My personal memories of the two families, the Clarkes and the Cosseys, who conjoined to bring me into the world, go back as far as three remaining grandparents, all born in the 1870's and 1880s, and who battled through the wreckage of the first half of the twentieth century, with considerable hardship, suffering and loss along the way, but ultimately to raise successful families.  It is at this point I will leave my personal story to consider briefly the parade of family members whose presence, or memory, infused my first years, and whose histories were a constant narrative in the family conversations that I quietly and assiduously absorbed. 

The Clarkes

My maternal grandmother, Gertrude Brown, was born in 1886, and married Charles Clarke, born in 1889, in 1909. They had three daughters: Gertrude, my mother, born in 1909; Dorothy, born in 1911, Maud, and one son Charles. They lived initially at 33 Little Bull Close, among a collection of tiny yards clustered around the narrow alley that ran from Cowgate to Bull Close Road. They then moved to a small yard, 3 Curtis Buildings, just off Grapes Hill in West Pottergate, near the Paul Pry public house. They were not well off, but he worked as a labourer for the City council, and there was no reason to suppose they would not have made a good life for themselves if the War had not intervened. 

The day War was declared in September 1914, my grandfather joined The Norfolk regiment, and at the age of 25, left his wife and three young daughters behind, and plunged into the maelstrom about to engulf the world. With only one or two brief visits back home, during one of which in 1916 his only son was conceived, he fought throughout the full four years of the war, until, one month before the end of the conflict, he was killed fighting alongside the Australians in their last engagement of the war, in Montbrehain in France on the 8th of October 1918. He was 29 years old, and left a wife and now, four young children. My mother told me often of that terrible day in November 1918, when the streets outside were full of celebration at the end of the fighting, but my grandmother sat in that little house in Curtis Buildings, alone with her four children, and the telegram that told her that for her, the war would never truly be over. There are no photographs of him, and no letters or documents; even his medals that I remember splendidly framed and hanging in the little-used front room, were disposed of after my grandmother died in 1960. His memorial is an immaculate grave in Northern France, and his family, that he saw too little of, but who have survived the century since his sacrifice. 

My paternal grandfather, Charles Cossey, was born in 1877, and married Ellen Standley, born 1879, in 1900. They had seven children, three daughters, Ellen ( Nellie), Lily and Ivy, and four sons, Charles (Sonny), my father, Cecil, John and Ronnie. Nellie died at the age of 30 in 1931, and John died aged 29 in 1944, but the other five prospered to various degrees. 

In the early years of the century they lived at 11 Nile Street, a few yards from Nelson Street School, which at least four generations of my family have attended, and remained there until 1929, when they moved to 203 Drayton Road when the new estate was built. This was at the same time as my grandmother and her family moved there, 15 houses further along, and which led to the meeting of my father and mother. They stayed there until the blitz in 1941, when a bomb dropped on the other side of the road, with the result that an interior wall of their house collapsed, although, apart from the windows, the exterior was undamaged, and they had to move out of the now unstable premises. They moved to a little cottage on Aylsham Road, down a lane beside the Windmill Public house run by Lesley and Lily, and it remained the family home until it was sold for development in the sixties, and grandmother and Ronnie moved to Vicarage Road.

My grandfather was a taciturn little man with a strict military bearing and a fearsome moustache. He had spent 10 years in the Norfolk Militia until he joined the Norfolk Regiment in August 1914. He was 37 years old at the time, but gave his age as 35 to be accepted, and his Army records still give his birth date as 1879. He served in France but was invalided home after a mustard gas attack, and given six months to live. The fact that he survived another thirty years, in good health, on a full pension was always a source of amusement to the family; although I know my Mother always rather bitterly put it down to the luck of the Cossey's, that had tragically and unfairly escaped her and my Father. 

My grandmother was a tiny, indomitable woman with a lined, pointed face, grey hair tied tightly in a bun, and long dresses and coats that harked back to her Victorian origins. She had survived a terrible operation for lung cancer in the twenties, and had had her share of suffering, but she was always kind and quiet when I saw her, and never failed to walk down to visit my Father at least every week, even when she was approaching her nineties, which was about the time she was persuaded to give up her cleaning job at the Windmill pub. She lived to be 93, and died at home in 1971 with the ever faithful Ronnie in attendance.

My father's older brother Cecil had a full and long life, working as a letterpress printer at Robert's Printers in Botolph Street,  and raising a successful family; His sister Lily married Leslie Comer, a sharply dressed, well groomed, successful businessman who ran the Windmill pub on Aylsham Road for many years. Leslie was a charming, gregarious man, who ran his business, and his life, as if it was a game to be enjoyed, and enjoy it he did until his generous, carefree lifestyle proved too expensive to sustain. He was fond of treating his friends in the pub, and at the racetrack, to free drinks, and spent more time in front of the bar, socialising, than behind it, with unfortunate consequences on one occasion. He had had a successful day at the Norfolk Show, where he ran the beer tent, and in the evening was treating his numerous cronies to drinks in the pub. He trustingly, but carelessly, laid his bag of takings comprising nearly a thousand pounds, behind the bar while he held court in front of it, and inevitably during the evening the bag disappeared. He was stunned by the loss of the money, but was more hurt by the thought that one of his friends could abuse his friendship so treacherously, and was never quite the same carefree host afterwards. He was a lovely, friendly man, but his expansive and overly generous lifestyle led him into difficulties, and he was reduced to selling off some property he had been left, to sustain it, until finally all was gone, including the pub, and he spent his last years in a little flat, probably reflecting on the halcyon days at the Windmill and the Yarmouth racetrack when he was king of all he surveyed. Lily survived him by some years into old age, and outlived their only son John, my old playmate from our childhood days, who died suddenly while only in his forties.

