Those earlier years.

"Wait for me Mark, Andrew can't run as fast as you. Mummy says we must look after one another today. You know everyone is saying goodbye to our daddy today!"

     It was raining hard as we hurried away from our once happy house. Our clothes already being invaded by raindrops trickling down our necks and my ankle socks but somehow rain didn't matter on that day. As I ran I thought of our mum, althought not alone in the house, she'd wandered around the bedroom. No longer apparently a bed at all, but instead. a festoon of bright colours that mum could never see.  Yet the floral tributes seemed to seep away from their bedroom and sing in the air, notes I couldn't understand, and out into her tiny but well ordered kitchen where once she'd been our beautiful,soft and whistling mum.

    Not until years later would I comprehend the challenges that mum and dad had faced. Mum had been educated at a boarding school for blind and partially sighted children somewhere in Birmingham. Away from her parents, her friends,siamese cat and the familiar surroundings of her native town. Unlike mum, dad did have a little sight as a boy. His family had moved from Sunderland to Coventry, I think, in the early thirties. Only in his early twenties did he have both his eyes removed.

It must have taken him sometime to readjust to a world of everlasting dark pages and constantly bruised knees,head, elbows and weakened confidence. Yet, somehow, he emerged from this time determined that the most important target was to regain his confidence and so his identity. I think it says something about my dads thinking that he'd tap his stick around Coventry city centre when it was dark. He didn't want people to feel sorry for him when he fell- which he surely must have done many times.

 He had once been a rope-runner, working on Coventry railway lines; disposing of defused bombs that fallen so cruelly and heavily on Coventry.

It was whilst dad was retraining to be a telephonist that he was to met the girl he was destined to marry. The girl who was to become our now grieving mum.  Following a fairly short courtship they eloped and married in London. They were quite difficult times then. Disabled people were, perhaps, over prtoected by their own families. My plucky dad, James, had already left his loving parents behind in Coventry and headed alone to London with only his suitcase and the clothes he stood up in. He found work as a telephonist and also lodgings where a lovely landlady took him under her wings. Thank you Mrs Frampton-you were an angel!