At the time she was 80. And yes, Mrs John Smith it was. Though more likely something like Mrs Valerian Rodriques.
My parents were born and raised in some kind of bubble in the Indian subcontinent in the years just before and just after independence. Being more English than the English was a mark of being in the genteel class. But because the British departed in 1947, the idea of what is “properly English” was frozen at that time.
Ironically, all my great grandparents were either peasants or domestic servants. If I said that around some of my aunts they might box my ears
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Can you explain this expression? I’ve seen it relatively often, but it always elicits a “WTF?” from me. Do you mean they’d hit you really hard in the ears with their fists? Maybe with boxing gloves on? Or what?
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It’s an English expression from the first half of the 20th century. I’m using it ironically, because any expressions used by my aunts (not so much my uncles) are frozen in time from either actual English usage in the interwar period or from popular books set in that period.
People born in a certain time period from a certain class do all sorts of ironic things. My great-grandparents and grandparents and their siblings were laborers - and the men wore suits to go anywhere, even to their son’s house for dinner. Even though they never wore suits to work. And my great-grandfather always had a pen in his pocket - although he couldn’t even write his own name. Apparently, that’s what they thought the upper-classes did.
That’s what everybody did. My mother and I put on dresses to do the grocery shopping, in the 50’s and the first part of the 60’s. Men wore suits and ties to farm equipment shows. It was as normal as putting on a shirt instead of going to town barechested.
I’m sorry, I thought I mentioned that they did this until they died - definitely as late as 2000. Long after most other people their age had stopped wearing suits everywhere.
My mother wore a dress/skirt and a hat to town as late as 2000. It was what she felt normal in. And she liked hats.
But what I meant mostly was that your grandparents etc. may well not have been doing it because they thought it was what the “upper classes” did; but because when they were growing up it was, in many areas, what all classes did.
Of course you may have had conversations with them that indicated otherwise. I didn’t (as far as I know) know your family, and you did.
In the days when most of the population did hard physical labor, the suit and tie was a welcome escape from the workday grind.
In the post-World-War-2 era, people moved up into white-collar jobs where the suit and tie was part of the workday grind. That’s when dressing down became popular.
People also really dressed up to do any kind of travelling, if photos of plane and train trips from the 1950s are any reflection. Nowadays, if I travel, I dress for COMFORT, dammit.
Back to the original topic: we have a parakeet named Morty. I’ll occasionally call him “Mortimer Bird”. I’m quite sure my adult son has no clue what that references, though I think my husband might. That character actually predates both of us, but not by all that much.
Is that still made? This reminded me of colored toilet paper: when I was a kid, Mom would buy 3 packages of TP a week. Green, for the bathroom off the family room. Pink for the kids’ bathroom. White, for the parents’ bathroom. I have not seen toilet paper in anything but white in decades.
Milk delivery (may have been mentioned already). We had a “milk box” on our back porch - insulated with something (hell, probably asbestos), and painted the same color as the house’s siding. Neighbors had passthroughs built into the houses themselves - a metal door of some sort on the outside wall, that the milkman would use to put the milk in, and a similar door on the inside wall for the family to grab the bottles to put in the fridge. Clever, actually, and I bet it would see good use these days by package delivery people.
Between child-proofing and tamper-evident seals following the famous Chicago Tylenol poisonings back in the 80’s, it’s getting so you need an engineering degree to open a bottle.
In “Father of the Bride” (I think - or some other Spencer Tracy movie) Tracy comes home from work, in a suit, and gets dressed for dinner with the family in a tux.
Our “milk chute” opened directly onto the kitchen counter. When milk delivery stopped bein a thing, my mom stored a coffee can of bacon grease in the milk chute. Until one Halloween, when some kids got in there, and covered our windows (including the car) with bacon grease.
Ugh - yeah. My mother did that. An old coffee can, to be precise… until the day she went under the sink to get something and found that a mouse had chewed through the lid. I don’t recall whether the mouse had died in there or not. Hell, I guess if you’re gonna die, drowning in bacony goodness is not the worst way.
