7) A Trip to Britain
As Jonathan grew I missed my family more and more and was keen to go and show them my baby. Jonny thought it was a good idea but he did not want to come too. So it was decided that I would take Jonathan on my own. I left Chingola at the end of April and returned at the end of May. I was not concerned about the eleven-hour journey with a 10-month-old baby. Whenever we took Jonathan for a trip in the car he promptly fell asleep, I was sure that he would sleep all the way to London. He slept in the car all the way from Chingola to Ndola but once on the plane he was wide awake and did not sleep until the last hour out of Gatwick when it was time to wake him up. As he was under two years old and we only paid a 10% fare for him we did not get a seat for him. He had a cot that hooked over the luggage rack but he screamed blue murder when I tried to put him in that. As soon as the plane had taken off and we were told that we could unfasten our seat belts the person in front of me pushed back his seat and left me with no room at all. It was not a comfortable trip. Every now and again one of the hostesses would come passed and say in a loud voice “You don’t have much room there do you?” but it made no difference and he kept his seat like that for the whole journey.
Dulcie and Alan came to meet me at the airport and took me to their house for the night. By this time they had three babies. Martin who was born 13th Dec 1962 so as this was 1966 he would have been almost four years old, then came little Frances who was a year younger, born on 22nd January 1964 and then came the baby Paula who was born 17th October 1965 so was exactly four months younger than Jonathan. They later had another daughter Clare born on 24th June 1970. Dulcie and Alan had arranged to have a short holiday in Swansea while I was there which was good, as we had not seen each other for two years. Alan drove us all down to Swansea the next day, I wonder how we all fitted into his car, three adults and four babies and all our luggage. And when we got there I wonder how we fitted into the house, my Gran and Grandpa and my Dad were all still alive then so it would have been eight adults and four babies.
Dulcie and Alan were living Shoreham by Sea in Sussex at the time. Alan was an electrical engineer. Dulcie had met him when he has been working with Phillips. He used to install and service the medical equipment that Phillips made. Dulcie was a radiographer working at the new Singleton hospital and that is how they met. Dulcie had done much better at school than I had. She had stayed on to do her “O” and “A” levels and got good results. When she got the results of her exams she was not really sure what she wanted to do and had first though that she would do pharmacy. (I think she even started the course) She was talking to Linda Chappell’s mother about her plans and said that she was thinking of doing pharmacy and Mrs. Chappell said “Oh I did not know that you liked animals” Dulcie had not been qualified very long when she met and married Alan. I remember she used to tell us terrible tales about the state of accident victims that she had had to x-ray on the days she was on duty in the emergency ward. She used to work in the wards too. One day she asked an elderly patient who she had to give head x-rays if his teeth were his own. He assured her that they were and she went ahead with the procedure. When she checked the plates to see if they were all right to send to the doctor she could see that the patients teeth were obviously false so the whole thing had to be done again. She told the patient. “I asked you if your teeth were your own and you said they were now I have to do it all over again.’ The elderly gentleman replied “They are mine, I paid for them I did not get them on the National Service.”
When they were first married they lived with Alan’s parents in Greenwich in London but soon bought their own house in Eltham also in London, moving to Shoreham by Sea in 1966. They eventually moved to the village of Cheddar in 1970 and live there still. Not long after they were married Alan left his job with Phillips and went to work for IBM the computer company. They were just coming into England at the time and needed a lot of new staff. I remember staying with them for a short visit when he was in training with IBM and he used to come home and tell us how wonderful the computers were. I used to ask him stupid questions like, “Can computers speak Welsh?”, “Can computers read books?”, “Can computers hear you speak?” I was not serious I was just trying to think of the most outlandish things to ask. Understandably Alan told me I was a nut and of course they couldn’t but here we are only 40 years latter and computer are doing all those things. He showed us pictures of his computers and they filled a whole room and I am told that they had less memory than the small desktop computer that I am using now.
