Betty Keifer, wife of an American Air Force Sergeant, lived around the corner in Marlborough Road and was pregnant at the same time. In the middle of one night there was a pounding on our front door and there was Sergeant Keifer in a real panic. Betty was giving birth in the toilet. Marjorie, with only a month to go herself, rushed over in her nightie and delivered the baby, actually in the toilet bowl. Kevin was unharmed.

Soon after Hilary began to walk Jean Manning-Jacobs, whose kids were always playing in our garden, who had herself been a nurse, said "There's something wrong with her tummy, see your doctor, quick." Within a few days a surgeon at Ipswich Hospital had taken out a kidney with a large cancerous growth. Hilary owes her life to Jean and that surgeon.

I have never been sentimental or emotional. My mother used to say "You're too hard, you don't show your feelings." The Senior Lecturer at the Management College at Brooklands old motor race track reported "unflappable". Apart from Marjorie's heart attacks and after her death I can only remember two occasions when I have shed tears from emotion. Once was when Paul got into trouble with the Law, and the other was in the office car park when I heard that Hilary's operation had been successful.

Hilary went to Queensbury School here in Dunstable and being a strong-willed individual was continually in trouble with the teaching staff, but got good exam results. At 18, like her brothers and sister, she left home and struck out on her own. After a series of misadventures in bed sits she finished up near Kingston on Thames in Surrey with quite a good job. But there was a difficult situation with her so-called landlord, and rumours of her company closing down which brought on a fit of depression, as a result of which we persuaded her to come home after eight years away.

Eventually she returned to Kingston to live on a boat, which I helped her to buy. One night there was a heavy flood after rains and a tree trunk floated down the tributary into the Thames, holed the boat and sank it. That was the end of that and she came home again.

Now she has a decent job in Luton and has got back to her normal happy self. After being a great comfort to me following Marjorie's death, she married John Ward from the same company where she works and now lives in Luton. John is mechanically minded, like Malcolm, and is fairly placid - very necessary to cope with Hilary.

In her 'teens she belonged to the famous Luton Girls' Choir, up to its final last day. We used to go to performances as far away as Eastbourne and Tewkesbury, stay overnight in an hotel, and collect her after the performance, or else meet the coach in the small hours of the morning. I have a photo of the final Choir and a tape of one of their records.