Beggins

A true story of a Belfast boy who grew up in tough times. His father left the family home to find work elsewhere when he was 8 years old and two weeks before his fifth child was born.He never returned and only on a rare occasion did his wife receive any support from him. The family faced many hardships. It was 1942 and Britain was at war with Germany. They were to face food rationing and the bombing of the shipyards and so they were evacuated to the country away from the city and the dangers of war. Back in Belfast he attended a catholic school run by religious brothers. He had developed a stutter, and so school life was tough for him. When it was his turn to stand in front of the class to read, he knew that the minute he started to stutter he would be beaten. As a result, he played truant when he had one particular brother who delighted in humiliating him. It was less than half a dozen times in the space of a year and for this his mother was taken to court. It was decided that as she was raising her family as a single parent with no father in the home then it would be better for him and in his interests, to spend the final 3 years of his school life in a boy’s home. He was 11 years old.

When he left school at 14, the school leaving age at that time, he had no qualifications and there was very little work in the city. He found work attending the gardens in a local convent. The pay was minimal and with no prospects.

When he was 18 he joined the RAF and hoped that at the end of his 2 years’ service things would have improved with regard to work but there had been no change. With very few prospects of permanent work, he made the decision in the mid 1950s to leave his home country to seek a better life for himself in London. Our paths crossed shortly after, and we spent the next 63 years of our lives together.

We married and raised a family and although the early years were tough, we got through them and our standard of life improved. He had permanent work with the LCC Parks Department and over the years through sheer hard work, climbed the ladder from a parks labourer to propagating in the greenhouses. He transferred to tree felling and by the end of his career he had reached the grade of arboriculturist. He never forgot the hard life his mother had trying to raise her family with very little income and was determined that his own family wouldn’t suffer in the same way.

His health started to fail in 2003 when he had a heart attack and over the following years, cancer of the larynx, vascular peripheral disease and eventually vascular dementia. As his main carer, I lived with that dementia 24/7 for 5 years. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do as I watched him slowly leave me. I was exhausted both physically and mentally. It was soul destroying. Would I do it all again? In a heartbeat, he was the love of my life.