I remember when we got to the house in Swansea my Dad opened the door. I had Jonathan in my arms and of course Dad gave us both a big hug and a kiss. He told me later that he had seen Jonathan’s face when he opened the door although at that time there had been a slight improvement in his sight and he could see light and dark and could tell the outline of someone standing in front of him, he could not normally see a persons features and could not recognise anyone but he said that he had seen Jonathan and was very pleased about it. Dad got around his own neighbourhood quite well on his own by then and he would take Jonathan down to the shops with him when he went to introduce him around to all the people. I spent the month seeing relatives and just being with my family. After only two years in Africa my blood had thinned or whatever it is that makes you more or less sensitive to heat and cold. It was May and in England spring, in fact almost summer. I was cold all the time. I borrowed my sisters’ warm clothes and while they walked round in summer dresses I was wearing winter woollies, people must have thought I was a little odd, but I really was cold just about all the time. Jonathan wore his cousins’ jerseys to keep him warm but he was not used to being so wrapped up and did not like it at all.
My paternal grandmother was still alive then and we went to visit her in her home in Llanelli. Amelia (Amy) one of the twins lived next door to her mother with her husband Frank and their son Mark. Amy was the only one of the girls to marry a non-Italian. Frank was a tall thin Londoner who was a professional footballer when Amy first met him. He had played for Southampton and Stoke-on-Trent I think. I remember he was the goalie. Amy was a jolly outgoing girl who always had an answer for everything. Frank was quiet and more withdrawn but they were a good couple. When they had first married they went to live in London and Amy used to tell the story of their early marriage. She said that they had had a few arguments and she had stormed at quiet Frank “I’m leaving, I’m going home to my mother”. Frank looked up from the newspaper he was reading and said “That’s a good idea, lets both go and then we might get something decent to eat”. Needless to say she never tried that line again. Before her marriage, Amy had worked with my parents in their café. I’m sure her bubbly personality was a great asset. She loved to grow her nails long and kept them beautifully manicured and wore very bright nail varnish. She was the first person I saw wearing nail varnish that was not red. She went to Italy on holiday once and there you could buy blue, green, yellow or any other colour varnishes that were not available in Britain at the time. I remember her once coming to work with a different colour on each finger it certainly was a talking point. Another thing I remember about her was that she would not use cloth handkerchiefs as most of us did in those days. She thought that they were great harbourers of germs and so she used Kleenex tissues, she always had a box of them with her. She and Frank used to have big discussions on which was the best way to dispose of the used tissues, one of them, I am not sure which thought that it was healthier to put them in the fire and the other thought it was best to flush them down the toilet. It was an on going discussion that I don’t remember ever being resolved. By the time I went to see them while on holiday in 1966 Frank had his own business selling Italian foods wholesale to the delicatessens. He might not have been born an Italian but he had become an adopted one by then.
Amy’s twin sister Adeline was a much quieter girl. She had married a young Italian called Silvio he was from Sardinia if I remember rightly. She obviously carried the twin gene as she had twin boys and then a little girl. I think that Silvio had been an electrician but by that time he was working for Frank in the Italian Food business.
Theresa by then was back in Swansea with her daughter Rita. She had remarried another Italian called Franco. I think he was from a place called Ischia. She had two sons called Adrian and Paul and a daughter called Caroline by that marriage.
Cousins on my mother’s side were fewer. There was Uncle Gus and his wife Assunta’s children, Gloria, Anita, Rosanna and young Mario. I remember on of the girls, either Gloria or Anita getting almost hysterical because she had swallowed her chewing gum. My Mom, Aunty Assunta, and possibly my gran were sitting in the living room and they heard a terrible scream from the hallway where we kids were playing. I had visions for a long time of Adele being dropped on the floor as she was certainly on the floor when I went into the living room, but I suppose my Mom, who had been feeding her at the time, just put her there. The adults all fussed around the screaming child and it took them a little while to work out that she had just swallowed her gum. Maybe she had been told like the rest of us that you would die if you swallowed gum and she was just more gullible than we were. Gloria had a lovely soprano voice and sang in concerts, she obviously managed to get the balance between Italian and Welsh just right.
Uncle Eric and Aunty Elfina had three boys, Paul, Lawrence, and Baby Eric. Poor kid he was called Baby Eric by all the family until he was quite big. Paul helped his Dad in their business and he later became the Mayor of Swansea, in fact he was actually the first Lord Mayor of Swansea when Swansea became a city. That must be my only claim to fame, that I was first cousin to the first Lord Mayor of the City of Swansea.
I don’t remember seeing any of my Dad’s brothers when I went back that year. Lou was married to Tess and they had two girls Bernadette and Michelle. George was married to Val (I think she is one of the bridesmaids in the photo of Theresa’s wedding) and they had one son called Michael. Fred was married to a girl called Cherry and they had one son called Jonathan.
