Emma Martin's home site

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Most autobiographies have a start, a middle and ... well if they are autobiographies, obviously they don’t have an end. This one is different, it has two starts, two middles and one end. In effect, it has been a life in two parts. It was a difficult birth; a caesarean when caesareans weren’t that common. Finally I did arrive just before midnight on the seventh day of the seventh month in 1947; a bonny ten pound four ounce baby boy, born to a woman who only measured five feet if she stood on tiptoe. Hardly surprising that she had problems giving birth and I was told that she nearly died during the process. In fact I wasn’t ever allowed to forget it. Maybe that’s where my guilt complex came from? My parents, Ted and Alma Packer were, I guess, middle class; dad a solicitor’s managing clerk and mum a housewife. They had one daughter, Shirley, born in 1939 so between us we bracketed the war years. A sort of going away present and a welcome home one. As most nine year old girls would be when they’d had their mums all to themselves, Shirley wasn’t too keen on my arrival. Apparently when mum and I came home from the hospital she was asked if she’d like to hold her new baby brother but that was exactly what she didn’t want. So not a great start to life, but at least we all made it through with nothing more than emotional scars, well except mum of course.