Ivy was a cheerful, friendly little woman who took over the old family home at 11 Nile Street in 1929, and lived there with her husband Arthur for another 60 years. She spent her ordered, useful life working at Edward and Holmes shoe factory on Drayton Road, where I later began my itinerant working days; while her husband Arthur spent his working life at Laurence and Scott’s Foundry at Thorpe. They were perfect examples of how the thriving industries  of Norwich, whose factories had powered the city for most of the last century, could sustain working class families such as mine, in productive and satisfying employment for a whole lifetime.  It was a life style that was still in full bloom when I began my working life in 1960, and which I participated in, in a desultory way, for some years, but which I saw disappear almost entirely over a brutal thirty year period as the real world caught up with a Britain, and Norwich, that thought it was still living in a post war boom which would never change.

The last, and youngest brother was Ronnie, born in 1919 and young enough to be friends with me and my brother, rather than just a rather remote Uncle as the others were. Ronnie was a neat, sociable man different from the rest of the family. He was what was known in those less judgemental days as a " confirmed bachelor" , and it was simply accepted that he would never marry, and would stay living with his mother in the family home, although there was speculation at one time that he and Joan might get together, not, I suspect, encouraged by Ronnie. He worked in an office, another break with tradition in the resolutely working class family, and had intimations of intellectuality, in that he read books, and watched foreign films, a trait that gave us a bond when I was in my teens, as we discussed Visconti movies, and the latest Nabokov novel. We went to the cinema together, and the theatre, and he acquired tickets for us for the first music gig I ever went to: Lonnie Donegan at the Theatre Royal in 1957.

Ronnie's favourite cinema was inevitably The Noverre, and he got his books from a private library on Guildhall Hill. He also had a European holiday every year, a package trip that he undertook alone for his two-week summer holiday. When I began work, and had some money, I accompanied him on two occasions: once to Italy, on a long train journey through the Alps to a picturesque little village on the Adriatic shore; and then to Paris, a city of dreams that I had become obsessed with the year before, when, late at night, the train from Calais stopped on a bridge in the suburbs of Paris, and down below, in a quiet dark street I saw a little cafe with a few tables outside, which were bathed in a pool of amber light from the cafe interior, flooding through the large window, and occupied by lounging young Parisiennes, with their cafe and cognac and Gauloises. It was an image that has stayed with me for nearly fifty years, and one that I was compelled to recreate for myself the next year. I did so during a magical week spent watching Goddard movies, and then seeing them come to life as we observed the languid, elegant prostitutes in the cafes on the Champs D'Elysee, where we drank shots of cognac washed down with tiny cups of bitter coffee; and then memories of sweeping through the deserted early morning Place De La Concorde in a classic Citroen DS, to our crumbling pension on the Left Bank, the only place to stay in the new wave sixties. This early 1960's trip to Paris was also just in time for me to observe another literary tradition that had been de rigeur for three decades: the acquisition of banned books, that had been published by the Obelisk Press since the first publication of "Ulysses" thirty years before. On this trip I smuggled back copies of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" and "Black Spring", and the rarely seen, four volume edition of Frank Harris's "Memoirs". These cheaply printed paperbacks, with their familiar cream covers, had long been the stuff of legend among the libertarian, censorship - hating, anti - establishment underground that was about to sweep all before it over the next ten years, and I'm grateful that I had a chance to participate in this subversive rite-of-passage:  the new freedoms that came by the start of the seventies were necessary and welcome, but they could never replace or recapture the furtive thrill of plucking the forbidden fruit of the Paris bookshops, and the heart thumping ordeal of the customs line at the airport.

In his early years though, Ronnie had proved himself, by being the first in the family to join up, which he did at the beginning of the war. He was at the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940, a far cry from the triumph that sentimental legend now suggests. The horror of what he experienced during that first great defeat caused Ronnie, along with many others, to be invalided home with shell shock. He recovered though and was sent out to North Africa to fight with the Desert Rats for the rest of the war. His Father, with his military background, was proud of his efforts, and insisted that his older brother Cecil, follow suit and join up as well. He did so, and in a poignant moment during the war, Cecil met Ronnie in North Africa, where they were photographed together, and the story sent back to be printed in the local paper. Ronnie served bravely and well, although not a natural soldier. On one spell of leave, he arrived home, and immediately stood his rifle in the coal house. His father was appalled: "your rifle's your best friend" he told a rather unconvinced Ronnie, and immediately took it, and spent considerable time cleaning and greasing it. Ronnie always said afterwards that it was the cleanest his rifle had been throughout the whole five years of war, although he never spoke much about his experiences, and never afterwards took any interest in military affairs. Like so many others, he did his duty when called upon, then slipped back into real life, without a backward look.