CHAPTER 1

BOYHOOD DAYS AS THE SON OF AN ENGLISH SOLDIER

My first exact memory of childhood is of running along a path that crossed a recreation ground, strewn with daisies, docks and ragwort, calling out“Daddy, daddy.” My father, a young policeman, was walking home to our small terrace house on Throstle’s Nest Avenue in the north of England industrial town of Wigan, and my mother had set me down at the start of that dusty path, saying,“Daddy’s coming. Run and meet him.”

It was the late summer of 1928 and I was three and a half years old, having been born to Thomas Herbert Wylie Griffiths and Edith May Griffiths, née Jones, on 25 May 1925.

My father, born in the seaside town of Poole, Dorset, was the eldest child in a late Victorian family of two strapping sons and two daughters. He had been sent at a tender age to a boarding school at Yalding, in Kent, but was withdrawn– and his education terminated– when my grandfather Griffiths,‘master’ of a Victorian workhouse in Poole, where the poor and indigent were cared for, died suddenly in his early 50s. His widow, Susan Wylie Griffiths, was instantly bereft of husband, home and income. She no longer was able to pay for her four children’s schooling. But my grandmother was not one to complain. Of sturdy Scots-Irish stock, brought up in a Protestant enclave in the mainly Catholic county of Cavan in what then was British-ruled Ireland, Susan Wylie was a trained nurse. She quickly found a post as a ward sister in Liverpool and later went to work on the staff of the longest-serving Liberal Prime Minister of Great Britain, William Ewart Gladstone, who made his home on a great estate shaded by oak and beech trees at Hawarden in north Wales. As he aged, Gladstone seems to have taken the young widow under his wing, more than likely because, as a nurse, she looked after the‘Grand Old Man’– or GOM– as he was known, when he was ill.

One day, she was invited to take her younger children to tea with the Gladstones. One of the four, probably Agnes, the youngest, seized one end of the table cloth and, pulling sharply, tipped the Prime Minister’s silver tea set onto the ground, spilling the contents of his teapot over the Persian carpet. Appalled, Nurse Susan apologised. But the GOM would have none of it. Picking up the teapot, he presented it to the little girl, who passed it on to her elder brother, my father. For the rest of his life Bertie Griffiths, as he was known, made good use of it– as a place to keep the nuts and bolts he