In the interest of coherence and my sanity I am going to start at the beginning. All questions will be answered in sequence and maybe I can make some sort of sense of my life.

The Story begins here

HOW IT WAS.
My greatest influence was Gran - my maternal grandmother. It was because of her I became a nurse. I really wanted to be an actress but she convinced me that to be successful you had to sleep with the producer. I wasn't sure what that entailed but her facial expression told you it was something you didn't want to do. She was built like Queen Mary - the woman not the boat - and her demeanour was that of a duchess unlesss she lost her temper when she became a termagant. Her family - devout Roman Catholics - escaped the potato famine in Ireland and were not best pleased when she married Grandad an English atheist. He was an engineer and they had a good life travelling in South Africa until he had a horrific accident and with a crippled hand was pensioned off. By this time Mum was born and they bought a grocer's shop and settled in Lancashire.
Never one to be dictated to by circumstance, Gran took herself off to Edinburgh to train to be a midwife and from then on half the babies in the valley were delivered by her and she was an important member of the community. She was a brick when Mum met my father, fell in love and got pregnant at the age of eighteen. She made sure they were married before the birth and delivered my sister Maddie the same year. Two years later I appeared and after another two years my brother Evan was safely delivered - all by Gran.
The valley we lived in in NE Lancashire was surrounded by soot blackened hills. The main road was lined with factories and cotton mills and my parents worked in separate ones. Twice a day you would hear the clang of clog irons on the road as the workers marched down the hill in the morning and back up after the hooter had sounded at 5.30pm. We were latch-key children and poor but every Thursday the 'order' would be delivered from Grandad's shop and Gran would come every week laden with fruit and vegetables. The house was a small three bed -rooomed end of terrace with a piano taking most of the living space. We were well loved and content and then Maddie, aged six left home.