She was allowed a little free time in the evenings and told us she had been asked out to the cinema by the son of a very rich family.The evening went well and the young man insisted on walking her home. Rather than run the risk of being seen by her mother and also being embarassed at living in a tiny terraced back to back house, she told him she lived in one of the large very posh houses on Mellish Road and off they went. She stopped at the first house saying it was hers fully expecting him to leave her at the gate and then she could escape. But no, he stood and expressed amazement at never having seen her before as apparently his family lived 2 doors away! End one wartime romance!!
She met my father just as the war was over and her sister Mavis who had been despatched to live with a rich Aunt, also had met her future husband and a double wedding was arranged. Just a few days before the wedding everyone was amazed when Mavis ran away with an Australian Airman who was stationed in the UK! So mums wedding day went ahead under a cloud of family scandal!
Mavis married the airman in secret without any family present. He told her that back in Queensland he had a huge amount of land and a sheep farm.She went off to Australia expecting to find an enormous luxurious farmhouse and had such a shock! She wrote to mum to say the house was a tiny tumbledown wooden shack in the middle of nowhere.But she stayed and went on to have three children.
Mum and dad had four children together and mum worked hard to raise us all with very little money at all. But I had a wonderful happy childhood and cannot ever remember having "gone without".
Mum was renowned for her strange dreams and had always been laughed at by the family for the bizarre things she dreampt about. The first ones that came true was the morning she told her own mother that she had dreampt that Mavis`s first baby had died. Of course her mother was disgusted and told her so but then the next morning a letter arrived from Australia saying just that.
The next was when my elder brother Alan was taken ill in the early 1950s when he was three years old. He was taken to a sanitorium where mum was not allowed to see him for three months and she was totally distraught. On the day she and dad travelled to collect him she told dad he would be wearing a red sweater and would have long blond curls and of course she was told she was Mad. But true to her dream Alan ran down the ward in someone elses red hand knitted sweater and his hair had lightened and he had long tumbling curls.
She always wrote her dreams down and a few years before she passed away she gave me the beautifully hand writted book saying she knew I would do something with it one day. One day...............
more tomorrow...........
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