The Story Starts With You

 Jim was only some 21 months younger than me. Mum talked of a laburnum in blossom outside the window of the Mansfield Nursing Home where he was born. He replaced me in the back bedroom at Heath Avenue, which I suppose served as a sort of nursery, and I moved to a smaller room over the front door. I can’t say I was overjoyed at this new baby in the house, ousting me from my privileged position of only child/grandchild - and a boy at that! Mum said that one day, when she was wheeling Jim in the pram and I was sitting on some sort of seat contraption on the front, a neighbour stopped to admire the adorable baby sitting up in his sunhat, with his ‘boot-button’ brown eyes (Dad’s description): enough was enough, and I leant over, seized the sunhat and threw it to the ground, saying ”There goes his sunbunnit!”. 

Alison

 One evening I remember him sitting at the bottom of the stairs in his pyjamas with a bad stomach ache. The doctor was asking him if he could describe the pain and he answered “I’ve got pink tummy-ache, and green tummy-ache and blue tummy-ache …” He was taken into hospital and stayed for a good week or more, with Mum restricted to very limited visits as was the norm then, but I don’t think they got to the bottom of it. [In fact I think stomach pain in small boys is relatively common and seems to be a sort of growing pain.] Granny Windsor would tell a funny story of hearing Jim weeping copiously on his way in from the garden one day to find his Mum, holding out an injured finger; then he stopped suddenly, looked intently at his finger and removed something from it, before saying “Oh, it’s only a bit of red cotton, I thought it was a bleed”, and returning sunnily to the garden. 

Alison

 Every so often on a Sunday morning, Dad would take Jim and I out in his car for a “Sunday Adventure’ so we’d all be out of the way while Mum was cooking Sunday lunch. A favourite route was past the pit and then the golf club until the road became an unmade rutted track. The car would lurch across the potholes (deliberately) and Jim and I would roll around in the back seat while Dad pretended to loose control of the steering. At one point this track went through several hundred yards of Forestry Commission pinewood, which was very frightening to us in its tall darkness, particularly when Dad would say he’d just seen a goblin watching us. This would be an opportunity for Dad to stall the car which he would only manage to restart just before ‘the goblin got us’ - Dad of course now a hero to the two of us, who had been shrieking in delicious terror “Quick, Daddy, quick”. Or when we were well into the countryside and out of sight of any habitation, he would again stall the car and then tell us he’d run out of petrol so there was nothing for it but to walk all the way back, which would be miles and miles. We couldn’t have enough ‘Sunday Adventures’! 

Alison

 At the age of 5, Jim joined me at the local State primary school, King Edward’s Infants and Junior School. The uniform was a bottle green blazer with the KE badge, a matching beret or cap according to gender, and a red tie. Jim was of course a quick learner and soon mastered his letters. Each morning when he was placed on the loo after breakfast the house would echo to ‘F-I-N-I-SH-T —— FINISHED!’. Apart from arriving and leaving together I never really came across Jim at school although I would sometimes spot him at playtime, more often than not standing by himself in the playground, watching rather than joining in. 

Alison