Crowded house.

Yes, of course, the ex-farm girl had killed, plucked and gutted the chickens, boning the meat and setting the giblets aside for soup, without batting an eye. The chickens had been purchased for that very purpose, but they’d been around long enough (for fattening up; not that a bantam gets very fat) to have earned names.

There was more to the story. I've omitted some characters. There was another child at the small kitchen table. My grandfather's sister Mary had died, leaving a ten-year-old son to an unreliable father who turned him over to his mother-in-law. My grandfather took them both into his household, formally adopting the child. So his mother (my great-grandmother) is at the table as well, or more likely in the easy chair near the stove.

Rearrangement of the single-fronted Edwardian terrace occurred. My grandfather flew around with a hammer and timber and cement sheeting, and Len and his cousin/adoptive brother Robert migrated to the new sleepout (translation: bungalow) in the tiny backyard. My mother, a teenager, now shared the second bedroom with her grandmother instead of her brother. What a choice; not that she had one.