Pre School

I went to school for the first time in September 1962, less than two months after my brother was born and a couple of months before my fifth birthday. I have very few personal memories of the years before my school days, but like all families mine was in the habit of repeating to me stories of what happened prior to my earliest recollections. Sometimes I think I remember things, and then I wonder whether it is just my memory of what I heard my parents and grandparents say.

My Mum taught in Sunday school and from September 1959 I went with her. I learned many of the songs she taught. My first sentence was heard as I was walking to my Grandma's Turner's house when I said "Acan smell t'dinner!" On the way to Grandma Smith's flat on the bus I was separated from my Dad. As I held aloft a big bogey I had extracted from my nose and asked my fellow passengers "What shall I do with this?" A kind lady told me to put it in my handkerchief, whilst my Dad disowned me and looked the other way!

According to my baby book I grew in my first year from 8lbs 8ozs to 27lbs 1oz and from 20.25 inches to 29.5 inches. There is a photo of me sitting on a swing from September 1958, my head is covered with long locks of blond curly hair, apparently my hair darkened after my first haircut or at least that was the story I was told. I crawled for the first time aged 10 months and stood unaided and walked around my play pen at aged 12.5 months, taking my first unaided steps at 14.5 months.

I had many childhood ailments such as nose bleeds, measles, colds, tonsillitis and mumps. I suffered "brain fever" caused by the shoddy and frightening administering of my smallpox vaccine, by a doctor who eventually got struck off! My favorite song back then was "On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep" after hearing it performed in a local pantomime. For my fourth birthday I had the first of my annual birthday bonfire and firework parties celebrating the end of the gunpowder plot of 1605.

I spent the first of my childhood holidays in Worthing, Sussex in 1959, staying with our dear family friends (brother and sister) Uncle Ray and Auntie Peg Watkins. Returning in 1961 and every year thereafter till I went on my own in 1974. The kindness of the Watkins has never ceased to amaze me, friends that were as close as anyone and all because the Second World War brought our two families together. I am so thankful for such a happy childhood which my parents and grandparents provided me with, I was most surely one of the lucky ones!