My mother remembered:

The hokey pokey man on his bicycle selling ice cream and the muffin man with the tray on his head and bell in his hand.
Riding on the back of the coal man's horse-drawn cart to the end of the road.
Having her photograph taken with her father in a studio and feeling hugely proud of her new button boots. (I still have the photograph.)

Never mind my mother remembering, I can remember bare foot children and the lamplighter. We didn't have gas lamps in our street but where my aunt lived she had a gas lamp outside her door. My mother was born 5 years before the first world war so her memories were of a completely different world to ours, she was named after the lady that loaned my Grandmother the horse and cart that took them to the church for her baptism. My mother was required to work in the house and had to bake bread before she went to school on a morning. Sundays were only for reading the bible, no housework was permitted, great grandmother was chapel and ruled even her daughter's household.

My grandmother remembered (and told me all about) laundering sanitary napkins and how grim it was - so glad I have never had to do that!

My mother remembered the Jarrow March coming through the town. One of the men gave her a little clockwork mouse which she treasured for years.
Doing the washing in the outhouse, boiling the sheets, putting them through the mangle and helping to hang them on the washing line. She also had memories of the lamplighter and the knocker-up who knocked on the doors to make sure the miners were ready for work.

Clogs, poor diet and caring former 3 younger siblings from 6am when her parents both left for school. She threw a clog at her younger brother who was refusing to get dressed for school. The clog hit his ear which bled and all 4 of them were late for school and in big trouble as a result. Mum had lots of positive memories and even managed to make the sad ones some kind of life lesson. She didn't work outside the home and focussed on her 3 children as she was determined we wouldn't have to carry the responsibilities she did as a young child.

My mother remembered having to move from Salford to Romford when she was 8 and her father got a job at Ford's at Dagenham.
Quite unusual to move from one end of the country to another in those days.
Mum quickly had to learn to talk with an Essex accent at school and revert to Salford once she got home!

My mother remembered having her tonsils out on the kitchen table!

The title misled me... and my mother was remembered all of a sudden because she would have been 100 today- this lovely sunny warm day, with butterflies flying around, house martins just arrived and the first few newts seen sunning themselves in the garden.

My mother used to love talking about growing up in a large house with her sister, brother and cousins. Three generations of two families shared the house and a doctor rented some downstairs rooms for his surgery. She had piano lessons from a professor somebody or other which impressed me no end and walked her dog for miles across the Common.

I'm sure it wasn't all idyllic but she was obviously very happy.

When she was a teenager they 'downsized' into a typical suburban semi which I remember as being very well kept and felt like a happy home but Mum said that as she was the youngest by 8 years she felt lonely after so much hustle and bustle.

She talked about horse drawn milk floats and the rag and bone man but I can't remember much else.

My mother used to tell us about the milkman who would go round the streets with his horse and cart, filled with milk churns, with metal jugs hanging off the back. People would go out with their own jugs to be filled.

She would go to the shops for her mother and buy, for a farthing, a scoop of fish or meat paste wrapped in a twist of greaseproof paper.

Her mother drowning yet another litter of kittens in the copper - my mum never got used to this, it used to break her heart. Nor could she cope with her mother chopping up live eels for dinner - all the pieces would still jump about on the kitchen table, and she would run, screaming, from the room.

Hokey pokey, balloons which they called bladders, Empire Day, running around the streets with her brother to find the street photographer, who would take their photo and turn up a week later at their house asking for payment (they were always being told off for this!).

I remember having my tonsils out on the kitchen table , Mum didn't want me in hospital in Glasgow with the bombing

My mother and her two younger sisters spent most of their childhood at a boarding school in England as their parents were in India.
She remembered never getting enough to eat, and sometimes going to a grand house nearby in the holidays, as the local gentry took pity on the poor children who couldn't go home for holidays.

My Mum worked in the City of London during WW2 and told me about sitting on the roof of the Chase Manhattan Bank taking her turn plane spotting at night with a tin helmet on her head. Also, the caretaker coming into the ladies replenishing the loo rolls and shouting over the door in a wonderful cockney accent 'you need anuver roll in there Missis 'Ames?'. She used to cycle on an old bone shaker 10 miles to the nearest station, take the train to London and return the same way at night. (I can't imagine today's 20 somethings doing that)
As a country child, she and her sisters and brother collected berries from the hedgerows and sold them to the local village shop for a halfpenny a punnet. Her Mum used to sit in the outside WC plucking chickens in order to contain the 'fevvers'! My own Mum did that many years later in a more salubrious WC, plucking fevvers from pheasants

marmight my mother was at teacher training college in Crewe in the early years of the war and used to do fire watch at night.
It was apparently a useful opportunity for romantic encounters in an era when you had to be in your dorm by 9.30 at night and visits from the opposite sex prohibited

My mum's father was a GP in Liverpool and especially enjoyed maternity work. When Mum was a child, the family used to have their summer holiday just a few miles away in West Kirby so that my grandfather could be called and quickly return home to deliver the baby if one of his patients went into labour during his break. Hard to imagine these days... He was a lovely man who sadly died far too young.

Oh Joy that has brought some memories flooding back to me as I visited West Kirby many times in the 1950s when we lived not far away. I loved that area and the walk across the sands to Hilbre Island with the Welsh mountains on view across the Dee estuary in the background. Lovely!

Thank you Gagagran for those memories. I don't know the area at all, although I believe I may have been taken there as a child. Mum's holidays would have been in the 1920s/1930s so I guess it may have changed a little!