My parents married at Wem Parish Church on Christmas Eve 1929 and were photographed after the wedding in the gardens of 1 Shrubbery Gardens, the home of my grandparents, Richard and Ada Owen. Here their daughter Heather (1931) and twins Harry and Adrian (1932) were born and in 1935 Eleanor was born at 23 Barnard Street, my parents first home of their own. My father came from Harmer Hill and my mother from Clive, both near Wem. This small area of Shropshire, its market town and villages close by to the south, is the region of my childhood and most of my poems, and is known by heart.
Here grandparents and parents spent most, or all, of their lives, and their memorials can be found in Myddle churchyard and Wem cemetery. They were working class people who found employment in the locality: in Grinshill quarries, on the railway at Hadnall, in the big Houses, at Chatswood Safe Works by Shrewsbury, and the Ordnance Depot at the 'Camp' on the edge of Wem. We four children had opportunities unavailable then, went to College or University, to qualify as teachers. The source of my poems is a strong sense of what I have been given by my family in this part of Shropshire and not in feelings of loss of a time and place which provided rich benefit.
Wem of the 1930s and 40s was the right size for children, comprehensible and varied. providing unconsciously a form of education to do with community and roots. Children walked freely and safely about it, could easily reach the fields, river and streams and lanes that offered adventure. The town was active with working places and yards: the cattle market, the gas works and timber, coal and builders Yards, Brewery, Mill, Maltings and threshing in the farm yard near the Grammar School. All its streets were interesting then. The war brought excitement, not danger; evacuees from Liverpool and GIs from America. Occasionally I was aware of human distress and difficulty, but not as serious disturbances. The war ended and with the blackout gone there was the wonder of lighted windows, loud yellow illuminations again. My parents, like others, had seen their children fed.
Wem also gave me a formal education. The Grammar School, to which we went as paying pupils for a year in 1944, was invigorated by the teachers back from the war. Their drive and ambition made a difference and, inter alia, started a lifelong interest in language and literature. I learnt the poetry of Wordsworth and Shakespeare there. In my mind and poems and a novel, unpublished, their words and those of others are still alive.
My education continued at a Training College in Chelsea in 1954 and part time at Birkbeck College, London where I gained a degree in English in 1961 when I married. We had four children, and now enjoy three grandchildren. I taught English mainly in comprehensive schools, near Nottingham and in Derby, and retired in 1989 as a deputy headteacher, living near Nottingham.
