Old people stories

Anyone got any good old stories that have been shared by friends and family? Things you have only just learned about people.

My maternal grandmother died when I was very young; I have no memories of her. Today my mother told me that when he went to see her body to say goodbye, my grandfather got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. I never really knew anything about her, but she must have been quite a person to inspire that kind of reaction.

It’s sometimes easy to see the people we have only known as old codgers as just that, and we forget that they were once amazing people.

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When Coventry won the FA cup we took my Grandfather out to a restaurant where he proceeded to get progressively more pissed.

By the time the main course was being served he asked the waiter where abouts in Italy he was from? Upon answering my Grandfather regailed him with tails of driving a tank through his village, looting and the cheese makers daughter. He ended the reverie with “wonderful times” …

I still find this awkward, hilarious, terrible & weird in equal measure

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My great grandfather (died when I was four, but I can just about remember him - a small, rather fierce man, hard as nails) was a butcher. In fact he managed a shop, back when butchers slaughtered beast on the premises.

He was at the livestock market in Boston (Lincs) when a bull escaped and ran down the town’s main street. In a panic it tried to clear the gates into the town’s park. It failed, impaling itself on the gates’ spikes.

They called my great grandad who climbed onto the gates with the flailing animal and slaughtered it with knives. I believe he also disassembled it there. The story made the local paper.

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Late in 1938 while visiting London, my Austrian grandfather got permission to stay and bring over his Hungarian wife and three young sons who were living in Czechoslovakia.

My granny took a train across Europe to France. On the train she was stopped by a Nazi officer who wanted to check her papers. All was in order and he congratulated on her fine Aryan boys little knowing that the three blond haired, blue eyed boys were all Jews.

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