Ronald Leedham: Visits

Transcript

I can remember my dad coming to visit me, and they had a very poor visiting record anyway, but I can remember dad coming to visit me and he brought me one of those little train sets where you had a circle of rails with an engine and a tender and you wound it up with a key, and all that sort of thing. He brought me this and while I was playing with it on the bed, I can remember him saying ‘Your mum’s died, Ron’ and I can remember saying, ‘Is she?’ and that was all. I can’t remember anything else about that particular day, ‘cause I was so concentrating on this train set – you know what kids are like, and to be honest with you I’d been separated from my mother for so long.

That was the rules and regs: you will only see your child every six weeks if you’re lucky. And some kids didn’t have visitors at all, how they got on I don’t know. But he used to come every six weeks for a couple of hours and we had to go and see the superintendent, if I remember rightly, and he wanted to know where he was taking us. If he said ‘Oh I thought I’d take Ron down and we’d have a cup of tea in the town, in Sevenoaks,’ and he wanted to know which café we were going into because if it wasn’t up to scratch you might get a disease. I ask you. It was only afterwards when you think about it, you think 'who the hell?' Here we were in a warzone and he worried about us picking up a cold or something nasty while you were having a cup of tea.

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