In the years of austerity that followed the Second World War, money was tight for many working-class families. Those that lost a breadwinner faced particular hardship, as Patricia Morgan found out when her father died when she was 7.
“We were really quite poor,” she says of her childhood in Cheltenham. “My mother took a housekeeping job, but she struggled.”
Even through these troubled times, however, Patricia Morgan, now Mrs Patricia Malvern, does not remember going hungry. “Even though money was tight, I was always well fed. We always had meat and two veg on the table, every day.”
Her experience was to contribute to a remarkable discovery about the changing social face of Britain. For Mrs Malvern, who celebrates her 65th birthday on Saturday,