Mum’s the word 

What’s your favourite memory of mum?

McCarthy Stone asked that question of their homeowners and were inundated by loving, touching – and funny – anecdotes and some very evocative pictures too, proving that no mum is ever a stereotype! Here are just a few of them.

A mum with a saying for everything

“Piles,” she would warn, “you’ll get piles if you sit on cold walls.” Piles?  They didn’t sound very nice. I’d pull a face. “You’ll stay like that, mind.”

“Don’t stand with your back to the fire or your marrow will melt.” My marrow? No idea what my marrow was but I always took great care not to melt it!

She seemed to have a never-ending supply of sayings. “I want never gets but I would like stands a chance.” “Who’s she when she’s at home?” “I’m all of a hoo-ha.” “Well, I’ll go to France.” “I’ll tell you one thing and that’s not two things.”

Under the weather? She’d say, “I feel like one o’clock half-struck.”  Sometimes it was more a case of being pulled through a hedge backwards but if I didn’t feel too good, it was a different matter.  “Well, when you get to school, you’ll soon feel better.”

If anyone rubbed her up the wrong way, even just slightly, “Their taste’s all in their mouth,” she would huff. For something more serious?  “She’s got a face like the back of a bus.” Even worse, and, thankfully, not used too often, “She’s got a face like the back of a bus turned inside out and whitewashed.”

Patricia, McCarthy Stone Homeowner, Seymour Court, South Shields

(You can read the longer version of this story here.)

No flies on Lily…

My mother, Lily, was born in 1901 in a Sheffield slum with an outside bucket toilet.  She went to the local school and stayed there until she was 12 (the minimum school leaving age was only raised to 14 in 1918).  She then found a job, but wisely went to evening classes to study shorthand and typing. She turned out to be very good at this and, by the time she was in her mid-20s, she had risen to become the Personal Private Secretary to Sir Samuel Osborne, the “Sheffield Cutlery King”.

I asked her what it was like growing up in a Sheffield slum at the turn of the Century.  She said it was pretty grim and that going to the outside toilet was particularly unpleasant, because of all the flies.  However, she was a clever lady and she soon found a partial solution to this problem. She went to the outside toilet at mealtimes, because that was when most of the flies were in the kitchen!

Ian, McCarthy Stone Homeowner, Harvard Place, Stratford upon Avon

Multi-skilled businesswoman, Therese

Therese and her husband Michael ran a photography business in Kampala, Uganda, before moving it to Birmingham over 50 years ago. She was highly skilled at colouring in black and white photographs. They successfully ran the business until retired and travelled the world.  Her daughter Valerie says “She is very creative, active and business orientated. She went to night school and updated her skills in carpentry woodwork, learnt languages Hindi and Swahili for the business. She used to teach cookery in Africa and was an excellent cook in Chinese cooking and I remember she cooked for large parties. She lived in her large house until 94yrs managing her house and garden. She was good with gardening too.” Now 97, she is happily settled in McCarthy Stone’s Ryland Place, Edgbaston and has five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

A toughie but a goodie

My mother was never big on hugs. Her own mother died, leaving her with little in the way of love. But she grew up finding other ways to be good to people.

In wartime, our empty wooden garage became a henhouse, where she cared for hens so well that we children had fun collecting warm new-laid eggs from nest boxes. She cared for hens, and she cared for everyone who needed a home for the night or longer. Staff from my father’s work in London were welcome to come back to us after work, to stay for nights more free from stressful bombing. We all sat crammed round our oak table for supper, and jolly conversation flowed over ample helpings of Mother’s delicious soup, which she made by working vegetables by hand through a sieve.

Towards the end of her life she lived very simply in her own home with heart failure. Vigorously independent, she would sit on a high stool to wash herself at the bathroom basin without help. Seeing her there one day her kind GP, a fellow Scotswoman, said to her ‘You are a toughie, aren’t you?’

Yes, she was.

Julia, 90, McCarthy Stone Homeowner, Rutherford House, Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire

A big hearted landlady

Lots of people thought a great deal of my mother for what she did for our village in Hampshire in the 1940s/50s. Landlady of the local public house The Shoulder of Mutton, village shop and also village post office – all attached, she was looked on with great affection.  She also welcomed the Battle of Britain pilots so badly burnt and maimed into her pub, as other publicans would not have them on the premises! She welcomed them nightly by the bus load with their chief surgeon from the hospital in Basingstoke, where he was using plastic surgery for the first time. She banged a gong at 10 pm to tell her regulars ‘Time to go home, boys’. There was never any trouble, just a hearty ‘goodnight Glad, see you tomorrow!’ They all thought the world of her, and all my life and hers, so did I and still do.

Audrey, McCarthy Stone Homeowner, Blake Court, Bridgwater, Somerset

Nursing through two world wars

“As well as providing all the support and motherly love, she also had the extra role needed when my father was at sea serving in the Royal Navy in my younger days.

She served as a Red Cross Nurse during the latter part of World War One so was called to serve again on WW2. This was in Portsmouth dealing with the casualties during the blitz on the City. With my father at sea, my brother in the RAF and me at boarding school she was also living alone and had to cope when our home suffered significant damage in the raids and the loss of friends and colleagues when her first aid post was hit.

Warm hearted, very capable, quietly stoic and much loved, I was so fortunate to have been her son.”

David, McCarthy Stone, Homeowner, Clover Leaf Court, Alton, Hampshire

You can read more Memories of Mum here.

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