The 7 ages of
Frank Selkirk
At first the infant..
Sorry, I don’t know much about where I was conceived! About that time (December 1938ish) my parents were moving from Rochester to Loughborough. Anyhow, just before the start of the second world war when my mother was making black-out curtains I duly made my entrance at breakfast time as a medium-weighted noisy young man: this was at home at 24 Burton Street. I was duly named after my maternal grandfather who had recently died from pneumonia. Rumour has it that he had got over-wet out riding..
I was subsequently baptized at St Anne’s Church in Moseley close to where my residual grandfather lived in 82 Trafalgar Road.* (It is one of those strange coincidences that both my elder brother and my oldest son both live(d) even closer to the Church than did Grandfather Joseph Selkirk)
6 days after I was born the war broke out (but of course I remember the famous broadcast well!!!). The only thing I can recall of my life at Burton Street was going into the cellar during an air raid warning. We moved about January 1944 almost round the corner to Southernhay, Charnwood Road .
I do recall the family taking holidays in Braystones on the Cumbrian coast and the interesting rail journeys involved to get us to there. The wooden bungalow/chalets we stayed in at the top of the beach. (Several are still there a Google search reveals).The small shop and the drinking water coming of a spring outlet. 8 days before my 6th birthday we were walking to Beckermet (the nearby village and our long-established ancestral location) when we saw flags up on the tower: the second world war was over! We collected all the driftwood and built a large bonfire on the beech: such things were forbidden once hostilities started.
In the 2 years we lived at Southernhay there was a strange experience. I had measles - badly. Well on the way to recovery I suddenly worsened and was rushed by ambulance to Leicester Royal Infirmary. My parents were warned that I might live only for another 4 hours. I was very nearly the first civilian in Leicestershire to be treated with the new “wonder-drug” penicillin, but instead was dosed with “M & B” which apparently cured me only with the side effect that I didn’t grow for the next 3 years. Anyhow, in addition the consultant decided to operate on me in the middle of the night, making a substantial incision behind my ear.
Unfortunately (?Because he found I had no brain?) he died of a heart attack before he wrote up his report. This being at the end of the war there was minimal assistance so that after the operation no-one else could explain what he had found. So what was it? Mastoid? Meningitis?
I still have the Simple Simon I was given in hospital and remember singing “She’ll be coming round the mountain..” there, but was released after a week: bed shortage and knowing that my mother was fanatical in child-cleanliness. Back at home I had to have my wound dressed very painfully for weeks thereafter. I can feel where the wound was whilst I type this! I recuperated by spending hours lying in some form of bed outside underneath a blossoming almond-tree!
But by then, of course, I’d started at school..
*If you were to try to find 82 Trafalgar Road: well, where it was is now the start of Sovereign Way. A lot of Trafalgar Road has been redeveloped!
2018: St Anne’s Church
…
And where
82 Trafalgar Road was..
