Coral Musgrove

Living there at one point were my grandparents, Ivy and Jack Gough, my uncle John, my auntie Dyllys, my mother Sylvia, me and my younger brother Konrad, as well as a dog called Doggy and a cat called Puss. All in one small council house with two and a half bedrooms, one outside loo and a bathroom that just had a bath.

I guess it must have been hard for my mom to return to her parents with her children after an independent life. That said, we spent a lot of time in the summer with my grandparents —  it was familiar and it meant she could work and not worry about childcare.

My nan worked tirelessly to feed us, and she fed us in shifts, the grandchildren first, then each of her children, and then her husband. She made me a pudding every day and asked me each morning before school what I wanted. On a Sunday she got a leg of lamb for 25 shillings and fed us all on it during the week, no food waste at all. She even made the cat and the dog a Sunday lunch! My nan was the rock of our family. She kept us together, I never heard a cross word from her, but we all knew she was the head of the family.

In the garden my grandad had a greenhouse and he grew dahlias and tomatoes. Even now whenever I smell tomatoes it reminds me of my grandad and takes me back to those times. He had a hatred of earwigs and was always saying how they got into the dahlias. I can also remember him plucking a chicken. I found this a bit sickening.

We washed our clothes with a washer/boiler and had a wringer in the shed at the back of the house. No fridge. No phone. The back door was never locked. The milkman, the bread man, the butcher and grocer all used to leave the food on the kitchen table.

Mom had lots of different jobs. At first she helped out in a home for older teenage women in Bearwood, and then in the 70s she trained to be a teacher. She had to go to night school first to get some O Levels, then went to an all-female Teacher Training College in Bordesley Green. Once she had qualified she worked as the nursery teacher at Whiteheath Infant School for many years. This enabled us to move out of the house when I was about 15, and we rented a house in Oldbury that was owned by my Auntie Pearl’s in-laws.

Living at my grandparents were happy days for me and I only have very happy memories of that time.

This is a photo of my dad Eddie Molver riding the Wall of Death in Cape Town, South Africa. I don’t really know a lot about my dad as he left my mom when I was six and I never heard from him again.

My parents met at some point in the 50s. I’m not quite sure how, but my father was in the photography business. My mother moved to London from Smethwick in search of acting fame, and had lots of head shots taken, I suspect they met through one of her many portrait sessions!

He was substantially older than my mother, maybe even 10 or 20 years. I think he was quite a difficult person, but life was always an adventure with him. He always had a different car. There was a secretiveness about him, he lived life on the edge. In post-war London he probably had his fingers in a few different pies. He was a bit of a wheeler-dealer, at times it felt like we had a lot of money and sometimes it felt like we had none at all. At one point he ran a nightclub in London where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones played. The Rolling Stones actually stayed in our house just before they were really famous. Mom said there were gangs of teenagers hanging out outside the house.

By chance I managed to connect with my father’s family in South Africa via a website called Genes Reunited. I got an email from a person in South Africa saying they thought we might be related, and it turned out to be my cousin.

I got chatting with my cousin to find out more about my dad’s life. He had died by this point but it turned out that I had an older half-brother living in the UK who was the son of my dad from a previous relationship. I managed to get in touch with my half-brother via my father’s family and I went to visit him in Dorset. His mother had met my father while working in a boarding house in London and he left her when she was pregnant in the early 1940s, just before the war broke out. He wanted to move back to South Africa but she didn’t want to leave London. He still went anyway.

I feel quite angry towards him. It was only when I had my own children I realised how awful it was what he had done, I was so angry that he abandoned us. But good things have come out of it. I have a whole family in South Africa who we would love to go and visit, and links to family in Norway, as my paternal grandparents were Norwegian. Also having a half-brother and actually meeting him really helped. We could both provide each other with gaps in the information about our father.

He’s still got a place in my family album. He is still important to me. I’m angry at him but I’m not devastated. He was part of my life and then he wasn’t part of it and that was it. He was what he was, he was riding the Wall of Death and that sums him up really.