Voices of Postwar England

In the following extract Dolly Lloyd recalls her and her husband’s first impressions of the flat she was offered when the house she and her family had been living in was to be demolished in the slum clearances in Liverpool in the 1960s:

Length of audio clip: 1 min. 39 secs.

Dolly Lloyd: Nineteen-forty-six I got married. And they had the private landlords then. And what it was me grand…me mum said “I’ll try and get you a house. There’s a house going in Lemon Street, around the corner.” I said “Okay’” And that was the day of the old back yards. And that’s where I first started St Alfonso’s parish started me own family, married like, son and a daughter. And from there in the sixties we all got moved, didn’t we, Kirkby and everywhere, all Scotland Road was all cleared. There was no tenants associations or anything then. We all got moved. And the first offer that me mother got was down here, in the block, in [ Tibberton]. You know, I couldn’t live up in the sky or anything like that. So she said “Wonder will our Doll go down?” So she asked me. I said “We’ll go and look it” to Ronnie, you know, me husband. “We’ll go and look at it.” And when I come up to it I couldn’t live up here either. And he said ‘Oh God, look. The veranda and we can have a garden out there. Look at the bathroom’. And when I seen the bathroom I was made up because carrying the old bath in from the yard for the, ah and the water, you know, putting the water on the fire. I said “oh God, yeah, it is lovely, isn’t it.” Like luxury, you know. So I said “Okay we’ll give it a go”. So that’s where me life started.