Name a chore....

Scraping wallpaper off the living room wall on Christmas day, because it needed to be repapered before New Year. Everything in my mother's house had to be done before New Year. Pape4ing painting cleaning polishing dusting scrubbing. I still remember it even after 70 or so years.

Sitting out in the garden with a tennis racket ready to scare off any butterflies coming near my Dad's cabbages.
Doubt that it was very effective.

My dad is to make me cut the lawns with a push mower while he edged the border, wash and dry up each night and hoover downstairs on a weekend whilst mom was at work. Mom used to leave my clean washing in my bed and I was to put it away. Oh how I remember moaning and groaning but looking back it actually did me a favour.

My main chore was to fill the coal scuttle, it was too heavy for me to lift when full, so I would fill a smallish bucket and make repeated journeys.
Fortunately when I was ten, we moved into a centrally heated house, it was wonderful! I'll never forget the absolute joy of having a bathroom with a radiator rather than a paraffin stove!
The local dairy was in the next road to us, so we got our milk from churns on the back of their horse drawn cart. I loved getting the milk in our blue and white jugs. I still have the jugs, they're used for fruit juice in summer.
I was regularly sent to the 'offy', with an empty bottle, to get Cream Sherry for DGM and a bottle of Mackeson's for DGF.
Sunday mornings when DF wasn't on duty (Police), I'd be sent out to get the News of the World and ten Cadets (filter tipped) cigarettes.
How times have changed!

Horrendous thought now, but I used to light the coal fire when I got home from school, from the age of eight. I was even shown how to hold a newspaper against the fire to make it drawer quicker. How on earth I never burnt the house down I shall never know, as the paper invariably caught light.

Forgot to add - calling next door for a pint of milk. It was a dairy farm and the farmer's wife gave it to us in a metal container. She always told us not to come too late as the cream was settling on top.

Going to the shop on my bike for a loaf of bread. I wouldn't have minded but the shop was a mile away, down a long country lane.

Ooh, Cambia - was the newspaper a very precious heirloom your dad had borrowed?

Sounds painful!

Used to light the fire every day until the day I lit it with a 100 year old newspaper my father had borrowed from someone............

Every Saturday being despatched across the fields at the back of our house to the nearest farm to get two dozen eggs. Ten years old and I had to go all on my own as Ma was busy fighting with the laundry and coping with our temperamental mangle.

As the eldest of eight I seemed to have more chores than the younger ones, especially the boys.
Some if my jobs included
Polishing the quarry tiles with Mansion polish every Sunday
Washing up
Minding the younger children
Going to the shop
Hanging out, fetching in the laundry
Peeling vegetables
Plucking a chicken that father had killed
Making beds
Helping to saw logs on the saw horse with a long two handle saw
My worst job?
Soaking my father's feet and cutting his toenails and scraping dead skin off his feet every Friday evening.
I wasn't exactly little, these jobs grew in number as I grew older.
Might be why I got married at 18 to escape!
We did enjoy our childhood though. My dad was a farmer and we lived in beautiful countryside.

I had so many jobs to do. My brother, 3 years older, had none. When my sister came along 7 years after me, in 1946, she was spoiled rotten, and never did chores either. I really resented her!
I still hate the smell of Dura-Glit wadding, used to polish all the brasses. The job I hated most was having to clean the oven after Sunday dinner, while everyone else relaxed. Doing it while it was still warm, I was told, made it easier! Then I had to wash=up the dishes, dry them, and put them away.

I never made my children do much, apart from keep their rooms tidy. Funnily enough, my daughter said, the other day, how mean she feels that she never offered to help me when I had 5 children to care for, and was often tired. Children don't usually notice things like that. They are so absorbed in their own activities.

Collect acorns to feed to the pig !

Cleaning the open fire and preparing it to be lit again.Going to the COOP for bits of shopping for Mum and having to say the members number 119787.
Loved shelling peas and eating some!
Looking back they were good times,nice memories, but I am glad things are easier now.

Going to the butchers for "quarter of a pound of chuck steak and two ounces of kidney" for my mum's amazing steak and kidney pudding or pie (we had that most Saturdays for lunch)
Also running errands for my grandmother who lived next door - she used to give me 50p a week for that, which was my pocket money!

Dad used to send me with a bucket to a nearby field to collect horse poo for the garden. Embarrassing!

mancgirl
I well remember 'siding' the table.
I wonder, is it a Northern saying? I'm from Liverpool.

Sorry to lower the tone but the pop bottle thing reminded me of my friend and I going round to the yard at the back of the shop, sneaking pop bottles out of the crate and taking them back round through the front door of same shop to get the deposit! We did this at least once a week. Thinking back the shop keeper must have known what we were up to as we never actually bought any pop. We were quite poor and skinny so he may have felt sorry for us. Then again most of us were poor and skinny then, no excuse for what we did!

mawbroon when I saw the thread topic I was going to say sweeping the uncaroeted wooden edges of the stairs!!! I used my toy dustpan and brush.

Dusting the windowsill when Mum cleaned the windows

Ironing the occasional handkerchief.

Several people talking about cleaning and polishing cars, my goodness not just different times but a different planet I think.
In the immediate post war years I only knew one person with a car, they were as rare as hen's teeth.

I remember mangles, wooden seats on nan's outside lavvy and 'helping' to clean 3 storeys worth of brass stair rods and nan donkey-stoning the front and back steps.
I even remember our milk being delivered by horse and cart.
Wonderful, carefree days.

I gutted chickens after my mother had killed and singed the feathers off (I grew up on a farm in Canada). Not related to this job, which I didn't find bad, I have been vegetarian for many years!

Went to the shop for mum often. My sister and I used to grumble and mum (who had worked all day )would say 'right, I'll go then' , and start to put her coat on. We would then say 'no, no I'll go'. It worked every time.
She was a lovely mum and I didn't like it if she was annoyed with me.

Nothing when we were under 10. When older, we cleaned the silver cutlery, one cleaned one washed one rinsed and one dried.
The following week we all moved one job along ie: whoever cleaned changed to washing the cutlery and so on.
Of course, we also had to clean our bicycles...spokes rims and all. Dad would inspect then oil the pedals and chain and brakes, if needed.
Dad turned them upside down on an old sheet before we began...outdoors under the veranda.

Washing and drying up after tea on Saturdays and Sundays. Folding newspaper into narrow strips then folding them together to make firelighters.