Mend make do makeshift. 173

Money had been very tight for my parents in their early days in farming, and they knew how to run a tight ship, nothing was ever spent if it did not need to be spent. When new ideas and inventions came out, they would shy away from it for as long as ten years, until it had been tried and tested and proven. The drum mowers came out and we persuaded him pretty quickly to get up to date on that one, and a baler was soon taken up as well, but it did take some to get him to agree that that's the way to go.

This was my father before he got his Standard Fordson tractor

There had always got to be a guaranteed return, and this habit never left them in all the years of their life, whether it be the first fertilizers ever purchased onto the farm (nitro-chalk, basic slag, Humber fish muck) or whether it be knitting wool for knitting all our socks gloves and jumpers, which eventually became working garments and were darned and repaired many times before they were too holey to repair.

Thrift was the by word then, and we seem to have lost that word from the modern day vocabulary, it's become a throwaway society now, nothing is repaired, if it don't work chuck it, and get a new one.

Mend make do makeshift.

Nothing wasted nothing chucked, all make do and mend,

Thrift is what they called it, right up to the end,

Never lost the habit, brought up all me life,

To repair and keep it working saves a lot of strife.

Father hit some hard times, and came through not too bad,

Looked after all of what he’d got, through happy times and sad,

Money tight and barter things, that’s the way to go,

Coal exchanged fa half a pig, a railway engine drive know.

Bodge it up and weld it, or a big hammer and nails repair,

It'll last anther couple a years, father had the flare,

It's not allowed to ware out, till new idea is born,

Combine buggered the binder, n bright new paint adorn.

Move with the times, that's what were told, latest ideas must get,

But tell the old man, he's going deaf, you'll get ya sen into debt,

Tried and tested it must be, new ideas are not fa us,

Let someone else tek the risk, and save us all the fuss. 

Owd Fred

A saying that father had was --- "Ware the old buggers out fost", but then when we came along it was "Flog the young"