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the same year as Mam and Dad – and had rented a house just round the corner from Gran. When in drink, John Nolan was inclined to be violent and after he had been sent to prison for theft in 1936 they separated, leaving Hilda on her own to bring up their young son.

    Great-great-grandfather John Knights worked on the colliers that sailed up and down the east coast, and reputedly became quite wealthy after moving up through the ranks to command various ships. It was said that in later life he lived in some style in large and impressive houses in the more affluent parts of the town, with one story alleging that he had a sock full of gold sovereigns hidden up his chimney.
    John’s eldest son, Henry Knights, was Gran’s father, and he too was a merchant seaman. In 1886, at the age of just nineteen, he married a twenty-year-old local girl called Caroline Martha Wanless who we always knew as ‘Granny Knights’. She was a live wire and a real character who was not averse to the odd tipple or a regular ‘flutter on the gee-gees’. By the time Gran was born, the family had fallen on hard times.
    In 1906, when she was just sixteen years of age, Gran eloped to get married, leaving home wearing work clothes on top of her best clothes so as not to arouse suspicion. She knew all too well that her mother was dead set against the marriage to her twenty-six-year-old boyfriend. He was weather-beaten and had skin like brown leather as a result of working on the River Tyne in all weathers. Granny Knights called him a foreigner, as she was barely able to comprehend his broad Geordie accent. He had been blinded in one eye by having sand kicked in his face as a young boy. The couple had married at Trinity Church, North Ormesby, on the eastern edge of the town. Grandad always called her Lol and they had a hard but happy life for more than thirty years before death intervened.
    My maternal Grandad, Archie Bradford, hailed from South Shields, County Durham, and was a chronic asthmatic but he nevertheless managed to find fairly regular employment. He worked mostly as a dock labourer or as a lighterman on the two rivers and his job involved unloading ocean-going ships on to the lighters. The ships, being of too deep a draught, had to be anchored in the deep channel in midstream. A lighter was a kind of wide barge with a shallow draught on which the goods were taken to the wharves to be lifted ashore by cranes and derricks. Grandad worked long hours over many sweltering summers and chilled-to-the-marrow winters, until two years before the war, he died after an asthma attack. He would ‘fear no more the heat of the sun nor the furious winter’s rages’. He lived just long enough to see his two eldest daughters wed and the first three of his grandchildren come into the world, these being Jimmy, me and George. Three years prior to his untimely death he had promised Renee that he would take her to see the opening of the Newport Bridge, but she developed several septic abscesses on her neck and was bitterly disappointed. Boils were all too common amongst the undernourished children of the area at that time.
    Gran had endured a very hard life. It had been a long grim struggle for survival throughout the late 1920s and ’30s, the years of the terrible Great Depression, and, as a result, she had ‘lost’ five of her eleven children. It appears that great poverty invariably leads to a higher birth rate as having lots of children improved the odds of some reaching maturity. Three sons and a daughter died in their infancy, one of them being her firstborn son Archibald, named after his father, and a little later, a much loved, gentle and delicate daughter – named Florence after her mother – died at the age of only eleven years. She became ill after a rusty nail sticking up through the paper-thin sole of her boot punctured her foot. The tiny black spot under her big toe became infected leading to the