“If I told you once I’ve told you a thousand times!” – I reckon I must have heard that one-liner from my English mother, thousands of times. Some may call my statement an exaggeration. I would simply call it “like mother like son”. She reckons she told me a thousand times to not leave my school bag in the hall put the lid back on the kitchen jars put my school socks in the sock draw not leave my dirty clothes on the floor. Now I don’t know from which continent she got her unique sayings, but either way us kids heard plenty of them on plenty of occasions. One saying that was definitely carried with her from the Home Country, was Mum’s call to “wear your Macintosh and galoshes.” I only found out that this saying is not quite Aussie, when I named them as such in front of my primary school class. (my raincoat and wet boots that is). I couldn’t see the hilarity about an oft-used Mum home-phrase but they sure did! And then there was the “get the Hoover” saying. Well, many years later I was to attend a trade show of vacuum cleaners. Many years later I was to make the encouraging statement “What a great range of Hoovers you have!” Now the only problem was, these vacuum cleaners were made by National and were being represented on the day by some now rather irritated sales reps.. Come on guys! Mum had always called our vacuum cleaner at home “the Hoover” and National did have a great range of them So I ask you, what’s so wrong with my statement? Oh, she also asked me on many occasions to “get the Eubank” (floor polisher). Even I knew that a name like that should not be repeated outside the house. There you go. Mum’s phrases, used and understood at home were one thing outside in the real world, now that was something else! And another thing, I have no idea where mum got the term jobbie from, to describe the #2 seated bodily ablution function. I remember well being half-asleep and on my way to breakfast only to be confronted with the words – “have you done your jobbie yet.” Huh? What? Oh that! Yeah, soon Mum. Maybe the term came out of the English depression years to try and provide some distinction between those that were just sitting waiting and those that were on the job, had a job to do or were getting on with the job”. Who knows but that’s what mum used to call it anyway. Now, our Church Minister at one time made an attempt to add religion to our breakfast, by coming up with the slogan “No Bible – No Breakfast”. Mum could see us kids starving to death under criteria like that. So good old Mum, just put her own spin on this early morning religious decree “No jobbie, No breakfast” became her special catch phrase. At least under this order we did get to have some breakfast occasionally. OK folks, let’s face it. A Mum is a person that has always existed to a child. She is bigger, older and all grown up. Kids know instinctively that Mums have some pull with the other all-seeing, all-knowing Deity and our Mum was not slow in calling on her big gun contact whenever she needed to. Mum’s oft-repeated call of “Lord give me strength” meant a couple of things were going to happen. Firstly, mum was going to take off her thong (no, thankfully not the English one but the Aussie one that she wore on her feet). And secondly, with the lord’s help, we were all going to get a few well-directed thong hits to the bum. Only once did this sequence of events not go quite according to Mum’s plan when David reached up and took Mum’s thong off her and then simply just walked off with it. See, there were some forces at work in our family that not even the Lord was prepared to help out with. (Note to all parents It is usually best not to try and physically discipline a child that is bigger than you especially if only armed with one floppy rubber thong) Still, of all the phrases mum used on us kids, there was one that was crystal clear and unambiguous in its concept. It was scarier and more chilling than any of her other phrases and was guaranteed to destroy a whole afternoon’s fun – as we would wait in anticipation of the impending doom. It went a lot like – “I will have to tell your father about this when he gets home.”
