What can we learn from our grandparents about sustainable living?

There is nothing new about sustainability. Most people over 50 have been fixing, recycling and making do for years – so it’s no surprise, discovers Rose Stokes, that the life hacks that served the older generations are back in fashion

'When I grew out of a knitted jumper, mum would unravel it, add some wool and make a bigger one' (Getty)

When I was young, my grandpa used to fill the kettle in the morning, boil it and decant the contents into a flask. This meant that he boiled the kettle just once a day, thereby saving electricity and, crucially, money. In my childhood many of these habits and behaviours that governed how my grandparents and, by extension, my parents lived seemed odd. Having been born in the late Eighties without any lived experience of wartime – or even post-war – Britain, I struggled to understand these idiosyncrasies, considering them to be markers of their personalities, rather than indelible imprints of a time gone by.

My grandma would collect all of the fruit that fell from the trees in the garden and – without fail – would make a stock of jam to last the winter. If something in the house broke, my grandpa, an engineer by trade, would find a way to fix it; whether that meant by himself, or by asking someone down the pub who might have the requisite skills. I often remember wistfully that no matter the season of our visit, my grandma – and later, my grandpa, following her death – would stew apples every Sunday for his breakfast throughout the week. Still now, I have a Proustian fondness for stewed apples.

My parents straddled the period between the “waste-not-want-not” post-war mentality and the boom in mass consumerism and neoliberalism of the late eighties and nineties in the west. That is to say that while their incomes and resources increased, anything classed as “wasteful” was to be avoided. My mum knitted (and still does), they always had a healthy vegetable patch nourished by a compost heap in the garden and all options to try to repair a broken item would have to be exhausted before we’d consider buying a new one.

Jam made from surplus fruit supplies would last all winter long (Getty)