This is the record of conversation my Mam had with my Dad...
Dad comes in from work on Liverpool docks to find my Mam setting the table for tea, what's to eat?
Your tea is on the table, Dad looks surprised to find just a piece of paper on his dinner plate, what's this,
your tea, what do you mean that's your bloody tea, opens up the paper.
It read that my Mam was pregnant and she was not very happy with the fact, you can't be, I'm almost 3months gone, you can't be, well I' am, it's not mine, you what!!! I don't move out of this this house she said, you don't have to they can come in (wrong thing to say).
That is how my Mam broke the news to my Dad of my forthcoming birth.

We lived in a little terraced house 2up and 2down, I had a big sister 18yrs, another sister 15yrs a brother 9yrs, so I can understand what a shock it was for my Mam, she thought she had finished with babies and had just been measured for a Costume (suit) to wear when family and friends went to Butlins, Pwthwelli.

I was born the following January 1948, small and sickly, and as a child growing up was a poorly child, all of which my Mam blamed on herself.

My Dad and Mam sorted out their differences and low and behold they had another little girl four years after me, so that made seven of us in a little house, things were good for a long time.

My Dad started to be ill and Mam went to work.
In 1961 we were rehoused in Mazzini House, just off Roscommon St.
We had a ground floor Maisonette and it was great, my middle sister moved to the Sixth floor with her husband and young family, there was underfloor heating, an immersion heater for hot water all of which we hardly used because of the cost.
I heard my Dad say, this is lovely just like being on holidays.

After a while my Dad's illness was diagnosed as cancer of the lungs and we were told he had weeks to live, I was sixteen and my sister was twelve, Mum was fifty.
He died in the chest hospital in 1964 aged fifty five.



More to follow.... Part 1