Have We Had The Best Years?

In general their interests are very different to the ones I had growing up.
Your childhood sounds wonderful but as you say, that may have been a lot to do with your parents and neighborhood.

The best is yet to come, I hope. I’m disappointed with Brexit, but now downcast (who knows how it’ll pan out?); I’m older and fatter than I was but also less grumpy; my French is better than it was a year ago; it’s a sunny day, full of birdsong louder than the traffic; there’s always something to be happy about.

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I was born in 1938 before the outbreak of WW2. My parents shared a passion for ballroom dancing but, I think, nothing besides. Socially and culturally they were chalk and cheese. My mother was a scholarship grammar school girl from a middle class family reduced to poverty by the Great Depression. My father became head of the family of ten at 15 when his father dropped dead running to catch a tram.

The war accentuated their differences and, as firstborn, I became the fulcrum that bore the violent emotional storms that beset the home. My father was bitterly disappointed that his son did not share his interests in sport and fishing. He disavowed me as his son in his confusion and shame. My mother twisted the knife, and I endured the lonely misery of the go-between.

Otherwise I had a happy childhood, and retained some childhood innocence. My first school taught me lots and provided the emotional support I needed to survive.

Puberty and admission to an all-boys grammar school was a mixed blessing. Many of the all male teachers were ex-servicemen several were war-damaged, what we now recognise as PTSD. The culture at school was of repressed violence and in some cases repressed homosexuality of staff members. From my earlist teens I was sexually conflicted, and only met girls when I left school at 18, and began to understand where my true orientation lay. Those were very, very different times. Those of you born in the 60s and 70s can have little or no idea.

This is not a cheerful report, and I shall not elaborate, but life is less conditioned by the material things we often associate with things being good or better, but with the profound influences of culture, of war and peace, of poverty and disease, and of blind fate and human ignorance.

A lot of my present life is spent in trying to heal the wounds of the past; not easy but necessary. I am grateful to have survived to 80 and to still have the chance to reconcile what can be reconciled, and to learn to accept what can’t.

Happiness is an optional extra, and to be welcomed when it pops up, especially as a gift to be passed on to someone else. :smiley:

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It is brilliant that you can find the courage to talk about it now and I hope that happiness pops up often.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

There were times Peter when so much was hidden away with the sunday best.
It was hard to talk about the things which needed to be addressed and so many things were taboo including divorce.
My parents had secrets which they needed to share with me but did not have the courage to let go.
You never really know how much you care about some one until they are no longer there.
This follows you throughout your life.

Yes I enjoyed party’s, clubs and music. Anything that kept me away from home actually.
You’ve changed my name Barbara…I prefer it😉

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There’s a quality of universal helpfulness to many of Barbara’s utterances, Chris, so I’m sure we can both draw comfort from her reply. Thanks Barbara! :smiley:

Hello Stevie and welcome to the Forum.

Please could you amend your Registration to show your Full Name as per our T&C’s.

If you are not sure how to do that… simply put your full name on this thread and I wlll amend your Registration for you.

Cheers :relaxed:

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I had the most beautiful childhood, outside playing till dusk :blush: no money but very very happy, lovely parents, mum was a district nurse, dad although Ill with asthma was always having different jobs, holidays in the campsite Robin Hood in Rhyl every year haha, sometimes changed location, always went back to Robin Hood haha, banana and sugar sandwiches on the beach, lovely cooked breakfast every morning, those holidays were magic, had no car for many years, we used to get a coach there :blush:
Playing in fields, picking flowers , usually bluebells, having lovely neighbors in our street where everyone knew everyone.
No drugs or alcohol where we were! Lived just to play games with brother and sisters, big arguments over the bathroom haha, there were 5 of us plus the parents, 1 bathroom and the loo was in the bathroom :blush:
Just lovely summer days, getting brown, playing, innocent childhood.
I got wiser as I got older, soon worked out to be world wise haha
Never any regrets of a beautiful home.
Soon found the alcohol :wine_glass: haha, never the drugs though.

Yes we had good times, I think my children had good times, even better than mine. But the next generation will not have as much playtime outside, parents are more aware of the dangers. Did we have those dangers?
Lucky me hey :wave:t2:

My dad had a Morris minor…a green one…then he got a Morris thousand traveller (we called her bluebell)…we used to go camping every year in either wales or Cornwall…x :slight_smile:

My father had a 1936 Hillman which spent the war years on bricks, wheels removed, as there was no petrol. You started it with a handle poked into the front as it had no electric starter.

