INTRODUCTION
Back in the early 1980s my mother used to come over to Castle Donington during the school holidays to look after my three boys, Richard, Andy and Pete. She had found life very difficult to handle since the death of my father in 1977. I can never remember my mother being a well woman and yet at the age of 67 she was reluctant to retire from the farming, straw and haulage business; it had given her a reason to keep going.
On one visit she was particularly unhappy. Her life had always been connected with the farm and now she felt as if she was no longer needed. Although she was worn out with work and worry she was reluctant to leave her sons to manage without her. It was at this time I was finding that most of the elderly people with whom I worked enjoyed telling their life stories and I wondered whether my mother would enjoy writing hers. After all, she had continued keeping the daily diary she and my father had begun many years earlier. My younger brother Andrew still keeps those diaries that tell very little about my mother but much about the day to day events of the farm. Each entry begins with an account of the weather and goes on to detail what has been done on the farm for that day. My mother assiduously kept her nightly routine of making her diary entry until six days before she died on Thursday, September 6th 2001.
I didn't think it would be easy to persuade my mother to write her story so imagine my delight and surprise when she asked for pen and paper to get started. At last we would have something we could talk about together. Up until that time we had lived over again many times the weeks of my dad's final illness and his death followed by details of the business and how many bales of straw had been sold. She seemed unable to look beyond or past the six or seven years since my dad had died.
From that time on she scribbled away using scraps of paper and backs of envelopes. I often promised to type them up but it was going to be a mammoth task. She had always been proud of her ability to write and spell well but the papers got out of order and events and dates became muddled. Besides these difficulties I was very busy looking after three boys and a husband as well as going out to work. However, as her eightieth birthday approached I determined that I would try and edit her story, which she had spent many hours writing, and put it together in book form for her.
Of course it isn't complete as she lived for many more years after the time when the book ends. The last years of her life were so tied up with my youngest brother, Andrew, and his family, that only they are in a position to record what her life was like during her last years. Perhaps, like me, they will feel that a record of her story should be put down in print to hand on to the next generations. At the end of this particular edition of the book there is an 'endnote' which briefly fills in something of what it was like for my mother in her later years.
My mother was delighted to receive her eightieth birthday present. It gave her much joy sharing it with friends and relations. Her own account of her eightieth birthday is included as Appendix 2. I hope this second edition, which includes photographs and new material, will give much joy to my two sisters, Margaret and Geraldine, for whom it has been printed, in memory of our mother who died in September 2001.
Last year Margaret, Geraldine and I managed to spend two weeks together in Greenwood, Canada, at Geraldine's home. We talked much about our childhood and all the different relationships within our extended family. What was interesting was our agreement that the times described by our mother didn't begin to capture what our childhood had been like for us. So often we wanted to say, 'but it wasn't really like that'. This is a salutary reminder, that even within large and close families as ours, parents and children experience life from different perspectives.
The italic print in this edition denotes passages added by myself and written in the first person singular. The rest of the text is a faithfully edited record of my mother's own writing done on scraps of paper and backs of envelopes.
Joan Wilkinson (nee Holman) November 2001