I was born in Wales, UK, in the 1960s, in the grounds of a hospital that had been a 19th century workhouse. Here the poor once worked for nothing more than food and shelter, served by that grim place. Forty one years later, my mother would spend the last weeks of her life, ill in one of the wards.

My parents had tried to have children for many years, but couldn’t. After medical treatment my mother became pregnant, and gave birth to a baby girl – she was born dead. My mother said she felt her stop kicking about a week before she was born.

My mother was told she couldn’t have any more children. I was born to an apparently sterile woman; she had no more children after me.

When I arrived home from the hospital, I was welcomed by my grandfather and the pet dog, who climbed up onto my pram and gently rested the side of his face against mine. He would follow me everywhere I went after that; he was a guard dog in a way.

My grandparents had hard lives. Both men worked in the coal mines for very little pay. They both started work at the age of twelve. On my mother’s side, Harry worked underground hacking away at the coal seam with a pick, on his hands and knees in water, surrounded by rats.

 As soon as the First World War started, he joined up. He was one of the few who joined the army in 1914, who survived to see its end in 1918. He took part in major battles, including the Somme and was wounded twice; once when attacking a German trench.
As he jumped into it, a German bayonet went through his groin – he killed the man and fought on. Another time he was blinded by mustard gas: he was blind for a year. This took him away from fighting for a year and probably saved his life. With his sight back, he returned to the fighting. 

  When the war finished, he re-joined the army and was sent to Ireland where he met my grandmother. After some years, he returned to the same coal mine he left before the war. Life there was hard – they lived in a cold, damp house and, when my mother was 15, her mother died of pneumonia, she was 45. My grandfather continued to work at the mine, walking eight miles over mountains in the dark, cold and rain to get to work each day, after working ten or so hours underground he would walk back in the dark. The coal dust eventually accumulated in his lungs and he developed lung disease. Thrown out of work, with no money and no compensation, my parents took him into their home, where he lived when I was born.

My father’s parents’ lives were difficult too. Having little pay, my grandfather spent most evenings drinking in the pub. When he ran out of money, he would beat my grandmother for her housekeeping money; so my father didn’t have enough food to eat as a child, except for one good, hot meal a week when he went up to his grandmother’s for Sunday lunch. 

My father also served in the armed forces, in the second world war he was sent to Australia where he was in the Australian Air Force, supporting the New Guinea campaign and preparing for the defence of Australia. He left there in 1946, I would go there later in 1994.

Some of my earliest memories are happy ones, spent with my grandfather Harry. My father spent very little time with me as a child, and my mother for all her virtues could make my life very hard, but he was always loving and kind.

Unfortunately, when I was two and a half years old, he died and my mother developed spinal problems. A bone in her spine disintegrated and she spent most of a year in hospital, while I went to stay with my father’s parents in their tiny old coal heated house, where toast was made on a poker in the open fire, the clothes were washed with a mangle and the only toilet was outdoors.

Here is a picture of my fathers father outside his house.

When my mother returned from hospital, infancy was over and childhood had begun.