Tendring Topics……..on line
Grandfathers
Prince
Charles, Prince of Wales, was born on 14th November 1948. I well remember hearing the official
announcement of his birth on the radio. My 24 year old wife Heather and I had
been married for two and a half years. We were living in a bungalow just off
the Norwich Road
in Barham, three or four miles north of Ipswich .
In the autumn Heather had been diagnosed as suffering from laryngeal and
pulmonary tuberculosis. She was confined
to her bed and we were waiting to learn when she would be transported to a
sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester .. There she was to spend more than a year, a period punctuated by six
weeks in Papworth Hospital, where she underwent life-saving but disabling surgery (thoracoplasty) involving
the removal of eight ribs. This permanently collapsed her left lung allowing it
to heal.
Visiting Heather in Nayland Sanatorium
in summer 1949. Patients having thoracoplasty
were expected to lose a stone in weight during the surgery, which involved
three operations with rests of a fortnight after the first and second. They
were therefore required to put on a stone beforehand. Heather was taken to Papworth for surgery a
day or two after this photo was taken. It is my only photo of Heather in which she appears to be 'plump'!
In November 1948 we had our own worries
and. I can’t pretend that we were particularly interested in the royal birth. I
do though remember the BBC announcer telling us, with a plummy accent (BBC
radio news-readers all spoke posh in those days!) that Her Royal Highness the
Princess Elizabeth ‘has given birth to a
Prince’. I remember thinking - and
probably saying to Heather, ‘Fancy her
giving birth to a prince. I thought that members of the Royal
Family had babies just like the rest of us!’
Heather was discharged from the sanatorium ‘cured’.
Despite her subsequent lifelong frailty, four years later she gave birth at
home, to the first of our two sons. They, in due course, gave us three
grandchildren, two boys and a girl.
Heather died at the age of 82, three months after our diamond wedding
anniversary. She had lived to see all
three of her grandchildren grow through schooldays and adolescence and graduate with good degrees at universities.
Now,
the baby prince who was born while Heather was waiting to be transported to the
Sanatorium is himself a grandfather.
His grandchildren (I have no doubt that he’ll have more!) will have
privileges ours have never known – but they certainly won’t have the freedom to
choose their careers, their friends, their partners and their paths through life that ours have
had. I hope that if, like me, he reaches
his nineties, he will be as proud of the progress of his grandchildren as I am
of mine.
My grandchildren!
All three are graduates (their grandma and I were both proud to leave school at 16 with our General Schools Certificate and Matric. Exemption!) Jo is the real intellectual. She is already an M.A. and an M.Sc. She has been working as a Social Worker seconded to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield
Hospital and she has now been accepted for
a Ph.D. Course studying clinical psychology at Sheffield University.
on all the other girls!
Chris
has been teaching English in Taiwan
for almost a decade. A few years ago he was named ‘Teacher of the year’ by the educational organisation employing him. He speaks Mandarin like a native and I
notice that on his ‘Facebook’ page he now puts messages in Chinese
calligraphy! He graduated in Fine Art
and has produced pencil portraits of family members using old photographs as
references. One of his drawings of his grandma
as the school-girl of 15 that she was when she and I first met, almost reduced
me to tears when he gave it to me.
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Heather Gilbert (destined to become
Heather Hall) aged 15 – drawn over 65 years later by her grandson Chris!
I wrote about
grandson Nick’s career in this blog a few weeks ago. He graduated in Photography and after rising
to the very top in the European Travel Agency, has founded and is the Managing
Director of his own International Tourism Consultancy (www.SE1media.com) He has a charming Belgian
girl-friend, Romy Cywie, who has been welcomed as a member of ‘the family’ (I
now make a point of remembering her birthday too!) Can you wonder that I am proud of my three
grandchildren?
The Prince of
Wales will be very fortunate if, at my age, he has a family as warm, as united
and as supportive as I have. I am only
sorry that their grandma isn’t here to enjoy hearing about their activities and appreciating them all as much as I do.
St George of the Exchequer to the rescue!
Interest on mortgages for house purchase is at
an unprecedentedly low level. Good news
for borrowers but not so good for those of us who see our life savings
entrusted to banks and building societies. Those savings are steadily decreasing
in value as inflation outstrips interest rates. It also means that monthly
mortgage repayments are low. They are within the capacity of a great many
would-be home owners. However, financial
institutions have recent memories of being saved by government bale-outs from
bankruptcy resulting from by unwise lending. To prevent a recurrence they are
demanding much larger deposits – perhaps as much as 20 or 25 percent of the
total loan required – before granting mortgages. These are beyond the reach of most young
people, particularly those who (thanks to the government’s policies) are
already burdened with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt.
That’s
.where George Osborne our Chancellor of the Exchequer rides in like a knight in
shining armour, to save the situation.
He is going to lend those eager young couples the money they need for
their deposits. He started the scheme on
quite a modest scale but is now proposing to widen the scheme to include purchasers of existing as well as new properties. Prospective home buyers will need to have saved no more than five percent of
the money they hope to borrow from a bank or building society. This, he hopes,
will not only help those who want to fulfil the Conservative dream of a nation
of home-owners, but will also encourage developers to build and thus help
Britain out of recession
And perhaps it
will – eventually. Immediately though it has increased the demand for houses
from those who, thanks to Mr Osborne’s generosity (with our money!) can aspire
to home ownership. It will take many months
at least for any building programme to take effect. In the meantime market forces will ensure
that house prices once again rise above the rate of inflation until the bubble
bursts and we have yet another financial crisis. This time the government has
been warned by the Institute
of Directors
It doesn't appear to have occurred to Mr Osborne that if loaning most of the deposit money required for house purchase was too risky for the banks and building societies, it might be too risky for him too. Perhaps the thought would have crossed his mind had he been taking risks with his own money, rather than ours!
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