I enjoyed my stay in Swansea but I did miss Jonny and was not too sad when it was time to go home again. Mum and Dad came to see me off at Heathrow airport and I remember there was a very long delay. I was supposed to fly via Entebbe in Uganda but there had been a coup and they did not want to risk landing there. It took them quite a long time to reschedule the flight and we did our stopover in Nairobi instead. These were the days before Jumbos and there were no non-stop flights between London and southern Africa. One good thing about the long delay was that Jonathan was very tired when we eventually got on our plane and so he slept all the way.
Dulcie and Alan came to meet me at the airport and took me to their house for the night. By this time they had three babies. Martin who was born 13th Dec 1962 so as this was 1966 he would have been almost four years old, then came little Frances who was a year younger, born on 22nd January 1964 and then came the baby Paula who was born 17th October 1965 so was exactly four months younger than Jonathan. They later had another daughter Clare born on 24th June 1970. Dulcie and Alan had arranged to have a short holiday in Swansea while I was there which was good, as we had not seen each other for two years. Alan drove us all down to Swansea the next day, I wonder how we all fitted into his car, three adults and four babies and all our luggage. And when we got there I wonder how we fitted into the house, my Gran and Grandpa and my Dad were all still alive then so it would have been eight adults and four babies.
Dulcie and Alan were living Shoreham by Sea in Sussex at the time. Alan was an electrical engineer. Dulcie had met him when he has been working with Phillips. He used to install and service the medical equipment that Phillips made. Dulcie was a radiographer working at the new Singleton hospital and that is how they met. Dulcie had done much better at school than I had. She had stayed on to do her “O” and “A” levels and got good results. When she got the results of her exams she was not really sure what she wanted to do and had first though that she would do pharmacy. (I think she even started the course) She was talking to Linda Chappell’s mother about her plans and said that she was thinking of doing pharmacy and Mrs. Chappell said “Oh I did not know that you liked animals” Dulcie had not been qualified very long when she met and married Alan. I remember she used to tell us terrible tales about the state of accident victims that she had had to x-ray on the days she was on duty in the emergency ward. She used to work in the wards too. One day she asked an elderly patient who she had to give head x-rays if his teeth were his own. He assured her that they were and she went ahead with the procedure. When she checked the plates to see if they were all right to send to the doctor she could see that the patients teeth were obviously false so the whole thing had to be done again. She told the patient. “I asked you if your teeth were your own and you said they were now I have to do it all over again.’ The elderly gentleman replied “They are mine, I paid for them I did not get them on the National Service.”
When they were first married they lived with Alan’s parents in Greenwich in London but soon bought their own house in Eltham also in London, moving to Shoreham by Sea in 1966. They eventually moved to the village of Cheddar in 1970 and live there still. Not long after they were married Alan left his job with Phillips and went to work for IBM the computer company. They were just coming into England at the time and needed a lot of new staff. I remember staying with them for a short visit when he was in training with IBM and he used to come home and tell us how wonderful the computers were. I used to ask him stupid questions like, “Can computers speak Welsh?”, “Can computers read books?”, “Can computers hear you speak?” I was not serious I was just trying to think of the most outlandish things to ask. Understandably Alan told me I was a nut and of course they couldn’t but here we are only 40 years latter and computer are doing all those things. He showed us pictures of his computers and they filled a whole room and I am told that they had less memory than the small desktop computer that I am using now.
I remember when we got to the house in Swansea my Dad opened the door. I had Jonathan in my arms and of course Dad gave us both a big hug and a kiss. He told me later that he had seen Jonathan’s face when he opened the door although at that time there had been a slight improvement in his sight and he could see light and dark and could tell the outline of someone standing in front of him, he could not normally see a persons features and could not recognise anyone but he said that he had seen Jonathan and was very pleased about it. Dad got around his own neighbourhood quite well on his own by then and he would take Jonathan down to the shops with him when he went to introduce him around to all the people. I spent the month seeing relatives and just being with my family. After only two years in Africa my blood had thinned or whatever it is that makes you more or less sensitive to heat and cold. It was May and in England spring, in fact almost summer. I was cold all the time. I borrowed my sisters’ warm clothes and while they walked round in summer dresses I was wearing winter woollies, people must have thought I was a little odd, but I really was cold just about all the time. Jonathan wore his cousins’ jerseys to keep him warm but he was not used to being so wrapped up and did not like it at all.
