Warning ............ very sad...........

Something else occurs to me …….

When Mam & Dad stopped going up North in the summer time they started going to Guisborough for the New Year and they always had a lovely time.

One of Iris & John’s neighbour’s sister read the tea leaves and Mam often had hers read.  Such a laugh!

Then one time they came back and Mam said that the tea leaves said she would have a granddaughter for Christmas.  Ena was as adamant as me that it wouldn’t be us, she had enough children and I had nowhere to put one, I still lived at home as we saved for our own place.  By April of that year (1967) we knew the tealeaves had not lied and that I would be the proud mother!! 

Another time when Mam and Dad came home, Mam was very quiet and a bit vague about the tealeaves but ……… when the chance came I asked her to tell me about them.  She eventually told me that after much cajoling - the neighbour’s sister said she couldn’t see anything but her face told a different story – she had admitted that it was bad news and she never passed that on.  Mam insisted that she wanted to know so she was reluctantly told ……. She would be a widow by the next Christmas.       

I laughed and said that she should always take those things with a pinch of salt but we both knew that the leaves had been right before – I had a six year old daughter as proof. 

By the February Dad was complaining of a pain in his shoulder, he wasn't a moaner so we knew it must be bad.  We persuaded him to see a doctor and in July he went to the Doctor’s who eventually sent him to a specialist who whipped him into hospital for tests.  He was very poorly, I went with Mam to visit every day, three buses and me pregnant!  Mam needed to see him, every day she sat with him while I amused N who was only about two and wasn't always allowed in to the ward. These tests proved that he had lung cancer which may have spread to his shoulders and elsewhere.  More tests needed to be done to find out where it all was.  Sometimes when we went in to the ward he looked like he had gone ten rounds with Cassius Clay having had more examinations of his lungs.  During the course of one of these tests, he had to have a pre-med which in those days was an injection, his heart could not take it and he died there and then. 

So on September 10^th 1974 my mother was widowed.  She never went North again.

........a few photos - Wedding, at a sports day in Malaya,  Singapore with friends and Ena, a card Dad sent when abroad.  Relaxing on holiday after N was born, a party for 50 years married...............