If I'd listened to my nana more when I was little, would I still be posh but poor?

Can you tell what it is yet? And yes, to those of you who recognise it, I borrowed a catchphrase from Rolf Harris.

I wouldn’t normally borrow catchphrases or sayings. As a family, we have enough of our own. I wouldn’t dream of ‘spoiling the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar’. I know that ‘don’t care was made to care’. As a child, if I asked what was for tea, I was told ‘bread and pullit’ although that one was lost on me because I mistakenly thought it to be bread and jam.

My nana (my maternal grandmother) used to tell us that if we sung at the table, we’d die in the poor house. I’m guessing that when my nana was a child, it was a scary enough threat to ensure she and her siblings didn’t sing at meal times. Families would be split up on entering the workhouse, men one way, woman another. Children were separated too unless they were babies. Life was purposefully harsh, just in case anyone thought it was an easy option and inmates were shamed and humiliated. Some families would never see each other again.

By the time, I was born the threat of the work house had diminished, having been officially abolished by the 1930s, although I was surprised to discover that hospitals maintained casual wards for vagrants until the 1960s. I have to say, a piercing glare of my nana's china blue eyes, was always more scary to me than any threat of the poor house. But I sometimes think about it now as I sit here knitting and wonder if, as a child, I hadn’t hummed inside my head at her dining table, I would be a bit richer now.