Swindon in the Past Lane

In the 1950s, when greetings cards were relatively modest, dad always bought my mum a big card in a box for her birthday and at Christmas.  Not big compared to those on offer today, but a box none the less.  His careful, rounded handwriting embellished with curls and loops conveyed the emotions I seldom heard him utter. The printed verse, often running to several inserted pages, said what he couldn't. The card, a padded confection of bows and bells - well, perhaps not bells - was always received with derision.  However mum kept them - in homage to the money they had cost him rather than the emotion expressed within them. Nothing in my parents's relationship was straight forward, but then how could it be?  There was too much sadness and too many secrets - and considering they had both experienced such deprived and lonely childhoods, a surprising absence of compatibility and empathy.  Mum wanted someone with ambition and drive.  Dad want...

One of my first internet stops of the day is always Spitalfields Life and yesterday's post At Tom's Flat reached out to me. Tom talks about his childhood spent in an orphanage  - "In an orphanage, you go from a cot to a bed in a dormitory and you don't know what they're going to do to you in there," he says. My dad wasn't born an orphan as Tom was. He had parents and an extended family, but when his mother walked out in 1935 he and his brother John were placed in St Mary's Home for Boys in North Hyde where they spent three years. Dad was just ten years old. John a year younger. He always said that once his father got on his feet again he sent for the boys, but it wasn't quite like that.  The orphanage closed and my grandfather was obliged to take back his sons.  A third son, four year old Patrick, was lost forever. P laced in the care of the Vincent St. Paul Society and subsequently sent to Nazareth House Orphanage in Widnes, Cheshire, Patri...