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Plenty of comments on the lines of 'my muvva had
8 children and we all got fed'. Good for muvva.
My old mum wasn't that poor (not rich either) and we never went hungry.
But what she taught me was kindness.
When Mrs.Mann's boys came to the door with an empty bucket and asked to 'borrow' some coal, they got coal. Never mind that Mrs.Mann lived in a fairly nice house, smoked, (and probably ate well, too).
When the Sikh men came up from Betterware in North Street with their little cases full of brushes (which we didn't want), they always went away with sixpence, 'for luck'.
And a hundred other acts of selflessness, of pure kindness; I didn't appreciate her at the time, of course, but now I do.
And her FIRST reaction on hearing that some children were going hungry would have been to make them sandwiches, NOT to blame the parents.
Oh, incidentally, voted Tory most of her life, although in her latter years her natural intelligence began to kick in, and she had doubts.
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