Fred and Bill Wilson

Fred and Bill Wilson

Fred and Bill were left at home alone when not at school while their mother Martha was working – perhaps Rose went with her mother.

The story is told that when left alone one day the boys decided to switch the kitchen into the garden and vice-versa, and on her return Martha found all the furniture arranged in the garden and the bare kitchen covered in earth and neatly planted out with flowers. Knowing Gran, I bet she wasn’t cross but exclaimed how pretty it all looked:

Bill had run into the road while his mother’s back was turned as she locked the front door on the outside as they were setting out one day. Bill ran into the path of a milkman pushing his churn of milk swung between shafts, and with two curved prongs in front to steady the little cart when standing still. One of these prongs damaged Bill’s back, and his spine grew crooked. He spent a long time in the Childrens’ Hospital and went to school pushed by my mother in a long wicker invalid chair in which he lay all day. She had to go and mind him in playtime.

When he grew up both he and Fred learned to drive the then new­ fangled motor lorries and during the first World War, while both in their mid-teens they both drove lorries. Bill continued to drive all his life, but Fred became a carpenter and later a builders’ yard manager.