Curing all Ills

AFTER discussing home remedies with my husband, he remembered having crushed arrowroot biscuits in milk to treat diarrhoea, but if his mother had no biscuits, she would brown some flour in a pan and use that; it seemed to work just as well.

Apparently, the best cure if you had banged your fingernail was to lie in bed and hold the sore digit in a pot full of wee! I remember my mother putting a spoonful of warm olive oil in our ears to cure earache.

Among the cures that I still use today are gargling salt water for a sore throat; a lemon, honey and warm water drink to cut through phlegm; a dab of eau de cologne to dry up cold sores; and sore eyes are always bathed in cold tea. After a few days I usually know if my problems really need the advice of my GP.

If more home cures from the past were tried for simple ailments, I am sure doctors’ surgeries would have more room for people with real illnesses.

Olive Hyett, via email

Home made cures

ON READING ‘When People Helped Themselves’ in the April issue, several remedies came immediately to mind, such as a hot bread and sugar poultice held in place by a bandage for the treatment of whitlows, poisonous fingers, splinters and corns – and even rather awkwardly applied to boils on your neck or other parts of the body. Or the placing of hot steam-filled milk bottles around the head of boils – especially carbuncles – to draw off the poison once they had ripened. Mother would rub eyelids with her wedding ring after spitting on it if you had a ‘pigsty’ on your eyelid. There was also the inhaling of steam with a towel over your head from a bowl of hot water with a little spoonful of Vicks added for chest colds and head colds.

Another remedy if you had a chest cold and there were any road works near where you lived was to be taken to stand near the tar boiler to breathe in the fumes. This was done whatever the weather, and was occasionally backed up with raw onions placed in cloth or an old stocking and wrapped around your neck for sore throats.

Getting your dog, if you had one, to lick small wounds on your hands and legs was not very hygienic, but it always seemed to work! Cold or even hot tea leaves would act as a compress for bruises, again in an old stocking, but they did stain your skin a little. Our grandparents were certainly very resilient and would swear by these remedies and they always seemed to work.

I dare say that there are many other readers who remember similar remedies. If only we’d had the foresight to record them all, as there seemed to be a home-made cure for everything.

Mr J. Crouch, Hornchurch, Essex.

ABC to XYZ

THE letter from Mr A. Millson stirs memories of my maths lessons when I attended school in Bromley in the 1940s.

The three sides of the right-angled triangle made famous by Pythagoras were known as Base (B), Perpendicular (P) and Hypotenuse (H), and the Sine, Cosine and Tangent of the angle opposite the Perpendicular were remembered by the mnemonic: ‘Some People Have Curly Black Hair Through Perpetual Blushing’.

We also met three people – ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ – who seemed to be forever performing tasks such as carrying weighty sacks of corn to the mill, finding time to dig a certain area of land or perhaps painting a fence or a gate.

There were also three mysterious characters – ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’, whose values varied with different circumstances. Calculations were made by memorising the Times Tables or using Naperian Logarithms – there were no hand-held calculators in those days!

Mr W. Franklin, Eastbourne, E. Sussex

Comfort Correspondence

LIKE your good selves, I like all things that keep alive the true British spirit. In WWII, I served with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and was a member of the Army Post Office here in Nottingham, and also in Birmingham.

We sorted letters, parcels and packets for all our soldiers and airmen, in all theatres of war. It was hard work and very constant. As you may imagine, love letters were the order of the day, and the 5,000 ATS members, who sorted at least 1,000 an hour, must have kept many a romance going!

Field Marshall Montgomery once said the front line soldier needed three things – obviously food and ammunition, but that his men could march for three days without food on a letter from home. Indeed, when the Normandy invasion took place, there was mail already on board the boats waiting for a lull to be able to distribute letters from home to our servicemen.

Mrs Barbara Danter, Nottingham

·        See the July issue of Best of British for six pages of great readers’ letters.