I was born in Belfast three years before the start of the Second World War. Two years into the war we were bombed out and evacuated to a farm at a place called Ballyweaney. This was a wonderful time in my life and I came to regard Christie Kerr, the farmer as my Daddy. Upon our return to Belfast we lived in dire poverty until I was placed in care of an extremely tough Children’s Home called Balmoral Boy’s School. It housed a hundred other boys, and our gym instructor, an ex-army champion body builder took us through his rigorous training program on a daily basis. When I was released, I got a job as a message boy with an automobile engineering firm. My eldest brother invited me to join him and his family in England. My dearest wish was to be an Automobile Engineer, but I served part of my time as a Blacksmith and went on to engineering where I became the Foreman in an International Haulage Company in Leighton Buzzard called Pentis Brown. Unfortunately, as time went on, my dearest wish was, ‘not to be an engineer,’ so I packed it in, and took up ‘Bricklaying’ where I joined all my mates out in the sunshine. I met my wife Jeannine when she was fifteen years old, and sixty-three later we are still together. As Foster Carers, we carried on fostering for over forty-five years, but retired several years ago. Even now, at the age of eighty-seven, I still do occasional jobs and we get bombarded with emails from our caring children with notes like: ‘Oh for goodness sake, hide the ladders!’