My paternal grandmother was still alive then and we went to visit her in her home in Llanelli. Amelia (Amy) one of the twins lived next door to her mother with her husband Frank and their son Mark. Amy was the only one of the girls to marry a non-Italian. Frank was a tall thin Londoner who was a professional footballer when Amy first met him. He had played for Southampton and Stoke-on-Trent I think. I remember he was the goalie. Amy was a jolly outgoing girl who always had an answer for everything. Frank was quiet and more withdrawn but they were a good couple. When they had first married they went to live in London and Amy used to tell the story of their early marriage. She said that they had had a few arguments and she had stormed at quiet Frank “I’m leaving, I’m going home to my mother”. Frank looked up from the newspaper he was reading and said “That’s a good idea, lets both go and then we might get something decent to eat”. Needless to say she never tried that line again. Before her marriage, Amy had worked with my parents in their café. I’m sure her bubbly personality was a great asset. She loved to grow her nails long and kept them beautifully manicured and wore very bright nail varnish. She was the first person I saw wearing nail varnish that was not red. She went to Italy on holiday once and there you could buy blue, green, yellow or any other colour varnishes that were not available in Britain at the time. I remember her once coming to work with a different colour on each finger it certainly was a talking point. Another thing I remember about her was that she would not use cloth handkerchiefs as most of us did in those days. She thought that they were great harbourers of germs and so she used Kleenex tissues, she always had a box of them with her. She and Frank used to have big discussions on which was the best way to dispose of the used tissues, one of them, I am not sure which thought that it was healthier to put them in the fire and the other thought it was best to flush them down the toilet. It was an on going discussion that I don’t remember ever being resolved. By the time I went to see them while on holiday in 1966 Frank had his own business selling Italian foods wholesale to the delicatessens. He might not have been born an Italian but he had become an adopted one by then.
Amy’s twin sister Adeline was a much quieter girl. She had married a young Italian called Silvio he was from Sardinia if I remember rightly. She obviously carried the twin gene as she had twin boys and then a little girl. I think that Silvio had been an electrician but by that time he was working for Frank in the Italian Food business.
Theresa by then was back in Swansea with her daughter Rita. She had remarried another Italian called Franco. I think he was from a place called Ischia. She had two sons called Adrian and Paul and a daughter called Caroline by that marriage.
Cousins on my mother’s side were fewer. There was Uncle Gus and his wife Assunta’s children, Gloria, Anita, Rosanna and young Mario. I remember on of the girls, either Gloria or Anita getting almost hysterical because she had swallowed her chewing gum. My Mom, Aunty Assunta, and possibly my gran were sitting in the living room and they heard a terrible scream from the hallway where we kids were playing. I had visions for a long time of Adele being dropped on the floor as she was certainly on the floor when I went into the living room, but I suppose my Mom, who had been feeding her at the time, just put her there. The adults all fussed around the screaming child and it took them a little while to work out that she had just swallowed her gum. Maybe she had been told like the rest of us that you would die if you swallowed gum and she was just more gullible than we were. Gloria had a lovely soprano voice and sang in concerts, she obviously managed to get the balance between Italian and Welsh just right.
Uncle Eric and Aunty Elfina had three boys, Paul, Lawrence, and Baby Eric. Poor kid he was called Baby Eric by all the family until he was quite big. Paul helped his Dad in their business and he later became the Mayor of Swansea, in fact he was actually the first Lord Mayor of Swansea when Swansea became a city. That must be my only claim to fame, that I was first cousin to the first Lord Mayor of the City of Swansea.
I don’t remember seeing any of my Dad’s brothers when I went back that year. Lou was married to Tess and they had two girls Bernadette and Michelle. George was married to Val (I think she is one of the bridesmaids in the photo of Theresa’s wedding) and they had one son called Michael. Fred was married to a girl called Cherry and they had one son called Jonathan.
I enjoyed my stay in Swansea but I did miss Jonny and was not too sad when it was time to go home again. Mum and Dad came to see me off at Heathrow airport and I remember there was a very long delay. I was supposed to fly via Entebbe in Uganda but there had been a coup and they did not want to risk landing there. It took them quite a long time to reschedule the flight and we did our stopover in Nairobi instead. These were the days before Jumbos and there were no non-stop flights between London and southern Africa. One good thing about the long delay was that Jonathan was very tired when we eventually got on our plane and so he slept all the way.
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