The end of the line – or the start of the adventure – depending on which way you look at it. The Johnson name has ended with me in our branch of the family. I’m going no further as far as this website is concerned but I’m so proud of my two daughters and four grandchildren and the contribution they are all making. Maybe one of them will carry on the research one of these days!
My parents were married on 11th July, 1942. He, of course, in uniform; she in a borrowed wedding dress.
My Mum soon fell pregnant and was pregnant every year. For the first six years of their marriage, every one of those pregnancies ended in miscarriage or stillbirth.
But there was something different about the 1949 pregnancy. Now my Mum had the NHS.
She had her own family doctor and a gynaecologist; she had a midwife and specialist nurses. For the last three months of her pregnancy she had 24-hour nursing care and complete bed-rest in an NHS facility. And not a penny changed hands for the cost of all this.
And so, on a Thursday afternoon on the 5th of January 1950 I was born. This is the first picture we have of me at six months old, already thriving and far from the fragile new-born who looked, according to my great-grandmother, “like a skinned rabbit”.
