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.
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| 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"
