ALICE URMSTON (b 1921): MY parents were an ill-matched pair, God love them. My mother with her broad Bolton accent, my dad with his more cultured pedigree -- educated, rather refined.

They'd met up, somehow, this odd couple. My mother had been jilted once before in her life, and now, well, the two of them, they were neither of them spring chickens.

I was born six months after the wedding -- in 1921 -- myself and my twin brother. And a few months later, my mother lost another set of twins, after which she had two more boys. Twins again.

The boys were all prone to convulsions. And my mother would shake her head over her weird little brood, and whisper to me: 'They're all addle, Alice, all except thee.'

Nowadays, there'd be help for children like my brothers, but in the 1920s the only destination for their kind was the cracky school on Flash Street. Father, of course, was appalled that any of his children might end up in such an establishment.

My father used to wear a uniform of Hospital Blue, in token of his wartime disability. He'd returned from the trenches of the Great War severely rheumatic, but with the pension that this brought him and some inherited money -- £4,000, (I never knew how he came by such an enormous fortune) -- he'd managed to buy a big house and garage up Breightmet.

As a sign that we, his children, were a cut above the hoi-polloi, we were not born at home, but at the nurse's house.

But then when I was five -- somehow, I've never known how exactly -- my father's fortune vanished. Later we were told it was some daft investment he'd made that plunged us into poverty.

One moment we had been well-to-do, then we crashed down in the world, and had to say goodbye to the prosperous home and skulk off to a humble little house up Deane.

I've been told we slipped away in a furniture van, but I have no recollection of that myself -- I imagine I must have blocked out all that, horrified by what I feared lay in store.

How my mother coped, then and after, I'll never know. She went to work in a mill -- at Haslam's -- but her earnings would never be enough to keep four children and an invalid husband.

For a very short spell, my father got a job as a driver for Tognarelli's, the ice cream vendors. But then, I'm not sure how it was, I think he had a row with Mr Tognarelli. They fell out over something (ice cream probably).

My father's pride was always letting him down. He would tell us how he came from an ancient family, and would meticulously trace his lineage all the way back to William the Conqueror's Master of Foxhounds. And now here he was on the breadline, scraping ha'pennies together to go to the pub.

People began to despise him, I think -- you could tell -- because he was not capable of supporting his family.

I remember one time visiting two rich ladies -- how they handed us a few pennies as if we were beggar urchins, and then they looked at my father, and I noticed an atmosphere.

Children are so sensitive to such things -- the atmosphere in a room, the look in people's eyes. I could tell what the rich ladies were thinking.

After our downfall, as I came to think of it -- our ruin -- daydreams were my one escape. I've always been a daydreamer.

Education was another outlet. I loved books. I began to bury myself in schoolwork and I would come top of the class regularly, and so my teachers were expecting great things of me, a major scholarship, they thought, to the Church Institute or even to Bolton School.

But then, well, as they say in the romantic novels, something untoward occurred.

It wasn't that my mother stopped me progressing and thwarted my ambitions, but, no, I won't go into it here. Anyway, my scholarship was not to be.

My mother wanted me out of school, if you must know, earning my crust. 'We need thi bloody money, Alice,' was her way of putting it.

So it was that at 15, like many other girls, I left school and started work. I found employment up Deane at Holt's Hosiery. Trimming knickers, vests and camisoles.

I think it injured my father's pride -- his daughter in such employment. He would refer to Holt's as a slave-hole, but I never much minded the job.

I loved the colours especially. Some lovely colours there were. Garments in peach, and blue, and Eau de Nil. And the textures of the material. The soft fabrics, quite slippery sometimes.

My fingers would be working through the gussets and the sleeves, picking up scissors, trimming the cuffs. And I could do the job with a quarter of my mind. With the other three quarters, I could daydream.

If I looked out of the window I could see sheds with sloping roofs. The weaving sheds. And beyond them, if it was summer, a big blue sky.

I had songs running through my mind. The Isle of Capri was popular then. Gracie Fields. And there was a song about a big ship. It was sailing away somewhere.

This was all a long time ago now. I can't remember now where the big ship was sailing, but I was always on it. I had my ticket and my suitcase of fine dresses, my blue silk handkerchief fluttering in my hand. The sea-wind was ruffling my hair.

I was always waving goodbye."

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