I haven't been on "Rootschat" for a long time - years in fact. But much like the prodigal son, I'm back. Where I'm heading with this post, I don't know? but hopefully, it will create some interest.
I hope to achieve two things; Induce members to relate their or their relative's interesting life experiences and secondly to develop my own writing style.
So! here we go.
There's no such thing as an uninteresting life
PART ONE - What makes us.
We are a much-varied species; not just our skin colour or appearance But in our ways, our habits, our intellect, even the way we consider ourselves and treat our peers.
There are thousands of reasons for these differences, and it all begins with our parents and continues with every twist and turn of our lives. Apart from the obvious genetic traits that we inherit from our ancestors, we begin with a place on this planet. That is not only the physical place where we are born but the social environment into which we must learn to survive and tolerate. This social environment includes parents. friends, teachers and so many more; so even by mid-childhood we have become a very complex and unique character, How much more so by adulthood?
Born in northern England into a coal mining community not long after world war two, I suppose that the major influences on my early life would have been my family situation, a country just recovering from the horrors and the hardships of war, when people were looking to a future with some sort of promise and a healthy outlook, this was hoped to be an age of advancement. Then, of course, I was surrounded by coal mining families, my relatives were coal miners, our neighbours, everyone you knew seemed to be coal mining families, all with the common interests and goals that are evident in a close-knit community.
As a child, my parents were divorced before I was four years old and I wasn't to know my father until some years later. Together with my Mother and my younger brother we lived with my maternal grandparents. Grandad always seemed to cough quite a lot, not that it seemed like anything unusual to me at such a young age; although over the next few years I was to realise that this constant coughing was the dreadful results of a lifetime in the coal mines. Meanwhile Mum seemed to spend a great deal of time in a hospital a long way from grandad's house, she suffered from something called TB. My brother and I never seemed to worry about these matters, probably because we were always occupied with the many things a young boy spends his day's doing; building hideaways in the nearby fields, heading down the allotments to watch the steam trains, playing cowboys and injuns with our homemade bows and arrows, exploring new territories and a myriad of adventure that only can be imagined by a young boy. I guess that we enjoyed a freedom that doesn't seem possible these days.
As we grew older, my generation all developed their own very individual thoughts of what to expect from life and conversely, what they would put into life, South Yorkshire was little different to most other places; many of us went through childhood and school with the very likely prospects of working our whole life in the coal mines, whilst others may harbour some ambition to reach some other destination or status in life. Whatever we were envisioning in those early days, whether or not we would follow our idealised life plan was something that no one knew - and at that time I guess that we wouldn't have cared. This was our future, it would be exciting, it would be great, we were here to enjoy life and make the best of whatever it threw at us - Bring it on!
