(originally written on Mar 16, 2018)
Quite some time since I wrote on here : a dismal Christmas marred by debt and ill-feeling cast miserable shadows into the New Year had left me devoid of inspiration and energy. There is so much I could have been writing about, so many quirks and memories which all needed writing down before they fly off into the ether like so many mayflies at dusk : I can only hope that some of them will return before too long, especially now that I have lost my last and closest link to the past.
My mother, here pictured as a beaming bride on a cold New Years’ Day in 1955, smiling bravely as the chill Yorkshire wind sweeps down from the moors, passed away on the 22nd of February 2018 at the age of 83. She looks so happy here, in spite of a nasty cold and the less than enticing prospect of living so far from home with her new in-laws. How hard it must have been to leave behind the steep stone terraces of Bradford, her widowed mother, her job and her friends, to live cheek by jowl with strangers in an environment quite alien to her. The grand mill buildings she was used to now replaced by potbanks and bottle ovens, which at that time still polluted the air with smoke and soot, and a local accent far removed from broad Yorkshire vowels.
It was for love that she took such a step into the unknown, and which was to keep her here in the Potteries for the next 63 years, spreading family branches here, but keeping her roots firmly in the North. And now her chapter is closed, living on in the hearts and minds of those she has left behind, and for her, a reunion with those she had loved and lost. Rest in Peace.