Both my parents left school at age 14 to go to work. Charles Hill, still single, joined the army in 1914 and had been working for 10 years by then. My mother Agnes Emily Raybould wanted to go to Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts, but her father wouldn’t allow that, because she had to work to help keep the family. She was delighted when I went there, at 15. Our late cousin Arthur Short also went there – we were the same age and had been like brothers.

Mother went to work at Cadbury’s chocolate factory, where she became friends with Nelly Hill. While on a group country ramble shortly after the War she met Nelly’s brother Charles, also working at Cadbury’s. My mother looked over a hedge and commented on the wonderful array of bright red poppies; he couldn’t see them, which led them both to realise that he was colourblind – he hadn’t realised. He became my father. Later they were terrified that I might be colourblind: I’m not.

They married three weeks after my mother’s 21st birthday, so she did not need her father Walter’s permission: he did not want them to be married at that time, because one of her sisters had recently died. Walter shouted abuse at their backs as they walked down the street, my father having picked her up from home. He never forgot that. They had already arranged everything, and walked off towards a Quaker Meeting, where they were married. About 50 people signed their marriage lines. He was 10 years older than Mother at 31 – oddly enough, I was also 31 when I married. Must be in the genes.

While working as a maintenance engineer he learned music and singing part-time at Birmingham School of Music. He became a full-time self-employed professional before I was born, and on my birth certificate he is described as “Vocalist“. He eventually had to stop singing for a living when three things happened at about the same time:
1 The Talkies – he had earned his bread-and-butter singing to the silent movies in city-centre cinemas;
2 The Great Depression; a bit like now (2020 Covid-19) – nobody had enough money for entertainment;
3 Me.
He still carried on in evening concerts and weekend oratorios when the opportunity came. I remember how he would come home in his rough working clothes, go upstairs, and come back a different man in his evening dress. I woke up one morning with a helium filled balloon tied by string to the foot of my bedstead he had got from some event he hade been singing for.

He got a job as a clerk in a Labour Exchange, and when a job came along that suited his engineering experience he jumped at it. I remember Mother’s horrified face when he came home one Saturday lunchtime, carrying his bag of tools, having received half-an-hour’s redundancy notice. His next job is the one I remember, where he got a gold watch for 25 years’ service – notably, inscribed on the back “from his friends” rather than from the company. When he retired from being the foreman of the maintenance workshop (during the war he had also done war work as well as keeping the factory in production) he took a job there involving night duty as the man who received and entertained works lorry drivers who took a break before changing lorries between depots in London and Liverpool.

They are all in my head: they will only die when I die.