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Frank's Life story.

My memories are like snapshots off an old Brownie Box camera.  They are there, they get reinforced as I grow older but I’m not sure they are accurate at all.

After starting to investigate family history, I tried for ages to get all the older members of the family to write their own life stories. No one would do it and I believe you shouldn’t ask people to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.

Too few people write about the vast majority of normal peoples lives. The famous, the rich & all leaders of the world are well documented. I would like to have read the experiences from my past.  About being a lead miner in the 1800s, an early charabanc and transport driver who survived the great war. One relative survived WW2 after being a slave worker down a mine for Adolph's Third Reich. I was nearly an American! Reading about living in America in the teen years of the nineteen hundreds would have been fascinating. One grandparent definitely went off to fight in the Napoleonic Wars!

I don't think my kids are going to be too interested but I wish my grandparents & great grandparents had done this for me.

In days of old when I was very young, things were different, in their own way too! I looked like a small child, even when I got my first long pants around 13. I was raised during a time when adults had the belief that "Children should be seen but not heard". I am sure that one fact infected my whole life. (1)

I started life with an outlook gained mainly from my mother, who was over protective. A dad, who was away most of the time, and seemed incapable of knowing what to do with a small boy. Like his father before him, he had his humour gene removed. My parents were always short of money & lived in the slum area of Moss Side in Manchester (not that a child knows this, what happens around them is considered the norm). I got a lot of my morals & outlook on life from the remnants of a Victorian outlook & at Sunday school in a Wesleyan Methodist Church on the corner of Great Western Street. (2)

I think all views on life are definitely tinted from your earliest age! Because I was an only child for the first nine years and that my mum followed in the footsteps of her mother & grandmother. Plus the fact that it was normal for parents to explained nothing to children, I think I just got shielded from awful lot from real life. Maybe I developed a habit of being a dreamer in a world of my own. I don’t seem to have questioned what went on around me and I obviously wasn’t as curious as I am today. In fact, children who asked too many questions were considered a nuisance & certainly discouraged, usually by being shouted at!

 

 

 

 

 

(1) “Children should be seen and not heard”
 I tried hard to find where this saying came from and all I got was ~ Proverb of Unknown Origin! It was certainly practiced by all the adults that I knew, parents, teachers and by church. You were passed down knowledge but you were not meant to question any of it. Any demonstration of too much enthusiasm was looked upon as showing off. I always thought the saying was left over from the Victorian age but I am sure it goes much further back in time.
(2) “Wesleyan Methodist Church” John Wesley was famous for his preaching. He travelled on horse back the length & breadth of Great Britain. Clergymen, magistrates and, at times, mobs of people, persecuted him. Feeling, however, that the church failed in its duty to call sinners to repentance, that many of the clergymen were corrupt and that souls were perishing in their sins, Wesley regarded himself as commissioned by God to bring about revival in the church; and no opposition, or persecution, or obstacles could prevail against the divine urgency and authority of his beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley.