My parents were born in Ireland in 1931. My mother was the eleventh of thirteen children bought up on a small farm in Southern Ireland that passed down through her mother's side when her brothers went to America. Her father had been a valet for Lord Kenmare in Killarney and then London before returning home. When my mother finished her education at the age of sixteen in the late 1940s, she took the boat train to England where she joined some of her siblings. She spent most of her working life in London as the banqueting secretary at the Charing Cross Hotel. My father was the fourth of six children brought up in Northern Ireland. While his mother raised the children in Derry, she also made a living sewing. His father was in the British Army and, after the Second World War, he stayed in London where he was an electrician's mate until he retired. My father, I think, finished school at fifteen and then did shop work before joining the Merchant Navy at eighteen. He left at twenty-one and moved to London in the early 1950s where he joined the Post Office and lived with his father. My parents married in 1959 and my three siblings and I were born soon after. Rather than bring children up in London, they moved to Bournemouth in 1968.