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Friday 21 August 2015

Settling down and starting to grow despite having no "roots".

It is strange when one half of a married couple has a family and the other doesn't! All the time I was growing up I didn't have much or any family around so having so many of Jane's family within 20 miles was something I had to quickly get used to.

When we moved to Wolverhampton 3 of her 4 grandparents were still alive. Only her Dad's Dad had died (on holiday and in his sleep). Her Mum and Dad were both working - Mum worked in personnel and her Dad in sales for a well-known brewery. Jane's sister and assorted aunts and uncles lived further east, the Birmingham direction.

1979 was the year when we managed to buy our first house. We paid £16,000 for it which doesn't sound like very much to young people today. Jane's Parents were very generous to us. They gave us £5,000 out of their savings to help us and I think the lady at the Building Society was impressed that a young couple like us had such a big deposit. We felt very proud and very grown-up when we moved into our own home.

The 1980s were very mixed for the two of us. We both did OK at work and we gradually moved up the career and salary scales but we had a bad run when every year for 5 years somebody important in Jane's family died. By the end of the 1980s all her grandparents had died and so had one of her aunts and her god-mother. We used to dread getting a phone call at an unusual time because quite often it was somebody calling us with bad news.

It was also during these years that we found out that it was very unlikely that we would ever have children of our own. We didn't try to have children for the first few years but once Jane came off the Pill nothing happened. Eventually we went to the Health Centre and a bit later we went to the local hospital for various tests but nobody could find out what was wrong. Perhaps nothing was and we were just unlucky?



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