abram – Page 3 – A little bit of this ~ A little bit of that

My sister Rachel and I were born a little over two years apart. I was born at mum and dads then home in Luton and Rachel was born in hospital in Chester. Despite being two years older, it did often feel like Rachel came into the world running (there was just so much to learn about), whereas, I took things much slower – mum thought she was going to have me a week or so before she did but it seems I had a think about things and decided to wait a while longer … to this day i am a dotting your i’s crossing your t’s kinda of a gal.

I remember Rachel getting into a fair few scrapes – using her teeth to get out of her cot; a visit to accident an emergency when she ran head first into Stuart McClleland in the school playground (coming off worst with a black eye); coming home from infant school with her cream waistcoat covered in paint; then there was the time she took a liking to my Pluto toy and tried to eat him, managing to bite through the plastic. Needless to say Pluto didn’t recover. She was really much too young to know what she had done but somehow has never been allowed to forget what she did.

My childhood seems to have been less eventful, I was much happier in a corner with my head in a book, although I had my moments too. I remember pulling the legs off a plastic spider when Rachel annoyed me one time and throwing her Darth Vader toy out of the window to see if he could fly.

Despite our differences though, she is always the person I have the most fun with and I have very happy memories of the many things we have done together.

Love ya loads little sis.

More photos

Louis Bowers Abram and Delia Eileen Clarke were my grandparents on my fathers side of the family.

Delia was the daughter of Northamptonshire Police Sergeant Albert Edward William Clarke and was one of five children. Louis was the second son of Joseph Charles Abram, an Army Sergeant and Millicent May Bowers.

During the 1930’s Louis passed exams set by the East Midland Educational Union in Motor in Practical Mathematics, Workshop Science and Principles of Engineering and Engineering (Mechanical). He later worked at S and W Motors Limited where he was indentured as an apprentice from May 1931 to May 1933, as a Motor Engineer at York Ward and Rowlatt from May 1933 to May 1934 and at Gilmour and Vale a company that manufactured engineering components. He also worked at Vauxhall Motors in Luton, retiring in 1970 after 25 years service having established ‘an excellent reputation in respect of loyalty, conscientiousness and timekeeping’. He was a Corporal in the Royal Air Force and learnt to fly in a Tiger Moth at Sywell but war broke out on the day he was due to take his test, so he never saw active combat.

I remember visiting my grandparents at their homes in Luton and Chester. My grandad grew tomatoes in a greenhouse and to this day, I can’t smell tomatoes without thinking about him. My nan I remember would wear more than one pair of glasses at a time and also, back when we had paper money, would use the money as writing paper to work out how much she owed someone or who much they owed her. In writing this, I am surprised at how many photos of my nan I have found where she is standing, as I only really ever remember her with mobility issues – firstly using sticks to get around and later being confined to a wheelchair. Nan’s condition went un-diagnosed during her lifetime but today it seems likely that she could have had centronuclear myopathy like dad and I.