Bessie (1898-1993) After my parents divorced, when my brother and I were still little, we used to go and stay with our paternal grandmother, Bessie, or to us, ‘Granny’, in her small one bedroom flat in Finchley, London. Dad would pick us up every other Saturday morning and drive us down to London. He’d then stay for the afternoon, sitting in the arm chair, chain smoking and watching ‘Grandstand’ before leaving to go back to his house in London sometime between the start of the Basil Brush show and the beginning of Doctor Who. Gus and I loved staying with […]

“To begin at the beginning…” In the summer of 2024 I started to seriously look into my family history. My daughter had started to build our family tree on Ancestry.co.uk. In fact, she had done more than ‘started’; she’d done an excellent job in laying the foundations for her family tree. But there were gaps. And I was conscious that since my parents had both died (my father in 2018, my mother in 2009) there were family stories, often half-remembered, that I had in my memories from childhood that perhaps my brother also shared, but perhaps not. I wanted to […]