Family folklore ... stories you loved hearing the adults talking about as a child. Lighthearted and nostalgic, please don't grump all over it!

[LindorDoubleChoc]

I'm just cooking dinner so I'll come back later but, quickly, when I was a kid I loved to be around all the grown-ups talking on their rare family get togethers (ie. Christmas, the summer picnic, and weddings).

My paternal Grandad was a bit of a Delboy character by all accounts. He was from Wiltshire but married and had a family in South London long before South London was a desirable place to live. He was a motor mechanic among other things, when cars and vans were a rarity. He operated on the wrong side of the law a lot of the time and got away with it by being incredibly charming. My lower middle class mother always said you'd shake his filthy oily hand just because he made you feel you wanted to.

Any more interesting family folklore from years back?

The story about my Great Aunt, staying up all night with my great grandad, talking him into agreeing that my grandmother could go to the grammar school. That they would find the money somewhere. That she would help pay. This was in 1932, that grammar school education changed everything for the successive generations of my family. He was a cotton mill worker? He’d left school at 11.
The same great aunt going around friends and family collecting up little gifts so that all the kids in her class could have something for Christmas. This was the 1930’s. They all lived in poverty. That’s that only thing they’d ever been given.
My grandparents have some incredible stories, born in 1920 the changes that they’ve lived through are quite extraordinary.

I loved my gran’s stories about her childhood in the early 20th c. She described how her street had a “communal pig” and the kids would collect the vegetable scraps to feed to the pig. Once the pig was fattened up, it would be slaughtered and butchered and the whole street shared the meat.

I would love a community pig in my suburban neighbourhood instead of the wretched food waste bin.

My great grandmother was born on the wrong side of the blanket. The illegitimate daughter of a housemaid and an Earl. Every Christmas when my aunts got together (the Earls granddaughters), they would talk about how he visited their mother regularly. The aunts always told me and my sister to marry well as we had blue blood running in our veins!