Whenever my father despaired of my mother and her twin, he would drag up something which happened when they were both young, with their husbands away in the army and the merchant navy.
A Great Aunt Louisa owned properties here and there, and asked the two young mothers to visit her one day at one of her properties. They had children in pushchairs. My brother and my cousin. They paid the call on Great Aunt Louisa, in this dark house that stretched backwards, long and narrow, with hardly any natural light, except in the front parlour, where the blackout-lined linen blinds forbade its presence. In fact the presence of anyone other than a corpse was forbidden in the parlour, which was kept mausoleum-like for just such an eventuality, and for the neighbours to admire the untouched furniture and furnishings which lay in the shadows.
While Aunt Louisa's maid poured tea in the living room, she announced that she was "prepared" to give as a gift to her neices the two adjoining houses so that their families could be brought up in the proper manner, and not in rented flats in North Road, amongst those people there, rather than in Clive Street in Grangetown, where the better people lived.
We will never know what set them off, but the two girls in their cloche hats began by fighting back giggles which soon escaped into hoots of uncontrollable laughter and hysterics , and , unable to contain themselves and act with suitable decorum, Great Aunt Louisa ordered them from the house with instructions never to return again.
And thus ended both sets of parents aspirations to middle-class property ownership amongst "the better people".