Chatting with my mother over supper tonight, the conversation turned to the eulogy to be delivered at her funeral (she is 99 so this will become relevant before too long!)
She’s also been asked to write a 100th birthday bio piece for the parish magazine, which she is not keen on, but that’s another matter.
I knew already that her father had had a small engineering works in Coventry that made valves for the car industry (imaginatively named Valves Ltd) - but I hadn’t known that her uncle was MD of Singer & Co Ltd (the UK’s third largest car maker in the 1920s), and another uncle had a firm making pistons! So the Bullock family (my mother’s side) were keeping a big chunk of the British motor industry going in the Twenties and Thirties!
She also mentioned that during WW2 when they lived in Kenilworth, just south of Coventry, being bombed by the Luftwaffe was a frequent occurrence! Especially as there was an ack-ack battery sited in a field near the house which the Germans were very interested in taking out - my mother said they sometimes flew so low in an effort to find it that she could see the pilot’s faces in the bomber’s cockpit!
I have asked her to write all this stuff down so we have it for future reference. But it goes to show how much we don’t know about our parents’ and other relatives life experiences…
So have a chat with your ancient rellies before it’s too late! (My mother also commented that she often found out things about people at their funerals that she wished she’d known about when they were alive).
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