The Way It Was: My mother’s story – A Book By Lailo Thompson

This is the story of my mother, born in England in 1922, and up to the time I was five years old.

This was written using stories she told me as well as from journals she kept. She would not go beyond the time I was five because it was just too painful for her to relive those traumatic times. When I told her that I would like to tell her story, she asked that I did not use anyone’s real names, and wait until she had gone. I respected her request.

When I was a child I went to Lone Penny Lane often to be by myself. I would sprawl on the bank side among the wild flowers and sucking a blade of grass and have a serious think about life. Once I turned round the first bend it was so safe and peaceful that I often stayed there for ages. But if I went on and turned the next bend, somehow the atmosphere was quite different. The sun slanted at a different angle, and it made me nervous. At the end of the third bend, there was a five barred gate. I’d never been to the gate. I wouldn’t go alone. I once met young Crook coming up from the gate, he had a dead rabbit swinging by its legs in his hand and his trousers weren’t done up properly and his thing was sticking out. All he said was. . “It be dangerous back there Miss. There be adders.”

This event had such a big impact on my mother which haunted her for such a long time.

In one of her later journal entries she wrote “Looking back I can see how stupid I was. Most of my wounds were self-inflicted and I had no idea what being grown-up was all about and hurt so many people on the way there.”

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