They married in 1930, he was 25 and she was 21, and although they couldn’t know it, the easiest days of their lives were already over, and a blight was about to overtake them. They didn’t deserve it, but could do nothing about it, and all their glowing potential was obliterated in a few short terrible years in those grim, depression ridden 1930s. About this time my father lost his job as a Constructional Engineer at Boulton and Paul, due to his inability, so he later told me, to compromise his independence at the hands of unreasonable foremen. He loved the job, but even with the depression looming, he stood up for what he considered to be his rights, where a lesser man would have quietly bowed to authority; a mind-set I inherited, and which caused me many problems in later years. Their problems, however, were of a different order to any that  I ever experienced, and those early years shaped the rest of their lives irrevocably.

  Mother was intelligent, and artistic by nature in a way that differentiated her from the rest of the wider family. She was aware of aspects of life and possibilities that would not have occurred to the mainly aspirational and successful wider working-class families that she was part of, which made her situation even more painful, a pain that was fed by a deep but insistent melancholy that was at the core of her being, a trait that I inherited and which can paralyse the spirit if allowed to take hold;  I have fought it with varying degrees of success all my life, but my Mother was not of the right disposition to withstand the avalanche that was about to engulf her. 

That she did remain standing, and stayed by my father is to be admired, and was indicative of a much more resilient culture that had experienced hardship and tragedy in the bleak first half of the twentieth century but had fought on to make a better future. She looked after her husband and her children to the best of her ability amid poverty, loss and deprivation, and with the help of my father, gave me, and my brother a rich inner life through the ever present piles of books, frequent trips to the cinema and the long evenings when we would listen to the radio, discuss what we had read or seen, and tell ghost stories, which chilled me then, and which I recognised later to be retellings of classic stories from literature. My Father was a great talker and would regale us with fascinating anecdotes from life and his wide historical reading; my Mother was an inveterate film goer who never left me behind, and thus exposed me at a very early age to the complete spectrum of the cinema with all its wonders, and sometimes unsettling adult strangeness. We were poor in our everyday lives, but rich in imagination, an inheritance I am ever grateful for, and which has sustained me through a long and sometimes difficult life.

That she persevered, as many others did, is a testament to an inner strength, and she achieved periods of happiness along the way, but her inner melancholy infected her spirit, and she was always aware of that potential that had been so brutally denied her. She was bitter and despairing at times in the early post-war days, and in her last years, but found a measure of contentment with her family at many periods in a broken life, although the melancholy was never far beneath the surface. 

I was born 9 months after Brenda, my 10 year old sister, died, in hospital, of a long standing kidney complaint. She had been a regular visitor to the children's Jenny Lind hospital on Earlham Road for years, and by the early years of the war her nephritis had become critical, and at the beginning of 1942 she entered that anonymous looking building, with its tree filled grounds, for the last time. 

Her last days were made all the more tragic by the inflexible bureaucracy of those grey years, which insisted that the autonomy of the hospital was absolute, and families were of no consequence in their closed world. The visiting hours were between 3-4 on Saturday afternoons, and there were no exceptions; Brenda suffered through her last days without the comfort of her family, her only contact the letters that were sent by all members of the family on a regular basis, despite the fact that she was within walking distance of most of them. I still have the last letters that she received, from virtually every member of her distraught family, including Dorothy in Australia, and 6 year old brother Michael, wanting to know when she would be coming  home to play. These were taken from her locker after her death, among them a small bundle of ready stamped envelopes so she could reply, although she never got the chance to do so. The letters from her Mother speaks of her leaving sweets and comics with the nurse, as she came to the hospital to be near her dying daughter, but not allowed to see her or speak to her. She once told me that on one visit a nurse let her look through the doors to the ward, and she could see Brenda in her bed, "very swollen" she said, but she was allowed to approach no closer.

I have photos of her: a genuinely glorious, golden girl whose death left scars in my family that never healed. I was born in the middle of a great war, to a stricken family, but never knew the unbearable sadness they must have felt. Whether my arrival in any way alleviated their suffering I’ll never know, but even towards the end of her life, my mother would sometimes weep for the daughter she had lost, and whose comfort she felt would have helped her, in her despair at the onset of age and illness. My father must have felt pain beyond my understanding, trapped in a cripple’s bed, unable to even visit his beloved daughter as she lay dying in hospital; and then on the day of her burial, unable to leave his bed to pay his last respects, waiting at home with my brother, who was bewildered by the family activity, but hadn't been told the terrible truth that lay behind it.

