The other important birth in that same year was that of Margaret Lillian Healy, born on 18 January 1926 at No 6 Gabriel Street in Southwark, London, born to parents John Healey and Margaret Healey. My mother Margaret (who everyone called Maggie) was one of ten children, three boys and seven girls.

My dads family moved into Gabriel St where my mums family already lived, which meant that all the children ended up going to the same school together, it was at that school where my parents first met. All the Healey children got to know all the Carrigan children (which sounds like the beginning of a Fairy story), but in the pre war days the close knit street communities really did get on a lot like the Walton’s, and people really did not bother to lock their doors. The World was a different place then.

In his youth my dad was quite the ladies man, with many girls trying to win his attention, which he gloried in to the point of arrogance, my mum on the other hand, although a very beautiful girl, talented acrobat and tap dancer, was quiet and turned down the many boys who also flocked around her, because as she told me many times, she only really ever had eyes for Harry.

In those early times just before the war many working class children left school very young, at around fourteen years of age, and so it was with Harry and Maggie. They managed to get a job together sorting through mountains of old rags and clothes, my dads job was to stuff them into big bins and then jump them down, my parents were also very active in their respective hobbies, dad took up boxing and football, he also started to dabble with the piano, not in any classical sense but in the grand old tradition of the pub sing along, he later grew into a very talented pianist. My mum’s hobby of acrobatics and dancing led her to join a respected dance troop called Madam Terrie’s, she loved to tap dance and really wanted it to be her career, which lead her to audition for a very well known dance troop who had been on the bill at the London Palladium. Young Margaret was over the Moon when she won her place, she was going to be one of the twenty tiny tappers dance troop which would have taken her into a life of show business. But it was not meant to be, the war broke out and all normal life came to an end and nobody knew for how long. Dancing became a thing of the past as surviving became top on everyone’s list.

Harry was called up and my mum’s dancers were disbanded while everyone fought just to survive. I was told many War stories by my parents, of life sleeping in the underground stations, of German planes machine gunning the hop picking huts in Kent because they thought they were Army barracks, and of watching the battle of Britain live over head as my parents families picked fruit and hops on their annual holiday during 1940, the only holiday many Londoners ever had, including myself up until my early teens. But for my dad the war held a bitter memory, one I did not find out about for many years. My dad was enlisted into the Royal Fusiliers, and from what I could gather did his training well, but when it came time for him to go over sea’s to fight, he along with his best army buddy deserted, I never got to know the reason why, but from the man I came to know in later life I do not think it was because of fear alone, but I would not have blamed him if it was. Like so many others he was thrown into that terrible war while still only a boy himself. After deserting his own mother would have nothing to do with him so my mum’s mother (a lovely woman by all accounts) hid him and looked after him until she persuaded Harry to give himself up. When he did this he was promptly court marshalled and sent to a harsh military prison, if he had deserted after he had gone abroad he could well have been shot. My mum and her family stuck by him and were his only light at that dark time, maybe a forewarning of things to come.