In pondering about how to start this blog I have resorted to putting in a little background to my origins and early life..... Those of you who have stopped reading already WAIT!!! Hang on in there as one or two things might be quite revealing.....
.... I think the best idea too is to do a little each day and hopefully it will build up into a full picture of 'The Dave Shaw Mk6 - Protoype 4 (Experimental)' which is still not yet fully formed and tends to lapse into distraction, deep black periods, amazing bright periods and needs cheescake from time to time and the occasional reasuring cuddle or kick up the preverbial to keep on track...Not knowing where that track leads to of course. Obviously....or obviously once you get to know me!
As a child of the 1950's life was tough... Now before I go on, its easy I suppose to fall into the trap of recollections of life which fit the stereotype... Which memories are 'true' and which are those that have been formed and evolved through the effects of time, family folklore and myth?? Well, having 'thunk' hard about my early life and not forgetting several experiences when I was in therapy which served to put a few things in perspective...more about that later...and at the ripe old age of 50 something, I reckon I now have a pretty good idea of what was true and what wasn't.
So, where do I begin? My earliest memory is definitely the ceiling, the great big rubber flappy doors and the light array of the operating theatre and the vibration, feeling the trundling of a hospital trolley beneath me, as I was wheeled in to have my appendix removed at the tender age of two! It was very serious as the thing had burst and there was the issue of peritinitus hanging over me. I must have been terrified for the imprint of those scenes to have stuck for so long! I still have the scar, physically and mentally. I just hate hospitals! A close shave with death at an early age.... So everything since has been a bonus!
Having such a start has to be thought of within the context of a depressed post war Britain and being born into a very working class Brummie family in Birmingham but where there was also a massive Roman Catholic Irish influence. Mum was from Bray near Dublin, Dad was the Brummie and they had met in the Army in the late 1940's in Bicester in Oxfordshire.... So thank you Bicester (now the home of one of those large ex-factory outlet shopping malls) as without your input I wouldn't be here now. (ps I'm putting family members with capital letters as a mark of respect!)
Dad was doing his National Service whilst Mum was flexing her wings as a young Irish girl who had effectively ran away from the humdrum of home and six brother and sisters, to find herself, much to the gasps and annoyance of her deeply republican family! Join the British Army? Oh that Kathleen!! She certainly was a bit of a rebel..
In contrast Tom was a quiet, sensitive bloke who hadn't had much of a loving upbringing. He suffered the rejection of his father due to him having to do 'the right thing' and marry my Grandmother because she caught for Dad just after Grandad's first wife had died. All the context about how this this situation came about have been lost in time now but as a result Dad was raised by 'Grannie French', his fathers sister, in a tiny terraced house a few miles away from the main family home. This was also the home I was brought up in... 42 Hartopp Road, of which we will hear more later... Dad also suffered the scars of been evacuated to Aberdare in South Wales for a period during the war whilst the bombs fell on Birmingham. Despite Grandad and Grandmothers antipathy towards each other they went on to have a further five children and also raised Frank, from Grandad's first marriage and the apple of his eye, thus causing more of a wedge between him and my Dad.
Tom's early life must have been pretty awful but there were some compensations in that Grannie French, when she was sober, did her best. I know Dad regarded her as his real 'mum' in many ways....The drink thing was an issue and as a teenager I never realised at the time where my Dad's horror at my frequent visits to The Country Girl pub just up the road had originated from....
... But that's a story for another day!
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