5th December 2021

 As I contemplate yet another birthday tomorrow, I think about my long journey... I was born two years after the end of WWII. My father was still away with the army, my mother at home alone. No NHS, doctors too expensive, so my mother had to bang on the party wall to alert Mrs S next door when I was about to be born. Winters were harsh and we were poor. Cold lino on the floor, and coats on beds. No-one in our road had a car, so I would run out into the street every time a car went by. No phone. No TV until I was ten, then a rental. Central heating was unheard of, every house having an open fireplace. Coal was delivered by grimy men, who lugged heavy sacks to each house before emptying them, in a cloud of toxic fumes, into the coal bunker along the entry. At five, I walked a mile to school and back, on my own. One house I passed had a bowl of fruit in the window. I couldn’t understand why, if they had such exotic items, they were displaying it instead of eating it. So many changes in my life since then as home comforts improved and technology arrived. And internally, the extreme introversion from my mother gradually morphed into the extrovert style of my father. What a journey…