This Is How It Was

Eddie Aston was born into abject poverty in Coventry during1921. His story charts and details his life as it unfolded over the following 65 years. His humble and ragged childhood began in a long-since-demolished slum with a single outside tap, a communal washroom, and a toilet, shared with many other households, consisting of little more than a plank with a hole in it over the top of a dustbin. Eddie tells of his mother's constant struggle to make ends meet, his father having died a few months before he was born, then his schooldays in Redditch where he worked hard, becoming selected as Head Boy but denied a place at Grammar School as he was needed to provide an income at home. He describes long summer days with friends before he was placed by government policy into an aircraft manufacturing factory in the Lake District, then volunteering for the Royal Navy as World War II engulfed the globe. Post-conflict, Eddie, working for a number of companies and now a skilled sheet metal worker, defeated odds that were often stacked against him and formed his own, successful, company in Redditch. In his narrative, he describes meeting his future wife, Jean, who was a wartime single mother, moving into their first home, having two further children, seaside holidays and much more.