"Take Jimmy for a walk," my mother said as the hearse and coaches arrived. It seemed a relief to me, as we walked down the garden path and up the lane to the main road, that one distinct stage in the misery had abruptly came to an end.

Before leaving the house, I had been alone for a few minutes with my father, as a result of meeting my mother on the stairs.

"Would you like to slip in and say goodbye to your dad?" she said; she was still mopping her eyes. The bed had been pulled away from the wall a foot or so, for some reason and I stood behind the headrail looking through.

My father looked so normal that I felt a strong urge to appeal to him to wake, but as I touched his cold forehead through the rails I knew that it was no use.

I don't know why we walked the way we did. We could have walked in the opposite direction to the cemetery. Maybe it was because I had walked this way with my dad a few weeks before he died. One day during the summer I had arrived home from school to find him sitting alone at the table. He called me over, and by the quiet way he spoke to me I knew that he was upset, though he must have thought over what he was going to say, because he said it straight and without faltering.

"I want you to do your best at school and promise me to look after your Mother, because I won't always be here." I didn't want him to see me crying, so I walked away towards the fireguard. My father put his boots on and we went for a walk.

Opposite the old farm stables of his coal merchant days, we sat on a form. He said that his new boots, which had been provided by the British Legion, were making his ankles sore. Taking a razor blade from his waistcoat pocket, he unwrapped the paper and bending down, he cut slits around the top of each boot; then he winked at me and cutting the leather above his little toe he said, "That should ease the bugger."

Jimmy and I had almost reached the form where I had sat that day with my dad, when I heard the funeral procession approaching. I took my brothers hand and we ran and hid in a gateway until it had passed because I didn't want my Mother to see us.

Where we went or what we did after leaving the gateway I can't remember at all. I only know that looking back thirty-six years; the death of my Father gave me by far the worst experience of my life.

I had only known my Father for about seven years, because of course my first two or three years are a blank and his last two or three were spent on shift work or in hospital, during those lousy rotten days of the thirties. But the few years in between were marvelous.

My earliest memories are of smells of toast and frying bacon wafting up the stairs, and into the small back bedroom in the dark of early mornings in winter. My Father who was a coke and coal dealer, was up and out. There were three of us in the bed then, my Brother had not yet been born. This must have been the year that my older Sister started school, because after my Father slammed the door, my Mother would shout up - "Connie you'll be late."

The new council house was wired for electric light, but we only had bulbs in downstairs, at bedtime we went with a candle, my Mother following with a hot oven shelf wrapped in a piece of old sheet. Whoever was awakened in the night, by the feel of the cold "plate" would kick it out onto the floor, sometimes awakening the others, - "It's only the cold plate," was all that was needed to ensure a return to sleep.

Apart from selling coal and coke, my Father performed other services, such as carting and removals, including 'moonlight flirts' so there was always something different and interesting in the house. Something that someone had paid him in kind, or had just wanted to get shut of.

There were always plenty of books and I used to spend a lot of time looking at the pictures and sometimes the posh leather bindings with the silken bookmarks. I couldn't read and used to ask my mother what they said. One day I cut some pictures out of a lovely set of fishes. I took them downstairs to show my mother, but she played hell - "Where did you get the scissors? Your father will go mad!" I began to worry. But when my father arrived and was told about what I'd done, he said that if it pleased me then I could cut the pictures out, - "he can't read them," he argued, "And no one else wanted to read them." My mother's anxiety was now completely dispelled and she became annoyed at my father, for allowing me to spoil such lovely books.

We had lodgers to help out with the rent and one day there was such a rumpus downstairs - my father had hit the lodger. I hid on the 'big stair' halfway down the lobby. 'Old Chess' was behind with the rent and during an argument which arose when my father tried to make him stump up, old Chess had gone for the poker.

I was now under the kitchen table upon which the Copper was sat swinging his legs, and swapping yarns with my dad about the First World War. The cop got up to go and I remember him telling my dad , that if he pleaded self defense he would be O.K.

"Get your costume," my dad would say. "Were going for a swim." He'd take me to Pendleton Baths - Pengy or Pengleton as the district was locally known - "Where they have candlesticks on the manclepiece," he'd say. His artistic Indian tattoos used to attract many of the young fellows, who would stand around and ask him questions. The snakes coiled around his biceps, and the huge dragon snorting fire across his chest had a white spot in the centre of its body, the size of a tanner where the bullet had ripped through at 2^nd battle of Ypres. His dusty blood stained tunic used to hang behind the kitchen door until my mother threw it out. How he came to hang on to it after hospitalisation and three years as a prisoner of war has always been a mystery to me.