THROUGH THE YEARS.

Pictures left to right,1 My Uncle Gerald 2nd photo, left my Mum , middle Geralds wife( Patricia) right my Grandma (Olive).Click any picture to enlarge.
I was born in a (was then) small hamlet in Shottery,just afew hundred yds from Anne Hathaways Cottage in Stratford Upon Avon, in the 1940s,I was a war baby, my father was American/Canadian(Ray Story) serving in the Forces over here.My mother married him 6 months before I was born and they lived together for a few months before he was posted back to the States. I think he asked my mother to go with him, but i'm not certain of this, Could be me making a nice story out of that. My mother and me lived firstly in a terraced hse with her parents,then we all moved to a brand new semi-detached a few hundred yards away I think I was about 5 then.My grandparents were still quite young themselves (probably around early 40s)at that time,my grand father(Alfred Palmer) worked for the firm of N. C. Josephs who ran a large Factory doing mostly steel pressing and polishing, he was basically employed as a lorry driver but got on so well with the main boss Barney Joseph that he spent an equal amount of time driving him around.B Joseph had decided a while before to branch out and buy ground to put houses on, one of these houses when built we moved into.I almost forgot to mention my mothers brother(Gerald) also lived with us, he was doing National Service at the time of the move, he was just 18 and more like an elder brother to me than an uncle (it remained like that until he died about12 yrs ago). In those days we had a lovely little village primary school(its still there) called Shottery C of E school,this school only had 3 classrooms they were 5 to7yrs - 7to9yrs - 9to11yrs I attended here from 4 years to 11 years of age.my Mother and Uncle had both spent a year or two there when the family first moved from Wiltshire, they were actually taught by a young student teacher called Miss M Fortescue who went on to become head teacher and then on to teach both me and later my children too. At about the time I went from junior to senior schools my grandmother(Olive) died, she had played mother to me most of the time ( mum had to go out to work) and was dearly missed. The school was only 100yds across the road from the house, which was handy for nipping home for dinner etc.I remember the teachers could never work out how,(for safety) in icy weather they would put salt on the slides we used to make, then the next morning the slide was back, I would run over at night and put a bucket of water down 12 or 14ft long for the slide. To see more from our family visit my daughters blog pam-bigbustybikerbaby.blogspot.com.