Friday 30 December 2011

Ancient cure alls.

A friend yesterday remarked that as I'd been drinking hot milk and eating dry toast I might just as well as have pobs and be done with it!  This made me laugh a lot.   Pobs was the cure all back in the dim days just after the war when food was in short supply and doctors an endangered species before the NHS was introduced.
"She's very peaky...give her some pobs love" this was advice often followed.....and my mother's other big cure for everything was to beat up an egg, add warm milk with a spoonful of sugar and force it down my unwilling throat!  Its sliminess and eggyness  are still with me today!
I had two very different Grandmothers....the Lancastrian one was all in favour of pobs, whilst the Welsh one would brew up a potion from herbs gathered in the fields.....I have no idea which of these options worked best..I just swallowed down what was given me like a good girl!
Just around the corner from where I lived was Toad Lane, entirely innocent of toads of course...
But the original Coop had started there and the little shop had been kept intact . I spent quite a lot of time in there reading the tracts and showing people round it.  There was a wonderful small paper they had printed themselves called "Nobbut a Penny" I read them all through more than once.
Across the road was the Unitarian chapel....it was beautiful and I loved it dearly.   For a start they were never stuffy and girls were allowed to sing in the choir!
It was a different world we lived in then and not without its problems....and yet  a chance remark  took me straight back there...it was home and it was safe...until of course it all came tumbling down.
The street I lived in was called "Sir Robert Peel St"  There is now a multi story block of flats built where it once was...such is life!
I cannot think that anyone who had ever lived there mourned its passing....sad but true!

2 comments:

KeyReed said...

'to beat up an egg, add warm milk with a spoonful of sugar' hang on: if you change that to hot milk that's what I was told was an egg nog when I was a boy. Were they kidding me?

Revjeanrolt said...

Now don't take it personally Tenon......they were shielding you from the truth clearly.....Egg nog has alcohol in it!