Old sayings
Tough times make for tough parenting, and although reader Matt Mills came from a close, loving family, he remembers some of his mother’s more colourful insults while he was growing up.
Now living in Torquay, Devon, Matt recalls his parents’ early married life and the deprivations they faced together.
“My mum Florence came from a middle-class family who lived in a four-bedroom double bay-windowed terrace house in a desirable area (estate agents jargon),” he says.
“When she married my dashing, handsome fireman dad, Matt senior, she moved into a two-up two-down cold terrace house with one cold tap, candles for light and a small coal-fired grates downstairs.”
There was a war going on at the time and the Liverpool docks were heavily bombed. But while her husband was out all night in the air raids, Matt’s mother still went shopping every day with him and his younger brother Frank in the pram.
As the eldest, young Matt used to get the brunt of his mum’s sharp tongue.
“She used long words as insults, like calling me a ‘dilatory sod’ when tagging along to the shops,” Matt recalls. “She’d say, ‘Stop meandering around, you’ve got one mouth and two ears, so listen twice as much as yammering on’.”
Now aged 88, Matt has sent in a picture of himself at eight and says: “My dear mum would have said that I had a face on me like I’d lost a tanner and found a farthing.”
The freezing cold winter of 1943 made life for mum Florence even harder.
“Our toilet and tap were frozen solid under 2ft of snow, and there was a queue in the street outside for water from a standpipe. We’d be walking along and she’d say, ‘You never stop ‘moidering’ me! You traipse around, dragging your feet wearing your bloody shoes out with your gob open, keep hold of that pram handle, you gormless get’,” remembers Matt, adding, “I swear my brother in the warm sprung comfort of the pram would smirk!” ■ Send your old-fashioned sayings and insults to siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk