So the young man got qualified and the next thing he sought to do was to get married. Girls, as I said, left their jobs as soon as they were wed to set up home for their husbands. And we might just mention about families in the town at that time. In the 1920s and the forties it was still the fashion for many families to follow the old Victorian style and have large families. There were two that were very well known to me, who had seven or eight children, and there were many more around the town who I didn’t know so well.
There again children didn’t leave their homes as they do now, as soon as they get a job they leave home. In those days the idea was that they stayed in the home with their parents until such times that they got married. I remember the Goddard family. There were seven of them who lived not very far away, and because I went to school with one of the sons, I got to know that family very well. They all lived at home until, one by one, they married off and they left. And there were a son and a daughter who never did get married, and because they didn’t get married, they stayed at home with their parents until their parents died. And that was the way of it.
So these two probably left elementary school at the age of fourteen. The girl got a job somewhere and the boy got himself qualified. What’s more, if he got a job, the firm would provide him with the knowledge with two years of improvement.
He would then be about 19 years of age—a young man—and so the company he was with, if he was any good, would probably keep him on and he would stay there for the rest of his life. I know of two or three of my friends, now dead, they did just that. They got an apprenticeship with Hughes the builders and were qualified in the end. Hughes kept them on because they were good workmen and they stayed with Hughes until they were pensioned. It happened with me. That was the fashion. One didn’t look around for a job.