[Cherie]

Originally Posted by kirklancaster

When I was about 8 or 9, I would rise whilst all those in my house were still sleeping and I would go downstairs into the tiny rabbit hutch of a room and stoke up the dying coal fire.

I would make a cup of tea and sit there on the tatty sofa in a silence broken only by the metallic ticking of the mantle clock, and my dad's chronic wheezing - borne of too many years breathing in coal dust and from too many years fighting a war in malarial jungles over 5,000 miles away.

I would take in the poverty of that tiny room - from the scuffed lino covering the stone-flagged floor, to the broken tatty furniture - and always - my eyes would eventually fasten on my father's old rusting 'push-bike' which was propped up against the wall. Then as I listened to him fighting for breath and violently coughing in his sleep, I would look at the leather saddle bag on his bike and picture him putting into it his flask of strong tea and the pork dripping sandwiches he'd take to the 'pit' for his 'snap'.

As I'd finish the last dregs of my tea, and as the old man's tortured rasping from upstairs grew more violent, I'd look at the framed monochrome photo's of the Queen, and George VI, and Churchill, jostling for prominence with others of my dad in uniform with some of his mates.

Then my eyes would drop to a cockroach which dared to leave the shadows of its sanctuary in the crevice of the cracked tiled hearth and I'd squash it with my foot. It was at that VERY moment that I KNEW just what I wanted to be when I grew up -- ANYTHING but like my dumb, cannon-fodder parents.

It's very sad that you think of your parents in that way Kirk.