Henry

Henry had a harder life than most of us and he never fully escaped his childhood. Born on 11th May, 1935, he was just a small baby in Durrow later that year when my father was taken ill with double pneumonia and pleurisy. I remember being horrified when the doctor told our mother to leave the baby be as her husband, being the breadwinner, required all her attention. Henry caught pneumonia and was lying crying in a drawer by the side of the fire. Uncle Charlie arrived and took over the nursing of the ill baby, sponging his forehead with cold water to bring down his temperature and offering him boiled water in the baby bottle. A bond grew between uncle and nephew from that day.

Henry was 13 when Margaret died. Over the years I learned about why he never developed beyond that age. My parents had forbidden him to visit his sister in the hospital telling him she hated him. Unknown to them he went in to ask Margaret if she loved him and she told him she loved all her brothers and sisters and that seemed to set his mind at rest. After her death they told him they wished he had died instead of her and told him there was never to be any laughter again in the home. Like Ted and Helen he attended the Preston School and he was a keen student loving his Literature and History and Geography in particular. I can recall his reciting in a deep guttural voice: 'Tell Peggotty Barkis is willing.'

In due course, he came to England, to Lincoln first and then to London and he stayed at a Salvation Army hostel where Mike and I visited him on his final birthday and he confided many things about his past to us. He had dreamed of becoming a clergyman but felt he wasn't good enough. He was deeply religious and was in the church well before every service, handing out the hymn and prayer books. God was kind to him in the end as he just collapsed and died at a bus stop while on his way back to the hostel after a shopping trip. Old age or long-drawn-out suffering would have been hard for him.

Header Image: Fordville my grandparents' house where my father grew up.