The good old days

I have to wonder about the many posts on social media celebrating the time when "a family could live and purchase a house and have holidays on one income".

 Neither of my grandparents could live on one income.  My mother's father drove the van for the laundry until 1939 when he went to war and drove vans for the army.  He was evacuated from Dunkirk and then drove vans across Africa ending up in Palestine.  My mother didn't meet her father that she remembers until 1945.  Meanwhile his wife worked as a casual farm labourer until she managed to get a job "with a pension indoors" in the laundry.  When my maternal grandfather was demobbed after the war he couldn't get his old job back for years until he did but then he contracted cancer and died in his mid 50s after years of smoking.  My grandmother supported him financially during his terminal decline.

My father's parents were more middle class.  My great grandfather had a successful leather goods manufacturing business supplying mainly to Mappin & Webb.  So my grandfather worked in the family business.  My grandmother "I married the boss's son and look what a silly bugger I ended up with" worked there too.  The army didn't want my other grandfather because of his poor eyesight so he joined the ARP ... They were reasonably wealthy owning rental properties but even they both worked.  Mind you they lost one home to air raids... but I don't think they could've lived on his income alone.  My grandmother succumbed to bouts of schizophrenia leaving him her main carer and main income provider and they then struggled on only one income.  The family business had now gone the way of most of the rest of British Manufacturing.  He died of a heart attack at about 70.

Of course things are harder economically for people now than in the past but the golden age some people - mostly Americans - speak of ... Was it ever really real?  Maybe for them as their GDP was greater but...