Early Days

I am now 67, and I know I haven't too long to live, months, possibly years. I know that this may not be read for a long time, possibly never. My great grandfather wrote notes about his family and about his own life that were not read until I discovered them sixty years later. My own notes, like those of many other people, may be thrown away and destroyed. I was brought into hospital three months ago, and knew, as I had always known, that one day I should add to my great grandfather's story my own, and have had time during these three months to think about my own life, and to make notes, though weakness has prevented me from actually writing as I am now. Even though I am approaching my own death, I am happy with my own life. Of course I should have liked ten years more, there are tasks I have not completed, but I am also aware that I have been fortunate to have lived a good and fulfilling life.
I was born on July 24th, 1949, the third of six children, of whom five survived. Significantly I was born nine and a half months after the death of my sister Stella, who died when ten months old in October 1948. I had an older sister Valerie, my parents first child, born in October 1946, just three months after their wedding on June 29th, 1946. I was born on a Sunday afternoon, whilst my father was at a football match, presumably watching Manchester United, and my birth took place i the front room of my grandparnts' home at 16, Manley Road, Whalley Range, Manchester, a large Victorian house where my parents lived on the top floor following their marriage. Two years later early in 1951 we moved to a newly built council house in Woodhouse Park on the large Wythenshawe estate. I can remember it well, even though it has now been demolished, and we left it in, I think, 1959, to return to Manley Road where I lived for the rest of my childhood. We had very little in the way of possessions and furnishings. The woodwork of the hall, staircase and landing was painted by my father in a rather gruesome acid yellow, purely because it was probably left over from a job and was free. There was a unit with drawers in the living room constructed by my father from scrap timber and wood effect paper. I remember a large mural my father painted on the living room wall, scaled up from a greetings card, showing a deer and its calf. He told me later that he painted it as they could not afford wallpaper. The kitchen was simple, and I remember my father redecorating it in poppy red, and making a flip up table and shelves which we ate ate. I think the surface was covered in dark red linoleum. Outside was a toilet, coal store and a separate wash house. Upstairs was the bathroom and three bedrooms.
My earliest memory is of lying in a cot in my parents' bedroom at the front of the house. My cot was just inside the door and parallel to my parents' bed. I remember dropping a toy through the bars of my cot, and in my memory a hand came out from under the bed and removed the toy. It was about this time that my mother became pregnant for the fourth time, and at some stage I ceased to sleep in their room and moved into the tiny front bedroom adjacent to theirs and lying over the hall and stairs. It was also when I was weaned, which happened, according to the story, when I was crying to be fed on the bus from Manchester to Woodhouse Park, and when offered a sweet by a passenger I cried, "No, I want totty, not toffee.' It seems myfather was so embarrassed he took me off the bus and walked the rest of the journey home with me.
My sister Rina was born on November 12th, 1951, presumably at Painswick Road, but I have no memory of that or of her early years. I have a vague memory of being given a small black puppy called Pootchie who somehow soon vanished, dying, I believe of distemper. I have a memory too of my father sitting on a Utility armchair in the living room on a Sunday morning with his legs stretched out as he read the Empire News, and I entertained myself rolling round his thighs as a game. The other game was to put the chairs in the small dining room between the kitchen and the living room on their backs to make a train.As a boy I was very much a solitary child and played alone, whether in the house or our garden, or later when I went out to play down the cinder track or across Portway in the brook.
There are few photographs of me as a child, these were difficult days immediately after the war. I recall a small Polyphoto of me about a year old, and there is a photograph of me around the same time in my mother's arms at my great grandmother's birthday: she must have been 75, and her birthday would have been on 1st March 1951. Photographs of me and my sisters taken in front of 6, Painswick Road on 2nd June, 1953 for the coronation, with decorations created by my father have become a memory.