So… the first things I can remember, however vaguely from the mind of a child? hmmm? I keep thinking of that chintzy song from the 1980s. Oh yeah, “Life in a Northern Town”. Now I remember… by the “Dream Academy”, of all names. I should have known, and perhaps just noticed, something noteworthy about an academy of dreams!

“In winter nineteen sixty three
It felt like the world would freeze
With John F Kennedy…y…y…
And The Beatles.”

Standing in a short, neat row like the rest in our Northumbrian pit village, our little terraced house stood bedecked in snow. Perhaps it did resemble an idyllic, Dickensian Christmas card just somewhat. However, the scene from behind the warmly lit windows was far from anything like Yuletide merriment. The only clinking glass to be heard was sadly, every breakable object in the house being hurled at each other by my brawling parents.
Madly scrambling up the stairs, Karen and I heard the Christmas tree ornaments shatter around us… exploding like fireworks against the wall as we fled. Our bedroom door slammed shut just in time to hear the hallway mirror come crashing down in a million pieces. Huddled with my big sister against the window ledge, we pressed our faces against the frosty glass. Karen said she could see the shape of the Virgin Mary in the patterns of muted light being cast across our bedroom wall.
“Aah divn’t know who she is.” I whispered, trying to discern anything to even resemble a human being. The flickering forms actually terrified me. They could be the shadows of the gnarled, bony fingers of nasty little hob-goblins whom Karen told me lived under my bed. Every night I would check for them before cocooning myself deep beneath the covers, taking extra care to ensure that my hands were safely tucked away… lest they should be grabbed!
“Ye knaa nowt anyway!” Karen said in her strong Northumbrian accent, pounding a fist down upon my head. We whiled away another night of our parent’s battle time, living out fantasies in a world of toys and Fairy Princesses while the threats, screams and crashes went on and on from below.

Heeding Karen’s warning not to go downstairs lest I ‘get a hit ‘n aall’, I listened as every scream from my mother and bellowing yells of my father resounded through my body. Those cries of threats and abuse seemed to scratch themselves deeply into a part of me I could not have known existed. Playing over and over again like the break in a record, they truly were serving the very same purpose – to ruin what should or could have been a beautiful song.

Relief came with a shuddering slam of the front door. Dad had fled. At last I would be able to creep downstairs to find my Mam, perhaps to offer a comforting cuddle and survey the damage. But picking our way down a stairway strewn with shards of glass, we found our mother nowhere in sight. She was off, out that door… after him in the hottest pursuit.
With her fire fuelling a blindly raging inferno, Mam had clearly had enough. An astrologer might well quip – “What more could one expect when the warm, gentle flame of the Aries ‘Fire’ is fuelled by the wild, wicked wind of the Gemini ‘Air’?” My Arian mother had indeed been possessed by Mars, the God of War, as she chased the ‘sustenance’ of her burning vitality – her Gemini husband. All of which I knew nothing about, though certainly it all came cascading back when the time was ready. (Takes a moment to say a silent prayer to Linda Goodman whose books on her startling, life-long studies of astrology and humanity’s beautiful personal connections to all of those “signs” took me through great journeys of understanding like holding the hand of a wonderful friend sent straight from Heaven to gently and humorously show a way for us with such wisdom, strength and care.)

My mum knew too where to find him, licking his wounds, whilst trying to obliterate any memory of the responsibilities of a wife and children. There at the Red Lion, whatever was left of the housekeeping money was about to be squandered again on drink. Now, as an Aries woman myself, I would not like to have been in his shoes when a wife with fire shooting from her eye sockets walked through the door of that pub…

Time, it seemed, would afford opportunity enough for many re-enactments of that scene… in my own life, and in the lives of too many of us. And Time, it seems, affords me now the opportunity to take my turn to hold some hands, to wander through an understanding of many of the conundrums we face and work through in life. In this particular one, it appears, I took on more than many would have signed up for.

As the snow deepened, the faces of weather-weary people must have begun to look longingly at posters springing up here and there.
‘COME TO SUNNY AUSTRALIA’ they beckoned… with glossy pictures of happy families strolling along palm-lined beaches. A new life, promising jobs in a land of milk and honey began to tempt so many of those lost in the gloom of this miserable winter and economic recession.
Australia enjoyed an economic boom though, with vast mineral deposits being discovered all over the country. New industries spawned everywhere, requiring a vast influx of migrant labour to fuel a growing economy. In this bitter winter the lure was to prove irresistible to millions of families across Europe, including, it seemed… ours.