My Father
My father was in the 1914-18 war. When he came home, there was no work, so he went off to London to look for work, so this was why my mother was staying with my grandmother when I was born. He’d looked for work in Sunderland but there wasn’t any to be had, so off to London he went. He worked for a while down there and when this job finished he decided to come home. His journey was blazoned over all the newspapers, well, The Sun and Echo particularly. It described how a Sunderland man, Jack Henderson, had walked all the way from London back to Sunderland to be with his wife and his new-born child. There was quite a lot of publicity about it apparently at the time, or so I was told. But for someone to walk 250 or 300 miles from London back to Sunderland was quite an achievement and that after four years of war.
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