SIR: I was thrilled to read in your paper, sent me by one of my cousins, about the two-day conference (Yesterday and today) about my father, the late Bill Naughton - Bolton's own playwright and chronicler. I hope the venture is a success. I'm just about to return to America, where I've lived for the last 40 years, and my job at the Art Gallery of Yale University, otherwise I would have made every effort to attend. Only this April was I back in my old home town to celebrate the 90th birthday of my aunt, Mrs Kathleen Carr, who now lives in Aspull. She is one of three surviving relatives of my father's generation. The other two, six or so years younger, are my aunt, Lil Naughton, widow of my father's younger brother, living in Bentley Street, and my uncle, Donald Berrie, living in Astley Bridge.

On a drive round I got the chance to point out to my niece and nephew - both in their 30s - the house, 38 Marld Crescent, Johnson Fold, where my father first began to write. This would be in 1937 when, although still a coalbagger for the Co-op, he began to get involved with Mass-Observation. He saved up and bought a typewriter just before war was declared, and had to go and do all his writing of an evening in the back kitchen once they introduced the 'black-out'. This was because the chap opposite, Ben Martin, became an A.R.P. warden and our frontroom curtains let through chinks of light.

I've always had a special regard for the BEN. My father taught me to read using the 'Cameo Comedy Cartoon' which used to appear daily. It meant that I was allowed to go into Mrs Moran's Infants' Class at St Edmund's, Eastbourne Grove, in September 1934, a fortnight before my fourth birthday. My brother Larry, a retired teacher, who like me left Bolton in 1940 when our parents split up, has been working on a biography of my father for the last four years.

Marie Naughton-Weltzien

Blake Road, Hamden, USA

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.