( and later) had the same experiences.
I was astonished by the responses to my post on Twitter.
People from the length and breadth of the UK have responded saying that their childhoods were similarly blighted by cold.
It was soul destroying.
We all had frequent colds, coughs and chest infections.
Thank goodness for the NHS which was introduced just a few short years before I was born.
Energy prices mean another generation will suffer
I remember vowing that when I grew up that I would never be that cold again.
I never have been.
We got married in 1975, got a Glenrothes Development Corporation house with central heating.
My children never grew up without central heating.
They could watch TV, have friends around to play music and do homework in their own warm bedrooms.
All this was unthinkable when I was growing up.
Just look at this pic.twitter.com/qdLjJU2Ttm
— Ciaran Jenkins (@C4Ciaran) August 2, 2022
I look on now with horror at the news that energy prices this winter are going to force so many to switch off their central heating and endure the hardships and misery of the winters that me and my generation suffered 60 years ago.
This cannot be right.
Surely, my generation are not going to have to again suffer what they did growing up.
And surely we are not going to have another generation of children whose lives will be blighted because their parents cannot afford to heat their house.
Tricia Marwick is a former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, who served as MSP for Mid Fife and Glenrothes from 1999-2016.
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