Where do we start? I supose with the oldest male, being my grandfather Orton, who as it turns out has been a bit of a dark horse.

My earliest memories of him are as a farmer with a large farmhouse (girly cousins always refered to it as a cottage, but much to big for that in my eyes) that we reached after catching the bus into Wolverhampton and then a rare treat of a ride on Midland Red to Madeley.  We left the bus near a towering rough stone wall, that as a child always reminded me of a cliff. I doubt as it was that high in reality, but I was young.

Anyway, we then crossed the road and went down a pot holed dirt track that may have had some tarmac on it in the distant past and came to his farm house. It was opposite a sewage works and if the wind was in the right direction it overpowered the smell from his pigs.

He was a small man and walked stooped forward as if he had a hunch back, and habitually swung his arms in a military gait. Considering he fathered a long line of bald males, as far as I can recall he had quite long and thick hair himself. He was a strange sort of bloke and never had much to say to us as kids. Although I never knew it at the time he must have been in his 70’s by the time I can remember him because from information gathered at the funerals, our only social family gatherings since my aunty Lil died, he had previously been a mechanic at Guy Motors Wolverhampton and only retired on to take up farming on his 70th birthday!

Apparantly he also worked at Castle Bromwich on Spitfires during the second world war. On one occasion, so the legend goes, he was asked to check for a faul in the cockpit before the finished aircraft was despatched and started feeling for lose connections. He is the reported as having pulled off a tube and gased himself, losing consciousness only to awake moments before the end of his shift when the foreman shouted up to ask if he’d found it, to which he replied; “Not yet.”

In a previous life, possibly before Guy Motors, he had been a private milkman, here I am reminded of Norman Wisdom The Early Bird. The only other bit of information regarding this was that his horse was called “Blood” and that he went bankrupt. My dad never mentioned any of this and like an idiot I never thought to ask. It is also said that as a result of the bankruptcy he sufffered a nervous breakdown. This is hard to believe as he was the calmest person I had known until I met Bob and Andy Colley.

His farm was cursed with bad luck from my own memory. It had a disused canal on the left side of the farm yard and a weir at the bottom of the house. A dangerous and compellingly fascinating place that drew your eyes and body down towards it’s depths, how I never fell in I’ll never know. It was all the more irritating to know I would most certainly drown there because his last few ducks loved swimming through the turbulent waters.

His pigs lived happily enough in a large brick built sty at the foot of the clay ziggurat like hill behind the house. One visit they were all gone and when I asked I was told they had been sold but, at my uncle Frank’s funeral I discovered they had all drown when the weir cot blocked as it often did in winter and the yard had been flooded. I can just immagine my grandfather trying to save them and my more sensible grandmother preventing him from going out into the flood waters in winter, but this is pure conjecture based on what I have learned of his life. He did not seem the type to just stay dry while the animals died, especially as his money was invested in them.

He had a vegetable patch and tended a flower bed for my grandmother that would have been the envy of any professional gardener. My father said they only ever emptied his dustbin once every couple of years because he never bought canned goods and any leftovers was either composted or fed to the pigs while they lived.

I can remember he had a Morris Minor van and although I cannot recall any problems with it, family are all agreed that it was mechanically sound but that the bolts securing the back to the chassis had long since perished and it would sway off in the direction of a turn in a frightening fashion, especially if they were seated in the back. Uncle Frank and Graham finally had enough and bolted the floor back onto the chassis so my grandmother could go shopping in relative safety.

So that is the head of the clan or at least as much as I know at present. We are running out of uncles and aunties so the family gatherings are likely to get less and less. In reflection, I know as much about my grandfather as I think I knew about my dad and that was pretty sketchy at best. I rather think the same applies to my children’s knowledge of my life before they took notice of the world. I wonder what entry of recollection I may be worthy of when I’m gone?