 By the time I was old enough to have any understanding of those bitter days, the family had come to terms with their loss – as well as they ever could – and their stories of Brenda were told with laughter and affection, and remembered love. In my early, formative years, my sister was still a part of the family, and on many afternoons, I would attend the grave at Earlham Road cemetery with my mother, and she would tell me stories of Brenda, and point out the black specks of birds, wheeling restlessly in the grey sky, and tell me that they were angels, and Brenda was undoubtedly among them. I’m not sure that in those early years I really understood the awful finality of that loss, as she was mentioned so frequently, but in later years I felt something of that ache for a lost companion whose presence I never enjoyed, but which would have certainly changed my life, and whose absence I mourn to this day.

The old woman sits and weeps;

She was never old before

Even as the years whispered their lies,

But now she knows,

And the old woman sits and weeps.

The smile, the soft words

The tender spirit, are undimmed to the old woman

By forty years of cold death.

Forty aching years of lost love,

unshared moments,

days of joy that never dawned,

intimate moments and shared secrets

that only they could know.

A bond of love that gives life meaning,

a shared life that only she 

and her lost child could have had,

but were denied.

And the old woman sits and weeps.

The years of bitter regret

Seared by resentful anger,

The years sucked dry by undeserved loss,

Were years still lived with some joy

Amongst the ashes of defeat.

There was light that flared to dispel the shadows

as inexorable life pursued its blind path,

But they were years when life could still have purpose,

However diminished,

When the awful finality still hid in the encroaching darkness.

But now the old woman sits and weeps.

Now she was old, day was fading,

And the frailty that fingered her wracked body

told her in her despair that the one spirit

That could have understood, and cared,

And could have given some calm to her anguished soul

Was not there,

And had only existed in iridescent memory

For forty barren years.

So now her spirit is guttering as the shadows move in,

And the old woman sits and weeps.

Father was a cheerful, optimistic young man, full of spirit and proud of his rude good health. He attended The Lads Club in King Street where he did a bit of boxing and athletics. He worked in the steel yard at Boulton and Paul, where among the hard labour he was studying to be an engineering draughtsman which suited his ability with numbers, and the talent, which never left him, for precise mathematical draughtmanship. His happy go lucky attitude would have made him popular, but always liable for conflict with authority, as I mentioned above; in normal circumstances he would have recovered and been successful at whatever he tried his hand, but implacable fate was watching and quickly moved.

With the job he was good at, and loved, gone; the depression settling over the country like a choking smog, and a wife and young daughter to care for, even his generally positive, cheerful spirit must have been subdued, although, if circumstances had permitted, I’m sure he would have recovered his fortunes in time.

 He freelanced in his old engineering trade for a while, including a spell in Cardiff, which provided him with stories he thrilled me with in later years, about the ferocious fights he had seen among the razor gangs of Tiger Bay. 

His inevitable fate was already beginning to emerge, with his work dried up, and the constant pain he was experiencing becoming more intense, as his muscular, young body began to rapidly deteriorate. He was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, a terrible, degenerative disease at any time, but in 1932, almost totally untreatable. He struggled on for some time, and even tried his luck at pedalling an ice cream cart around the streets, but with little success. My mother told me terrible stories of him limping in, after a day in the cold and rain, exhausted and defeated by the pain and the effort, but prepared to carry on for the sake of his family. 

His options were closing in however, and he found himself increasingly in the hands of a curious medical profession, who saw in him a candidate for the use of new treatments and trials. He was subjected to a number of experiments, including injections of gold, but nothing hindered the inexorable onslaught of his illness, until that awful day when he entered the hospital for the last time as a whole man. My mother often spoke with bitterness of that day: “He walked in” she told me, “but he never walked out again. They brought him out flat on his back, and that’s how he stayed”. What they did to him in there will never be known, but whatever it was, he never left his bed again.

In those first years of suffering and despair, he raged against his pain and confinement, and life for them both was bleak. Within a remarkably short time however, he accepted his fate, and set about making the best use he could of what he had. He eventually came to be almost completely immobile, as his joints calcified and became rigid. He retained full use of his arms, which remained supple and muscular to the day he died, and he could half turn his head, but his legs and spine were completely inflexible, and his only posture for the rest of his life was outstretched on his back. He used a hand mirror to see to either side, and a conversation with him would often be conducted into the mirror, which always seemed completely natural, as did everything else about him as we grew up.  

 They moved into Adelaide Street during the mid-1930s, where my brother was born, and he soon acquired a remarkable circle of friends. He used his mathematical skills to do the accounts of a local self-employed builder, the details of which he would never talk about, but which prompted a sly smile when asked; and he took to drawing and painting, which he perfected to such an extent that he got commissions for fire screens, and even the sign for ‘The Stag’ Public House in St Benedict's Street. Some years later he would send me into the city to buy tubes of oil paint for him from a shop in the arcade, and he never stopped his art work, usually done for his own amusement, for the rest of his life. He also used his talents to amuse us, and my cousin Tony and I would often get him to draw exciting scenes of adventure to our specification: a lion fighting a water buffalo, or Tarzan, with knife in hand, in mortal combat with a tiger or snake. He never refused a request, and his patience and good humour were inexhaustible. 

