I was born in Caernarfon in north Wales, my mother being a native of that town, whereas my father hailed from the north of England. The language of the town and of my friends was Welsh.
My home was bilingual, although my brother and I spoke Welsh to each other. During the depression of the 1930s, life was hard for everyone. In one sense, as a family we were comfortably established as compared with most. Our family owned and ran a grocery and also a small farm two miles out of the town.
Nevertheless, we lived in a time of great poverty and no business could really succeed. Added to this was my father's failing health. Eventually the family moved to Lancashire, my father's home county, and for the next stage of my life, Bolton was to be my home. It was a great wrench to move from a market town to a large industrial town, from a place where everyone knew one another to a place which seemed so big and so full of strangers.
