Storytelling Sunday - Two little girls

Todays story is in honour of my mum (still alive) and my aunt who died in March. At her memorial service my cousin gave a talk and a couple of the things he talked about were a couple of things that I used to laugh about with my mum. So, when my cousin talked about it I realised it must have been either genetic or that it was a product of their isolated childhood!

Once upon a time their were two little girls, called Pat and Dos (short for Dorothy, also called Dorothy Dumpling). They lived on a farm outside a small village called Mooi River. Their farm was quite far outside of town and being the 1940's just after the war, life was very different and not as fast as it is today. They had electricity but it was powered by a generator, so at 8pm their father would make tea and then turn the electricity off and everybody went to sleep! They had piped water, but it came from the dam on their farm. Cars were not as fast or as common as they are today, they did not go to town very often. Their father used to use the truck for the farm and if their mother did go out she mostly left the children at home (accompanied of course). Anyway, this left the children at a loose end and since toys were not as advanced and they definitely did not have playstations and TV's like todays children they very often had to make up their own games. Some, very creative game inventions occurred. Dos used to pretend all sorts of things were farm animals, twigs, stones etc she would build "paddocks" and pretend to herd her "sheep" into the paddocks and that sort of thing. They rode horses, went for walks and had a very free childhood. One of their favourite games though, was to pretend to be cattle. This entailed going around on hands and knees with things stuck into their hair for horns, bending over and biting the grass. However, funny as this may sound, this was not the funniest. The piece de resistance was that they would take their fathers socks and put them into their shorts to pretend that they were bulls! Needless to say when Pat and Dos grew up and told this story to their own children, it caused much hilarity.

Although that was my story I would just like to add an aside about their food habits. This was brought to my mind by a comment that jimjams made on my last months story. Pat and Dos grew up to be teenagers and since their was no close High School they were sent to Boarding School, where the food was probably not quite what they were used to. They developed some wierd habits to try and make it more palatable, these 4 are just a few:

1. If they had sausages they were apparently a bit dry generally, so they would slice them lengthways, butter/jam them (just like you would a slice of bread) and then put the pieces back together, just like a sausage sandwich
2. peas always had vinegar and sugar added
3. they would butter bread, add salt and pepper and eat it just like that. Apparently if they closed their eyes they would pretend that it was avacado on bread
4. they would thickly butter two slices of bread, spread a thick layer of sugar on one, put the other slice on top and pretend it was cake!

Dos and Pat both grew up and had children and carried these traditions on. The last one is my favourite since when I was very little my mum used to give me that and tell me it was cake, I was about 6 before I realised that that was not how you made cake, lol.

For more stories pop over to Sian's Storytelling Sunday