Centenary

This is a photo of my beautiful Mum taken in 1951.  She was born 100 years ago on 23 September 1924.  She saw in the millennium, and died in its first week after a short illness at the age of 75.

I'm not sure what the occasion was for this formal portrait of her, she was married in September 1950 and she was not yet pregnant with my sister.

Mum was born in a coal mining town at the southern end of the South Wales Coalfield.  Her mother died when she was very young, and she was brought up by her grandparents as part of their large family.  In the Second World War she worked in the arsenal at Bridgend making munitions for the war effort.  After the war, she moved to London to train to be a nurse, and there she met my Dad who had been demobbed from the RAF.  My sister and I were born after Dad rejoined the RAF as a pilot.

As a family we moved around quite a few times, but eventually we settled in South Wales, coincidentally not far from where Mum grew up.  In her last years she was living in Derby with my sister's family.  Though she was staying with a friend in Cardiff when she was taken ill, and she spent her last few days in the Heath Hospital surrounded by the accents of her upbringing.  A sort of coming home I suppose for a Welsh exile.

Mum's last few years weren't easy, she was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and she could never break her smoking habit that like so many of her generation, she had acquired as a young teenager.  The heart failure she suffered following pneumonia was probably smoking-related.  Coincidentally, the mother of my friend and former colleague Alison was born the very same day as my Mum, yet she outlived her by 23 years, dying last year at the age of 99.  

Losing Mum was the first profound grief that I experienced in my adult life.  It took several painful years of coming to terms with her absence from my life.  Now I am thankful that she was my loving Mum, who raised me to be who I am today.  Yes, I would have liked more years with her in my life, but equally having seen her suffer in her last few years I couldn't selfishly have wished her to live longer with such a diminished quality of life.  

I shall always love and miss you, Mum.  Rest in peace.

This is my first blip in nearly six months.  I started the year with good intentions of at least blipping a few times a week.  But the building and restoration work at our new home in East Yorkshire became all-consuming.  We are in sight now of completion, hopefully by the end of the year.  Then there will perhaps be more time to return to photography and blipping.  We shall see!