Ask yer Granny!

WeegieWumman

I CAN'T seem to get this "quote" right at all. I'M OFF TO HIDE MY HEAD IN SHAME

grandma247

I have just finished reading and what a lot of memories it brought back. I lived abroad for most of my Childhood because my father like overseas postings but we did come back here for periods of time so I remember some time with my grandparents.
My maternal grandmother had a range in the dining/living room which had a hook to hang a kettle or pot and an oven at the side. It may have had something else on it but I can't remember now. They also had a ships table with the edge round it to stop the plates sliding off when the ship rolled. I have no idea what the history of that was.

When we came back for the last time we had to stay at my Aunts till we found a house and that first night I sat listening to the adults but I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying. It was broad Yorkshire and I took almost two weeks to tune into it.

Strangely I could understand my Grandmother who had a westmoreland accent.

When I was little Grandma had one of those horrible outside toilets that had to be emptied by a man every week i think. They also had their own water supply. They got a bathroom put in the house in the 60's.

Butterfly_Brain

hollydays wrote: »

I remember how people never threw away old clothes,but cut out the zips,etc.
Grandmas button box kept me absorbed for many hours,it was like a treasure chest to me.

I have a button box and keep old zips etc. I cut them off clothes that are no good for the CS :rotfl:

mardatha

My dad moved back home to Fife when the pit shut, and within a week my mum and I couldn't understand a word. He was very broad -Trying to think of some words now...
He would say sine for since, thrapple is throat, a speug is a sparrow, a hoolit an owl and a mavis a thrush...ower is over and mauny is must. There will be loads more but I canny think
I currently live in a very rural bit of the Borders and they are really broad here as well. My neighbour yesterday said "Div ee ken eeer honked?" - translation - she was asking if I knew I was caught (nail caught my hood as I went into the henpen ) Honked is hanked but the way they say it sounds like honked:rotfl::rotfl:
I do miss accents, old people always had accents. Now everybody sounds the same!

Memory_Girl

Mardatha - I'm raised a Fifer - but born an Aberdonian. Don't usually have either accent but I can put it on when I need to. I'm more of a soft BBC Scots IYSWIM?

In the States I was doing a mega posh speaking job - and somehow in the evening I ended up reciting a poem called "The Boy on the Train" - which is is the Fife dialect.

I only found out later that everyone was convinced I was speaking Gaelic:rotfl:

Long live regional accents

MG

RAS

I remember getting a call to my mum's telling us one of the farmers from the village where my dad grew up would be on TV. We dutifully watched. At the end we looked at one another "well I understood what he was saying, but do you think anyone outside the county understood a word?"

And it is not as if dialect is even county based; even now there are kids in some small towns who regard the city as the big bad place and 20 years ago a lot of people spoke distinct dialects that were very different to those 10-15 miles away. Moving around to work, I found that words used in one town were unknown the other end of another rail line.

seajaxx

We have lots of "dialect" words here, still going strong, and not really used anywhere else. A lot of them in this area came from the traveller folk who used to turn up to do the berries, or the tatties, that type of thing, but many more are just part of the scenery and all are still in general use (makes me wonder which ones we've lost tbh) . I remember my son having fun when he stayed in Glasgow for a while and he and the friends he made there traded local words.
Re. how Grannies and Grandads managed, I do know that a lot of my relatives homed in to one room when it was winter. Either they had a bed by the range, built into the wall (discouraged because it caused the "spread of disease") or they simply didn't heat their bedrooms. Other rooms were not used at all because it cost money. I remember once, looking after a large house that, in winter cost so much to heat that, we pretty much did the same thing- took to the kitchen and stayed there! Too expensive to heat the house!
Newspapers for loo roll anyone? I remember going to houses that cut theirs with pinking shears to make them pretty

meritaten

I can remember going with my dad every saturday night 'down home' as he called it. His parents had died but his sister and two brothers still lived there.
'down home' was a Valleys terraced house built just after WW1. it had a tiny 'scullery' which housed the cooker and sink (and not much else). the back door to the yard was in there. I hated having to use the loo as it was out the back door, down some very steep stone steps and was underneath the kitchen, next to the coal house! bad during daylight hours - in the dark and in winter it was horrendous! no wonder they still used 'guzunders'! This was in the fifties/early sixties! they lived in the back room - this room which was barely 12x12 housed a three peice suite, a table and three chairs, the tv, and a sideboard! you had to breathe in sharply to navigate round the room!
why didnt they use the front room? I dunno, but it may have had something to do with the large hole in the floor which the landlord refused to mend! or perhaps it was the cost of heating?

Sunnyday

I`m loving reading about everyones memories on this thread, thanks to everyone who has posted.

I only knew one of my grannies and we lost her when i was very small, she lived in a tiny terraced house with an outside loo and a coal bunker. I remember being scared of the stairs as they were really steep - almost like a ladder rather than stairs. Downstairs there were two rooms, the kitchen and the back room which was kept for best, it was crammed with furniture that was kept immaculately with lots of prized ornaments on fine lacy doilies. I can`t remember what was in the kitchen but it was the most used room in the house.

I`ve got to laugh at the postings about different accents etc, many people around us seem to have developed what we call student accents (no offence to any students reading) where regional accents seem to have been dumped as they are uncool. Everything seems to be pronounced strangely eg the word go seems to have become Gowe longer and more drawn out. Regardless of the origins of the speaker they all end up speaking the same way.

I was speaking to a friend less than a fortnight ago and we noticed a group of people watching and listening to us. One of the women explained that they were tourists and they were trying to work out what we were saying as they had never heard a Yorkshire accent before, that made me laugh as i didn`t think that we were that broad but it seems that a lot of workmates think that i am lol. They should have heard some of the older members of my family - it took some working out to understand what they were saying. I love the different variations in accents and all the different words used in different regions. I think that its part of us and it would be a huge shame if everyone lost that part of themselves.

SD

meritaten

sunnyday, my family are Welsh (Valleys), and we didnt realise that we were speaking anything other than the Queens English, until my mums cousin married a lovely woman from surrey. The poor woman had to ask Ken (mums cousin) for a translation of almost everything we said! Kens' missus thought we were speaking Welsh! lmao - the poor woman was then transplanted to Swansea and has become proficient at Wenglish! (Wenglish - the mix of Welsh and English spoken in South Wales - particularly in the Valleys).