This is my mother whose birthday it is today...
My first tentative steps in the sea. With my mother at Broadstairs in 1945.
She would have been 93 had she not died seventeen years ago quite suddenly in the street. She went shopping and never reached home. To all of you who have lost a parent you will know what a shock it is to lose part of your history. Although they may have gone they stay in our hearts and minds every day. My mother was an ordinary working class woman who had a tough life and never fulfilled her innate creativity. But she was very inventive in her own way and continued to express herself until her death. In the last years of her life she took up needlepoint. She would spend hundreds of hours sewing small abstract pieces. This is one that she gave to me a few months before she died...
When I look at it I always think of her…
Happy Birthday Mum.