My gran passed the 11+ and got a place at a grammar school (a big achievement for a girl given how there were fewer places for girls in grammar schools back then). However, she wasn’t allowed to take up the place as her dad didn’t want to pay for the uniform, and this was something that she was bitter about for the whole of her life. We also found out, shortly before she died, that her lifelong breathing issues were most likely caused by spending most of her childhood with undiagnosed TB. There’s such a tendency for people to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses but honestly, most of us would have been poor and life would have been a struggle, the way it was for the millions of anonymous people who have lived and died before us. As a woman, if I’d been born at the start of the 20th century then I most likely would have been one of the women ‘left on the shelf’ after WWI and I would have had to try to find some kind of job that would allow me to live, without the benefit of much education. A few hundred years earlier and I have no doubt I probably would have ended up burned as a witch, since I’m outspoken and like cats ...