101 Introduction

 

This introduction to our reminiscences was originally typed when I, Kathleen, was near the end of my initial nursing training in the mid-’sixties and found that my favourite type of mackintosh had disappeared from the shops.

 

I have never had any real ambition to become an author nor the abilities to do so and it is with some trepidation that I have undertaken to set down the following account, though I trust that I am well enough qualified in the subject of this narrative and that my experiences may one day entertain other enthusiasts that I’m convinced are around, even if we haven’t met them yet.

I ask that I be excused all imperfections and assure them that what I do write will be strictly confined to the truth.

My name is Kathleen, usually shortened to Kathy, which I don’t like, or Kate, which I reluctantly accept. My parents died in a wartime bombing incident very soon after my birth and, being the only child, I was entrusted to the care of my mother’s best friend who lived in Norfolk. She was married to a builder and already had a son around a year older than me, Jocelyn. In his case, his name is often shortened to Jos but, unlike me, he doesn’t have any feelings one way or the other on what he is called. Jos rhymes with boss, – it’s not Josh, as rhyming with cosh, or even tosh as in mackintosh. I didn’t know that I was adopted until I was 12 years old and I had been allowed to assume Jos was my natural brother up till then.

 

In fact, Jos isn’t even a stepbrother and we are physically quite different as I expect some neighbours commented on in our younger days. Unfortunately I’m not the sort of girl that turns heads, in fact most men seem to run for cover at my approach. As well as usually being described as ‘plain’ and with protruding teeth and a receding chin, I am too tall, too thin, blonde and wear glasses, not a pretty sight.

Jos, on the other hand, is dark and actually slightly shorter than I am but puts up with my lack of good looks ………… provided I’m well covered up, preferably in hooded raincoat and boots.

The family lives in a big Victorian house on a rectangular block of ground in the middle of a Norfolk market town. Our immediate neighbours live in terraced cottages whose front doors opened straight onto the pavement and whose gardens back onto either side of our garden. These cottages are actually owned by the family, having been built by an ancestor many years ago. At the far end of the garden is the builder’s yard, securely fenced off and only accessible from the road at the far end. The only way into our garden is therefore up the front drive and, over the years, trees had grown up so that parts of the garden are quite isolated and secluded. There is a croquet lawn, an extensive orchard, a big revolving summerhouse and an old air-raid shelter without its top structure, mostly used as a compost pit for lawn cuttings.

 

 

Later .........(many years later!)

As neither of us have married, I eventually found myself looking after my widowed ‘mother’ together with the family home, working part-time and at times to suit myself through a nursing agency. When mother died, my task in life seemed to be looking after Jos. The neighbours appeared to accept this as quite proper, those who knew us seemingly to have forgotten that I was anything other than his stepsister. Everybody knew us as Jos’n’Kate. In fact, J’n K

 

Most of the above was in my first effort at this journal. Jos first suggested that I wrote it at a time when I was more than usually fed up with my nurse training and, as it all then seemed rather exciting and different, I made a start. We later met a charming and like-minded couple who really enthused me to continue and then Jos and I targeted a hundred pages which seemed an enormous task at the time. Now we have to carefully edit it to keep it down to that limit!