Fred And Rose by Sounes Howard

Author:Sounes, Howard [Sounes, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405512176
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-09-04T23:00:00+00:00

THE marriage of Bertha and Bill Letts was not a happy one. Neither wanted children, and they were initially disappointed when, despite their best intentions, Bertha became pregnant. They changed their view when Bill junior was born and came to dote on what would be their only child.

Bill was sickly, but his lack of strength only made Bertha love him all the more. She idolised her son, and spent hours knitting warm clothes to keep illness at bay. Bill was struck down by rheumatic fever shortly before he was due to start at Northam’s Church of England Secondary School. He was kept at home for many months, and when he finally enrolled, his classmates were astonished to see that he was wearing girl’s woollen stockings under his shorts. The stockings, together with Bill having missed the start of school, made him the butt of classroom jokes. ‘We all thought it was very queer,’ says Ronnie Lloyd, who later became a friend.

Bill was soon being bullied. When Bertha found out, she took it upon herself to go to the school and deal with his tormentors. He was also lonely at home. Bertha played cards in the evenings, leaving Bill with his father, but now the novelty of having a son had worn off, his father lost interest in Bill and often reminded him that he was only the result of an accident.

After leaving school, Bill first worked in an electrical shop in Bideford and then for the Bristol Airport Company as a radio engineer. He was a reserved and distrustful teenager, prone to the notion that people were ‘ganging up’ against him. He experienced at least one unhappy romance, when a local girl he had been courting moved away from the village to marry another man, and the rejection added to his increasingly jaundiced view of the world. This was compounded when his father began to impose strict rules on Bill; for example, locking the front door against him if he were not home by ten at night.

One of Bill’s few friends was a Jewish boy named Lionel Green, whose family were well-off people from London, where they owned a business in the East End. The Second World War had begun, and the Greens moved into a large house in Bideford to escape the Blitz. Lionel had three sisters, and his parents employed a young girl to help look after them. One day Lionel introduced her to Bill.

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