starting school and other memories

When i look back when we was girls we was really happy i think i had quite a rude awakening at age 5 though when i went to school and found that other children and teachers could be down right horrible any way i made my first little group of friends at Davidson infants in Addiscombe it was situated in the high school at the time and this was 1968 the new Davidson infants hadn't been built yet and the old one was bombed in the war just the site existed in dalmally road where the new school stands today my new friends consisted of Lisa Gosdon who lived in Davidson road and Tracey hoskins who lived in Rees gardens Lisa's back garden backed on to Tracey's in those days sometimes i went to play round Tracey's sometimes Lisa's Lisa was my best friend all through infants there was other people i knew like Keith laws who was in my class and lived a few doors up from us i remember laughing at his jokes he couldn't walk very well as he had muscular dystrophy and his legs just progressed worse i heard he died when he was in his 20s Pamela laws was one of my sisters best friends and we always hung around her in the street mummy used to let us play outside a lot and i have so many memories i somehow always expected every one to be nice probably because i lived in a cosy little world of niceness with my family and until i went to school i never knew any different was a bit of a shock when i realised people could be different outside in the world .i was painfully shy but loud and lively with people i knew so it was 2 different characters coming out i never said boo to anyone i didn't know yet i was wild with my friends and at home mummy hardly ever smacked us i only remember one big thrashing and that was because id taken an antique brooch to school that had been handed down for generations and picked out the precious blue stones and lost them apparently i was going to have it when i was 18 it would have been worth something.that was the only time i remember being smacked.i have few memories of the infants but those i do have are vivid in my mind i remember only 2 PE sessions one i remember because even at the age of 5 i was embaresed because i had to wear boys pants apparently they had no girls knickers so there was me on the climbing frame trying with one hand to hang on and the other hand to hold up these far too big white y fronts apparently id wet myself that's why i was wearing them i still remember the embarrassment the other time i was just finishing PE when suddenly everything went quite and all sounds seemed to be coming from a distance suddenly i could see stars everywhere i looked all over the other children were these stars i knew something was wrong with me i remember my dad carrying me home from school but i remember nothing after this i had appendicitis i know i had my appendix out and went to the hospital i have the scar yet i have no memory of anything after the PE session not even coming home from the hospital or being in there everything is blank .it was about when i was 3 or maybe 4 that my mum slipped on ice and severely injured her spine she was carrying Laura at the time this must have been a terrible time for me although i don't remember it as my mum was my whole world and i would have been very unhappy if she wasn't there i often used to panic if i couldn't see her any way i don't know why but if i couldn't see my mum or i thought shed disappeared i used to start screaming horrifically this went on till i was at least 8 years old i remember one time mummy had gone round to the phone box in dalmally road to phone nanny she was gone half hour at least i was convinced something terrible had happened to her i was screaming running in and out of the front door calling for my mum Laura just stood there .when mummy got back a neighbor told my mum all she could see was this thing running in and out and hear this horrific screaming that was me that's what i was like panic stricken if i thought id lost my mum.we had a proper nan it was 1960s and my nan was what i would call a real nan she was a bit dumpy wore the nanny coat shoes and headscarf always carried her bag with her shopped at marks and Spencer's and eat at British home stores she always brought us sweets so while she was gossipping to my mum when she first arrived at our house her bag would disappear into the other room carried by our little hands wed go down it check shed brought the sweets then quietly put it back with out her realising nanny can we have our sweets now wed say after your dinner shed reply like i said she was the proper nan she was a gossip monger my mum always joked to us girls that she was a walking newspaper mummy was often livid and annoyed when her own business was put round the family by nanny she went from family to family spreading gossip us girls hated it if we was ever out with nanny and she saw someone she knew we knew wed be standing there for a very long time one time she got well annoyed with me as i kept saying nanny lets go now while she was trying to talk to some women in the end i pushed her and she nearly toppled over and shouted at me and we went .nanny often came to our house as she was on her own her and her husband my grandad had separated years before when my mum was 14 they had never divorced he lived in peace haven with his women Mary O'Brien my nan lived on her own in nice flats in queen Elisabeth close north London it was my nans decision to leave him they hadn't spoken for years and then my nan left he met Mary O'Brien and lived with her she was an Irish women i still can picture her she never liked any of us my mum reckons she tried to poison us once when she invited us for dinner i hardly ever saw my grandad and really didn't know him i just remember him dying that he had took to drink and the drink caused cancer and he died in1970 aged 50 i remember he liked to play the piano and that he was all for his kids when he was young as my mum told me his favorite songs were Greensleeves and England's fields. on the first page of my life story is a photo of my grandad with my mum and her brother Ronnie feeding pigeons my nan is in the bottom picture and once again my grandad in the bottom right hand photo .i was about 8 years old and Laura 5 when we as a family began to realise there was something strange happening in our house.the very first thing that happened was to my mum yet she has only told us this years later apparently mummy was reading the bible in our bedroom at the bottom of our beds us girls were asleep when all of a sudden she heard the most beautiful music playing she wasn't sure were it was coming from so she carried on reading i don't remember this but apparently i woke up and asked what the music was so she knew it was real then as she sat there the pages of the bible started to turn by them selves several pages turned over my mum was quite shocked this was the first that she remembers s the first that me and Laura remember i s when Laura's sindy doll went missing we searched high and low for this doll i remember having a strange feeling about it anyway i looked under the sofa in the front room and daddy looked there too it wasn't there i looked again there it was right in view you couldn't have missed it under the sofa in perfect view .