2This is the perfect book for anyone who remembers Lancashire in the 40s and 50s - or for anyone who doesn't, but would like to peer through the keyhole and catch a glimpse of a bygone era. It was a time when everyone stood for the national anthem at the end of a fi lm in the cinema. A time when the wireless was the chief source of entertainment and streets emptied daily, at 6.15 pm sharp, to listen to Dick Barton, Special Agent. When everything was fried in beef lard (assuming there was enough to eat) and washing was whitened with Dolly Blue. When children were made to take foul-tasting cod liver oil - neat, off a spoon, not like today in mercifully taste-free capsules. Girls with ribbons in their hair played with washing-line skipping ropes, while boys in patched trousers collected Dinky toys. A trip to the swimming baths meant the wearing of woollen costumes that did terrible things when wet, and you were washed vigorously in smelly pink carbolic soap, usually in secondhand bath water. And then there was Izal. The dreaded medicated toilet 'paper' that had the absorbency of a roof tile and just seemed to move stuff around - newspaper on string was better any day