Dear Philippa,

I see from press reports that increasing numbers of credit crunched young adults are failing to fledge, or having fledged, returning home to mum and dad, sometimes with a family of their own. There’s an acronym for them – is it Yuckies? There they are – grannies at one end, Yuckies at the other, and the poor sods in the middle.I have no direct personal experience of this – I effectively left home when I was eighteen, to the great relief of my parents.

However, when I was a child my entire immediate family lived in the same street: us at number 200, my mother’s brother and his family at No. 69, and my paternal grandmother at No. 45. We were at the posh end of course. We had a bathroom and a garden. Also at number 69 was my maternal grandmother who lived in the front room of a small terraced house: Uncle Herbert and Auntie Ivy, their two teenage daughters (one, a nurse the other, a rebel and inclined to be moody) and grandma who had one remaining tooth, a fierce looking incisor. And a dog called Rex with lots of teeth.

As a child visitor I was unaware of of any multigenerational tensions except once. The house had an invasion of mice, possibly encouraged by my uncle’s practice of breeding for the pot rabbits (huge, bad tempered things) in the back yard. No garden, you notice. Traps were set daily and many mice were caught, but none was set in the front room where grandma lived. I suppose to avoid frightening her.

One of the pleasures of my childhood was to visit grandma at number 69, eat her biscuits, and hear tales of her own childhood in Cornwall. And to watch as she crumbled biscuits onto the fire fender to coax out the mice she had tamed and befriended. One day I told my aunt how interesting all this was and her expression was all I needed to know that I should have kept my mouth shut, and my imagination enough to tell me that there would be some tense moments after I left. On subsequent visits the mice continued to emerge and be fed, and they were never again referred to. I much preferred them to the rabbits of whom I was terrified.

During the war, before I was born, most of the family either lived in my parents’ house or spent time there during the bombing because ours was the only house with enough outside space to accommodate an Anderson bomb shelter. Posh end, remember; having your own shelter has its equivalent today of having your own caravan at WithernseaI.

In the 1970s my father, by this time retired, received an alarming “have you told us everything?” letter from the Inland Revenue. All he had was a state pension, and they certainly knew about that and he replied saying he had nothing else to declare. Then came the “are you sure, because we don’t think so” letter. I rang them up and they refused to deal with me, but after I told them how much wind they’d put up my father they gave me a clue – “has another Edward John Croft ever lived at that address?” My father’s father, also called Edward John Croft, had died in 1945 and was no longer available for interrogation but grandma (not the mouse fancier, the other one) was, and she was duly grilled. Grandad from number 45 it turned out had used the posh end address when opening an account with the Yorkshire Penny Bank, depositing enough money to pay for several funerals which thankfully was never needed, and interest income had reached a level at which the bank grassed him up to the revenue. Sheepishly, grandma went to a drawer and, from under the lining, produced the bank passbook that she had concealed for over thirty years fearing that if its existence became known they would stop her benefits.

The bank manager, seeing the problem of how we could get grandad’s signature, produced a file that contained the sample signature and kindly left us alone while dad did a spot of forgery. So an unforeseen consequence of multigeneration living; but not serious thanks to an understanding tax inspector and a realistic bank manager. Rarer birds now.

Best wishes

Howard