Michael Glover and his sister Patricia Eales
HER
picture as a little girl may be on the cover of a book reminiscing
about Sheffield in the Fifties, but Patricia Eales feels in no way
nostalgic about those days.
Headlong Into Pennilessness is Michael
Glover’s account of growing up without a father in a poor two-bedroomed
terraced house lacking a bathroom or an indoor lavatory.
He shared the tiny house in Fir Vale with five other relatives, one of those being his older sister, Patricia Eales,
The
home always held a strange fascination for Michael, who defied the odds
to win a scholarship to Cambridge University and went to become editor
of Mirror Books, an award-winning poet and art critic for The
Independent.
It’s a view not shared by Patricia who has lived in
the Holymoorside area of Chesterfield since the early 1970s. “I couldn’t
wait to leave that house. It was tiny, damp and horrible.”
The
front cover of the book is a photo at Michael Glover’s christening.
Patricia, who was just seven years old at the time, is the only smiling
face on the picture which clearly displays the strain caused by their
absent father.
She said: “Michael grew up never knowing his
father. I didn’t meet him until I was four years old when war was over.
He appeared in all his khaki army gear with a huge handlebar moustache;
he was nearly black from years under the hot sun in Burma. My mother
fainted.
“The man that came home in 1945 was very different from
the one that left in 1939, according to my mother. Their marriage was
one of the many casualties of the war.”
Patricia Eales, now 70,
much prefers her semi in Derbyshire. “Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back
to an existence that was ruled by the make-do-and-mend attitude of the
time; nightly arguments about money and the freezing cold outside
toilet!”
Headlong Into Pennilessness is published by www.acmretro.com and is available in bookshops at £9.95.
From: http://www.sheffieldtelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/no_nostalgia_for_penniless_upbringing_1_4135774
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