The debt we owe them

 

Subject: The debt we owe them

One of the incomplete phases in my life is that I didn't discover knowledge of my parents lives before they married and in the period when I disrupted any serenity they might of had as a couple by arriving, squawking and squirming into their lives. .  That they were in love with each other until they died is clearly evident and I'm lucky to have heard and recorded many conversations between them when the concern for each other flows across the expanse of time. The recording were laboriously captured on open reel tapes, made and sent, not as today's intermate messages are sent at the click of a button but in those days, stowed on a magnetic tape wound on a small plastic reel, placed in a box suitably stamped and franked and then handed in at the post office to start its 3/5 week trip on a mail carrying passenger ship. Where ever I happened to be living at that time equipped with a bulky tape recorder I switched onto play and waited to hear Mom and Dad reciting their lives at an address I knew so well, the sitting room, the furniture and two ageing parents who thoughtlessly I had parted company with on reaching 21 and set off on my own travels.

I suppose it's only when you get old yourself and have your own family scattered around the world do you realise the enormity of leaving home to live somewhere else.. More so in those days when few people made a break and moved far away from home, 20 miles was average, only a bus ride away.. Those links which are  important to maintain were irrevocably broken as a new environment and new friends formed into a new bubble as the parental bubble, was put aside.

I always tried to maintain the link as best I could with lengthy letters, audio tapes and film clips of the places I visited and stories of the friends I made along the way but nothing made up for my own presence, especially for my Mom who had had such a difficult time bringing me into this world. We are essentially selfish at heart, perhaps we have to be to survive. It's made easier today's with the easy capture through the smart phone camera and the miraculous ability to transmit images and messages in nano seconds to anywhere  in the world, it certainly has been a game changer for the nuclear family.

But beyond this there is still an indistinct image or knowledge of the lives of our parents before they met, the conditions they grew up in, the town and the schools they attended and their own home life and upbringing. One of my cousins has completed  a family tree of our family living in Bradford in the early part of the 20th century. It reveals or substantiates ones own memories of the city fabric in this period after the First World War. The privation, the row upon row of small black grey, soot impregnated houses facing directly onto a cobbled street. No garden, only a well scrubbed step which led from the front door straight onto the pavement which itself led to the satanic mill lurking, a reminder of the  domination it represented on everyone's life, standing sentinel at the end of the road, waiting for the siren to call, at 7am the first shift to start work.  

The small closed rooms, the tiny kitchen two bedrooms upstairs and a toilet outside opposite the coal house. No bathroom or bath, no central heating only a small coal fire to heat the house. Is it any wonder that people visiting from abroad, from those lands of plenty such as the USA, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand wondered, not at the welcome they were given  but for them at least, the straightened circumstance under which people lived in these much vaunted islands. The gracious homes where today the tourist flock, the large walled estates and magnificent gardens was one prospect but  only a few miles away at an appropriate distance, towns distinguished by their squaller providing a stark contrast to the democracy of one person one vote and it's suggestion of equality.

What were the inner workings of the mind of my Mom and Dad as they grew up, what were their dreams, their aspirations. I will never know since it was an age when children didn't  ask such questions of their parents and probably didn't think to ask since we were captured in our own bubble which was the experience we had and was all we knew.

So much of my own knowledge of my parents is seen from the security they gave me and the unqualified love they offered. At that stage i didn't recognise the word love, it was taken for granted as so many important things are and it only came into focus later as a reflection of the debt I owe them.