2:40pm Friday 12th March 2010
OH dear, here we go again. Another Victor Meldrew pensioner with a selective memory (‘Is life here really that brilliant?’ Letters, March 4).
Mr Whittam tends to blot out any reference to the days before the NHS when each visit to the doctor had to be paid for out of very meagre earnings, or cure yourself if, like hundreds of others, you were on the dole!
Of course there are problems today for all of us. Who said life was easy?
But nothing today compares with the genuine needs of the working classes in the 30s.
And any other pensioner worth their salt recalls with horror, the work house, coal fires, tin baths, cold water before you could afford a geyser, sculleries, peg rugs, oil cloth, chilblains, diphtheria, tuberculosis, rheumatic and scarlet fever and the dreaded dole and means tested Relief Offices!
What is so infuriating are those who would give today’s pensioners a bad name by their permanent whining; their refusal, while grasping with both hands, to admit the £250 heating allowance was a very welcome addition to their pension.
That’s tardy behaviour in my opinion. That money kept me warm, cosy and in credit with both gas and electricity and I’m still happy to say thank you, a word now longer apparently in these gentlemen’s vocabularies.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is where I hope to dwell until I pop my clogs, rather than Misery Mountain.
JEAN CROWTHER, Warmden Gardens, Blackburn.
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