He was also an indefatigable letter writer, with a small, neat hand, and we had a constant stream of visitors from various charities, or the council, many of whom treated him as a friend, and would come to see him socially, outside of business. I was always admiring of their educated, well-spoken manners, as they introduced a touch of middle-class gentility into our narrow, deprived circumstances. These visitors and my father treated each other as equals, and there would have been no other way to approach him: he never lost his pride or his independent spirit; he was an interesting, and social man, and inspired respect among all who met him.

 There was also an extended family on both sides, and all within easy reach of one another, so the house was never empty, either in Adelaide Street or Mile Cross Road, where we later moved to. His mother would bring him his favourite home-made meat pie, his brother-in-law Arthur would come to give him a blanket bath, and Ronnie was always there to talk. During the war Mother’s half-sisters would be bringing their American boyfriends to the house, with their exotic gifts: comics, tins of food, and wonderfully scented Camel cigarettes in their glossy packets, a far cry from the Woodbines my father smoked. Those war time, and immediate post war years, must have been difficult and bleak, but my fragmentary memories are of crowded, convivial days and evenings, with much laughter, and adult affairs and gossip, that I never really understood, but which seemed exciting and mysterious. My memories should be of Dickensian misery, and I suspect that was indeed part of the reality of our lives, but the pain and regret that my father suffered, our poverty, and my mother’s despair, are overshadowed in my memory by his personality, and his determination to live life to the full, however constrained that might be. 

Sometime in the early fifties the doctors used him one last time for their experiments, and he became the recipient of one of the first artificial hip replacements in the country. The technique was crude by today's standards, and it could never had conferred many benefits, given the extent of his incapacity. 

It was however a momentous day when he came home from the hospital, and for the first time in my life I saw my father upright. He was smaller than I had realised, and painfully thin; his face looked drawn and grey at this different angle, especially with the strain of supporting himself on his crutches. He was able to swing his legs in a very short arc, and was therefore able to move forward slowly, but still with little real mobility.

For some days he experimented, and even came Into the living room to watch a film on TV with my brother and me, but it was very tiring and uncomfortable, with no means of sitting down or resting.

Dad found this new freedom liberating for a time and explored its possibilities as far as it would take him, but it proved to be a false dawn. Without any real flexibility he found moving around the house difficult and uncomfortable, especially as he couldn’t sit down, or relax in any other way, while he was upright. It appealed to his never extinguished, independent spirit, to move around of his own free will, but it eventually led to an inevitable brush with reality, which put an end to any thoughts he may have had of continuing this brief adventure. 

One night, after my mother had gone out, and he was alone in the house, he decided to get up and visit the living room. It must have seemed a reasonable, if pointless venture, but he wanted to experience on his own, the independence this new, if limited, mobility had given him. He made his way from his room, along the hall, and into the living room well enough, then stood for a moment in the centre of the room, perhaps to get his breath, or perhaps to decide on his next move. With his legs and spine completely rigid, he had to keep perfect balance on his crutches, because once he had lost it, he could never adjust to get it back, and for some reason, on this occasion, he lost it, and began to topple, like a felled tree. Luck was with him in many ways and what could have been a total disaster turned into something less than catastrophic, but still traumatic. He crashed unprotected to the floor, and the back of his head went straight into the fire grate; if the fire had been lit the consequences would have been horrendous, but luckily it was not, and a split head was the only result. He lay dazed for a moment, then assessed the damage. He was in no particular pain; he was bleeding gently into the coals, but not at a rate that seemed dangerous; he couldn’t move, but was in no real discomfort, and so decided all he could do was wait it out. His cigarettes and matches were in his pocket, so he lit up, and lay quietly smoking until help would arrive. 

Unfortunately for him, and for her, the first visitor was his 80 year old mother, who walked into the living room to be met by a sight that must have nearly stopped her heart, although she was made of stern stuff, and had seen much in a long, hard life. She couldn’t get him up, so she put a pillow under his bloodied head, made him a cup of tea, and sat beside him, as they talked quietly together, until my mother came home. This surreal sight that welcomed her, was the final chapter in Dad’s adventures with walking, and after a neighbour had been called and he had been got back into his bed, he never again to my knowledge, tried to regain that precious freedom that had been cruelly taken from him so many years before.