Vicky Roden

I recently received an email from a lady who lives in Scotland, about an old family saying :

“When I was a girl my mother would say that if I told tales too often then ‘Nonny’ would come and take them away. I’d completely forgotten about it until I saw your call for odd stories and I remembered an old sampler my great-aunt embroidered as a girl – this would have been in about 1910. The one thing you could say about her is that she had no imagination, but apparently told wild tales when she was little. Then one day she just stopped.

I’m going to try to find the sampler out – I think it got passed down to my mum, so it’ll be in a box somewhere. It was always on the wall when I’d visit my aunt, and scared me a bit! it read:

Little boys…