WRITING in The Argus, under the heading "Labour’s view" and entitled “I’m scared and angry over the energy crisis”, Amanda Evans said that she was planning to wrap up warm indoors.

Now, I don’t know how old Amanda is so I would suggest that she has a chat with either her parents or grandparents about how we kept warm in earlier times.

She would learn that most of us lived in homes that only had heating, a solitary open, coal fire, in the living room. Apart from the kitchen everywhere else was absolutely freezing during the winter and going to bed was not just a case of "wrapping up warm". In fact, on many occasions we didn’t even unwrap our bodies, we climbed in fully dressed, and even piled our coats on top as well.

And, Amanda, we too had energy crisis.

There were times in the past when we could only get a hundredweight bag of coal (that’s about 50 kilos) once a fortnight and when that ran out, as it did sometimes, my dad had to resort to taking drastic measures so that we could have at least a bit of heating.

He once took down the fencing of our back yard and burnt that, which was a bit dangerous because that left an unprotected 9ft drop to ground level.

He once chopped up a piano and then had the devil of a job trying to get rid of the metal back that held all the strings.

So, good luck with your woolly jumpers Amanda and be thankful that you are not now living back in the so-called Good Old Days.

Eric Waters

Lancing