time flies

I always say that everything in life goes in a circle. There’s a beginning and an end and it’s not a straight line, it’s a circle.

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My grand mother Ethel, was born in Gateshead, Co Durham in 1895. She was the youngest of six with three sisters and two brothers, or should I say half brothers and sisters. This wasn’t discovered until many years later. Her mother, Sarah Sandercock (nee Lythgo) was married to George Sandercock a seafarer who was lost at sea a couple of years before she was born.

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I found an old set of negatives - the old black & white 120 size - in the most unlikely of place, almost under my nose in my sitting room. How they got there I don’t know. I held them up to the light and I almost jumped with joy. Lo and behold there was the only negative, the original, the only picture ever taken of my first car. The print of this I can vaguely remember floating around in years gone by. That I would ever find the negative was as likely as George W Bush putting together two consecutive coherent sentences.

The picture must have been taken by me in 1958 with my father’s folding bellows type Agfa camera.

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Lawrence Alfred Copeland, my maternal grandfather, was born in 1885, the son of a coalminer in the Doncaster area of Yorkshire. At the age of 15 he was working as a colliery yard labourer but quite wisely decided that ‘going down ‘t pit was not for him.

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When my father died in May 1996 at the age of  81 it came as a shock. He didn’t look as if he was that age more like mid seventies. It was also almost a shock  that he was actually that age. I can still see him in my mind when he came back from WW2 as a youthful 30 year old.

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