A Stitch in Time

At last I am writing this book. I've been laid up in bed with a cold virus for several weeks, so have had the opportunity to put pen to paper. Something else has happened to me this year. I've been terminated by a Maltese lady I had been working for for four weeks in the city of Exeter, Devon. The story begins in 1939 when I was born in London weighing just four pounds. My parents called me Sheila Mary. My daddy was a Southern Irish man, just over from Limerick to make his fortune, when he, Johnny Dowling, met my mum, Gladys May South. Her parents had a little grocery shop in Islington, London. After they married, my Mother and Father took a little flat in Stoke Newington. It wasn't long before Daddy's sister, my Aunt Mary, came to stay to make her fortune also. She started training to be a nurse, as a lot of Irish girls did in those days. She was only twenty-three, my Mum was twenty and Daddy twenty-six. It was difficult for Irish people to get accommodation in London. Most bed and breakfast houses and flats had notices in their windows stating: Flat to let. No Irish need apply. Dad was working as a Barman in a pub when they started courting. Mum took my lovely Granddad Charlie in to meet him one day and he made the mistake of shaking the wrong Irish Barman's hand! They were both called John and lived over the pub too. Johnny and Gladys had a short courtship. They got married and decided to apply for their own public house. It wasn't long before Watney's Brewers offered them the George IV in Kentish Town, and so we all moved into the pub. Then war broke out. My dad was called up to the Army. The Royal Ulster Rifles. He arranged for two young Irish barmaids to come over to England and help Mum run the pub as she was under twenty-one. My Granddad, Charlie South, a seaman on his last trip before buying a little Inn in Buckinghamshire, was on the London steamer Merel which was struck by one of our own mines on December 8th, 1939 - the beginning of the Second World War. It sank within four minutes and only two of her crew of seventeen were saved. Both were badly injured. A third man was picked up dead. One of the crew of a motor boat which put out on hearing the explosion stated afterwards that the Merel, which was blown up on the South East coast - in British waters, must have been blown to smithereens. The forepart of the ship had been blown to pieces. No one in that part of the ship could have stood a chance. My Granddad Charlie was at the wheel at the time. My Grandmother and her children, on hearing the news on the radio, were devastated. I was eight months old and cannot remember sitting on my Granddad's knee. My mother told me he was delighted to have a granddaughter.