Boyhood adventures included making dens in the woods, making lamps that ran on gas generated by water dripped onto carbide crystals, riding old and generally oversized and unsafe bicycles across waste land, crawling up covered concrete culverts on hands and knees, unable to turn round in them, into pitch-black and stinking chambers where we lit candles; and after dark, knocking on peoples’ doors and running away to hide, hearts pounding with fear, when an angry man stood in his doorstep cursing us. Once a year, a woman in our street made toffee apples using up her saved sugar ration as a wartime treat. And we all wore short trousers till our thirteenth birthday, and lace-up black boots to school, and at play.

We had chilblains every winter on our toes, and soaked away the swelling and the itch in a bowl of our own wee.

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My dad’s first “new” car was a marina…and my first boyfriend’s car was a Hillman minx…he put red racing stripes down both sides of it…my first car was an old mini…loved her…My mum and dad were born in the late thirties too…I’ve been trying to think back after listening to and loving your life stories…I don’t remember them ever talking about the war years though it must have effected them both…I do remember the “make do and mend” philosophy of my mom and her talking about how she met my dad just as he was conscripted to Cyprus…I get chilblains every winter…I didn’t know about the wee solution…x :slight_smile:

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Helen, I think the wee was a placebo. But it had a very long and respected traditional provenance, along with goose-grease for a chesty cough, and the leaves of a fresh Savoy cabbage as a relief for housemaid’s knee (bursitis patella). I had whooping cough when I was weeks old, and my mother dressed me up in woollies and took me “seven different walks seven different days” which was a traditional remedy for that very grave illness. It seems to have worked. Like wee. :yum:

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Something must be magical about cabbage leaves…it’s also a tried and trusted method of relieving mastitis…I had whooping cough too…all I really remember about it is being smothered in vicks vapour rub…I also had mumps when I was little …staying at my gran’s seemed to work like magic for that as well…x :slight_smile:

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Had pneumonia as a baby, thanks to Alexander Fleming, I’m still here, He died about 6 months after I was born :heart:

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I always tell people that Adolf Hitler is to blame for me being here. My father was ‘bombed out’ in 1942 and with the family house destroyed they were placed in a council house whose garden backed onto my mother’s garden, spin on two decades and out I pop into the world, Hitler got his revenge.:grinning:

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I can remember my father buying his first car, a second hand Mini- FSD 469D (yes still remember the reg). Squashed my mother, my older brother and older sister and me into it and drove from London to Wales for a week’s holiday. Rained all the way and we couldn’t open the windows and my parents smoked like chimneys. Dad was Welsh, ex-service and a very calm easygoing person. Mum was an Italian immigrant who’d been treated horribly in London during the war (her father and brothers were interned on the Isle of Man and had some awful tales to tell) . Both had difficult lives behind them but worked hard to give us security and a house filled in love. I remember always feeling that home was a sanctuary, filled with happiness and the smells of home-cooked baking. In contrast my husband was a war baby, evacuated from a dysfunctional overcrowded family to a loving home in Bridport for a few years where he experienced a few happy years, then back to Paddington and poverty and misery. He always thought of his foster mother as his ‘real’ mother and looked after her during her lifetime. His tales of an unhappy hungry existence in Paddington are in such contrast to mine, and they still influence much of his thinking today as he never really knew comfort and love. I guess the child inside of us all is always there … our bodies grow older but we are still really the child that we always were.

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I had a difficult childhood as I had been adopted at two weeks old and my mother had a natural child two and a half years later. I know now that she was autistic, but she was always referred to as having learning difficulties and we had to make allowances for her.
She was very manipulative and always got her own way, which was a cause of friction between my parents.
No one wanted to play with me because of her and I was bullied because I had a loony sister.
My dad died when I was thirteen and I missed him dreadfully, we stood together.
There was no bereavement help for children in 1961 and I had to live with my mother and sister on my own.
My sister caused so many difficulties that I had to make the break with my mother.
Unfortunately, my mother in law was also a very manipulative woman and she and my father in law used her illness to allow her to behave appallingly. She also thought that I was not a ‘proper’ person because of my adoption.
They are now all dead and any problems we now have are of our own making!
Times are now definitely better now.

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Yes but the memories sweet and sour never leave you.
I do remember catching 2 buses to Farnborough Kent where my parents and I would share the grassland behind the cemetery with the cows…well, almost. We would picnic in the sunshine and then walk for miles to Westerham via Green Street Green and visit local farms to buy eggs or rhubarb. The last stop would be at a tea shop or a coffee house with a juke box… I rember playing Del Shannons Runnaway.
My biggest problem as a child was shyness and I found it hard to make friends. My first friend was a Chinese girl who invited me to eat with her family for dinner and this was my first introduction to my favourite food and my first best friend.
Time moved on and I developed ambitions and friendships but something was changing with my parents which they never shared with me…not at any time and we never said “goodbye”.
It is always good to say “goodbye”.

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We were brought up by the sea and we had a boat and a family farm to visit, but that didn’t really make up for the mental anguish.