First published November 2009
I’m not really Welsh. When I was 10 months old in 1956 my Dad got promoted at Montague Burtons to Manager and with my Yorkshire Mum we all went off from Southport in Lancashire to Aberdare in the heart of the South Wales Valleys. I had little choice in becoming a sort of Welsh person.
In school with my two brothers and two sisters we had a choir in each class each year, junior middle and senior choir if couldn’t sing you had to stay back after school and practise. Calon Llarn i llawn dionni and Y bob yny sydd fyddlon as well as the Messiah and the Math pash. Never did do Myfanwy.
In 1971 after some ‘O’ levels in the 6th form of Cathays Grammar School, I did, unlike Bill Clinton inhale quite a bit and the Head felt my future lay else ware.
I travelled; hitch hiked over Europe and then decided I wanted “to help people”. I went back home to Cardiff and became a psychiatric nurse at the local mental hospital. A job I still do today 35 years later.
At the hospital I met and married Ann a fellow student nurse the mother of my seven children. Five boys and two girls 1978 to 1995. I went to Cardiff Royal infirmary and became a general nurse as well and went on to work in Casualty. I earned £3600 a year in 1980 I had two boys and the council social services were paying £7000 as a deputy manager in an old persons home. We moved to Stourbridge in the West Midlands and then the promotion to Wakefield as Manager in 1982. We bought a house in Lower Town End Road in Wooldale “comer in of course”. Four boys by now and got the council to send me for two years to Hudds Poly to qualify as a social worker as well.
I met someone who sang at Colne Valley MVC. We had moved to Slaithwaite (financial crisis) and I took up from where I had left off in school. Won at Llangollen a few times. After a few years Thom Meredith the conductor asked if anyone was keen to sing with West Riding Opera they were doing Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers and needed big French soldier chorus. I got a review in the Yorkshire Post as “the most robust and non wooden member of the chorus.” I did a series of opera’s and even got some small principle parts. Martin Binks the director advised me to train with Jane Anthony from Leeds University and Opera North. You don’t clench to get the top B#’s Ann,much more the breathing and an open pharynx trap door opens in the head. I got paid £15 once for a single performance. Pro!. We did Opera Performance with Leeds College of music. A very young Phlida Lloyd coached me to sing La Fleur Que tu m’avez from Carmen.
We went on a camping holiday with my four boys in 1987 to the Dordoigne and my son Thomas aged four died in an accident, he drowned. It wrecked us all. But at the time every Tom Dick and Harry were opening private nursing homes with no knowledge, qualifications or experience.
As a way of coping and looking after my family I went into business man mode and borrowed half a million quid and set up, in Dewsbury the first private nursing home in West Yorkshire for people with Alzheimer’s disease. I was always close to all my brothers and sisters and my oldest brother joined me with his redundancy money and I helped him buy a nursing home in Manchester. A year later in 1993 our little sister had a baby and 11 days later had a heart attack and a brain haemorrhage and died. We took my baby niece in for 6 months.
My brother and I went on and developed four more nursing homes in Manchester and Dewsbury we had 220 beds in 6 units with 300 staff. We had three more children and we moved to Thurstonland sort of back to the Holme Valley. Lots of pressure and time commitments meant I kept missing rehearsals and letting people down I managed to sing the sextet in the Marriage of Figaro and then stopped singing.
All the pressures of work, history, family and grief led to my marriage finally disintegrating in 2003 after 28 years . Another type of bereavement. Two years later my brother and business partner got Oesophageal cancer and died in 2005. I often think if I can get through a year or two without a divorce or a death of someone close I feel really lucky. But in a very low point my friend Alan after a consoling bacon sandwich said why don’t you come to New Mill MVC we have a pint afterwards!! Sometime later I met a very attractive Kirklees social services manager at work called Barbara. My second oldest boy Joe after university and other jobs decided to work with the old man lots of expansion and opportunities in a growing market. Got a second wind at 53 life’s for living loads to do yet. Should go back and have those singing lessons again.
Kevin has now left the choir.
