You go to elementary school until you're 11 years old. You particularly enjoy learning cookery and needlework, although you find laundry work tedious as you do too much of it at home. Your parents don't want you to stay there as they need your help at home.
At 15 you start work as a box maker, a job that you have seen advertised on the hoardings near your home. Hours are long, the work repetitive and you hate your boss – he never seems to reward your hard work. You need to stay in this job though to bring in enough money to bring up your children. You and your husband find it hard to make ends meet from both of your salaries.
You save up and buy a bicycle and in fine weather you go on trips to the park on Sundays. You love a good sing-a-long at the music hall.
When you start work you live on the premises in a crowded dormitory. When you marry you escape from the dormitory and move to your husband's lodgings – a room in a terraced house. You find it cheaper to do most of the shopping at the back door – fruit, vegetables and fish from carts but occasionally you splash out on luxuries from the grocer's shop. As a treat you sometimes buy fish and chips from the parade of shops near your home.
You meet your husband at work and marry at 17. You have four children.
Your husband is reluctant to leave you to go to war, but in 1916 he is obliged to as it's illegal not to sign up. Your husband dies in the trenches as a private soldier in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele.
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