Alphabe-Thursday R is for Ron

Ron was born the youngest of seven children in 1925. Being the baby, he was spoilt of course, but there's not a lot of spoiling that can be done by an East End family with 9 mouths to feed on a milk roundsman's money. They gave up the "comfort" of their London home for a small holding in Essex. His mother lost her indoor cold tap and the privy and replaced it with an outside tap and "bucket and chuck it"
Ron was a bright boy and gained a scholarship to the local Grammar School but left at 16 to go into the Fire Service (World War 2 having broken out by then) until he was able to get into the RAF, which he did at 17. He was a Flight Engineer and made Sgt but didn't get any further because he burnt down the camp in Iceland. But Ron being Ron even came up smelling of roses on that one. His squadron was posted to Iceland but the men were told they would have to set up Nissan huts on the hill and would not be allowed to billet in the local town.. The cook house drain soon got bunged up with grease and Ron was told to clean it. He decided that if he put some petrol down the drain and set light to it that would shift the grease but what it did was set fire to the cook house - a fire that spread. He was sort of court-martialled and fined £20, a lot of money in 1945. But his comrades in arms were so glad that they were now going to have to be billeted after all, they had a whip round and he made a profit on the deal. But he never got past Sgt.
When the war ended he went back to his home town to find that almost all of his contemporaries had moved on, married, or, sadly, died. He went back to the church youth club and there was only one person who he remembered, a girl called Dot. They spent quite a lot of time together over the following couple of years but then decided that it really was time that they made the effort to go out separately and look for a life partner. Within a week they both found they missed each other so much that they had found their life partner and not realised it.
Ron trained as a surveyor, auctioneer and estate agent but his first love was drama and he belonged to several amateur operatic and dramatic groups. He was a founder member of a well respected amateur Shakespeare company and worked with after school drama groups at a local school. He was given an audition by the world famous D'Oyly Carte Company and, perhaps not kindly, they told him that they would have accepted him had he not been a husband and father by then, but that the life of touring and late nights was really only for those without family ties. He never really got over it. But, aged 38, he sent his wife (willingly) out to work and got a grant to train as a drama teacher.
He was a very good teacher, there being something of the little boy that understood the ways of little boys, and which appealed to the children. Then aged 49 in the space of four months he developed and died of cancer.
Ron was my dad

See what other R's have been written HERE