Early days – Bury, Lancs late 1950s. part 1

I was three years old when my Mum lifted me up to peer through the small reinforced window in the door of the hospital ward. I found myself looking into a long white sterile room at the end of which were some very large clunky machines which were vaguely human shaped. I didn’t know what I was looking at until my Mum told me that it was my Dad who was inside one of those machines. She called it an Iron Lung, which meant nothing to me, for all I knew was that he was ‘very poorly’ and ill with a disease and that it was dangerous for me to go near him. This early memory has been etched in my memory ever since.

In his early thirties and in the late 1950s my Dad, John, worked in a cotton spinning factory in Rawtenstall, Lancashire. He had succumbed to an epidemic of polio that swept through the area at that time, not long before mass vaccinations came in and pushed this highly contagious disease back. Dad was absent for a few months making this a difficult time for our family. My Mum shielded my sister, Jane, and I from a lot of it, but it must have been a tough time for her. Eventually Dad returned home, battered and no longer able to usefully use his left arm, the muscles had withered to make his arm just hang there.

But he didn’t give up, he learnt to write again with his right hand and returned to his job for the time being and continued with his love of amateur dramatics, both acting and directing with the Haslingdon Arts Society. He also followed Bury FC through thick and mostly thin. His jazz drumming in a trio did come to an end though. I found out later that he was not happy with his situation and he took a bold decision to change both his life and that of our family for ever. The Lancashire cotton industry was in serious decline, everyone could see that and he sought an opportunity that arose to work in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, then part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. He was offered a manager’s job at a spinning and weaving factory in the Midlands in a small town then called Hartley. We followed my Dad there and landed in early 1960, it was a great shock to suddenly find myself in a tropical, dusty country with different looking people and strange animals and insects too.

Part 2 follows in due course.