JEANETTE MURPHY (Lincoln) November 1941 by her son BRADLEY
I have a great relationship with my Mum, it’s fierce. I had a great relationship with my Dad, it was very smooth – very easy, there was no need to push there. My Dad was a bit of a smiley, smiley guy who thought he could get everything with a smile and apparently, I employ the same tactics. Whereas my Mum is very ‘meat and two veg’. When you articulate a relationship as it is in its status quo, you realise all the gaps that are there and all the missed opportunities. I was just one of the Lincoln boys. I remember having a happy childhood. My older brothers would say ‘don’t go messing about causing Mum any trouble’. There was a kind of protection there, that was my sense of it. I don’t know how that got filtered through, but it did. Because my older brothers hadn’t brought any trouble home there was no point me bringing any. I was pretty obedient in school. I wasn’t over academically bright, probably I had to work harder than others, and because of that it made me mess about a little bit, but not ever too much. I was raised in Wythenshawe in Manchester. There are five children; Karl the eldest, then Anthony, then David; they have a different father than me and my younger brother Darren. David the closest brother to me, has blond hair and blue eyes; a really good looking lad and I used to think ‘Ahh why can’t I look like him?’ My elder brothers in the UK are white and I have an older brother in Jamaica, Michael, who is Black, who I didn’t meet until I was sixteen. My brothers’ father was Irish. Mum didn’t marry him. She was born in Wythenshawe and later
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