ETAPA PRELIMINAR

Frank was born in 1933 in Hereford. His work brought him to the Midlands in 1961 and he has remained working for the same company as an electronics engineer since that date. Frank and Emily were married in 1961 and had two children: Sandy, born in 1964 and David, born in 1967. Frank was widowed in 1980. He married Meg in 1982.

FRANK

I was married 18 years. What's to tell really. An ordinary marriage. My wife was 10 years younger than me. Same as Meg (see note 13). Emily was killed in a road accident. She went to work one morning and that was it. The police rang me at work. It was on David's birthday. A car came across the central reservation and that was it. I get upset even now [broke down]. You

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think you've got over it all and you haven't. You never do. You can't. I just carried on. I went to work as normal and did the rest at nights and weekends. I met Meg about eighteen months later. I was

definitely not going to get married again. I wasn't going to risk going through that again [the heartache of losing someone] but it just happened. It was the best thing that could happen.

The hardest thing was being on your own. The fact that you've got no-one to talk to. No-one wants to know. I mean when you're married you come home, you've seen something happen on the way and you can sit and talk about it. Kids aren't interested. You're completely and utterly on your own. That's the worst. The work load. You just do it. It's hard. Made me realise the worst job in the world is housework. It's the sheer monotony of it. You do it this week, you do it next. It's going to be there tomorrow. That sort of think I couldn't stand. It is. It's the worst job there is. I couldn't put up with it.

It [being widowed] put a strain on ray job. At work for six months I was on automatic. I couldn't do anything at work. Jobs I used to do without thinking about became insurmountable. I remember one day doing something and I suddenly thought "I've done it!

Without any problem! I've done a job". I knew I was getting better then. For six months I couldn't do anything. I went along you know but went through the motions but everything was hard. As I say a tiny problem became enormous. Just blew out of all proportion.

When you're on your own you let the children get away with murder because you haven't got the time or the energy. You can't be bothered. It's easier to say yes than to argue with them. They were effectively in charge. They got more or less what they wanted. They sort of ran the place really. They couldn't once I got married. That's one of the things they didn't like. I should have made life harder for the children instead of doing everything for them which I did. That was a daft thing to do. Now I think if they'd been working, I mean, I should have said to Sandy "Sandy, you're 15 and doing 'O' levels now. I'm sorry you've got to leave school and look after the house". If I'd done that when Meg came she might have said "Thank goodness someone's come". You're trying to be both parents and you're working twice as hard to try and make up for it. You couldn't anyway.

I can't really say I thought about being a stepparent at the time. I wanted to marry Meg and the children

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came with it. I never really thought about it. Obviously I thought when we got married we'd have a few problems but nothing I thought we could never overcome. I didn't get married for the children. I got married because I wanted to marry Meg so it was just something that happened when I got married. A minor part of getting married I thought. Having two children of my own of course it wasn't a major change in my life really. If I'd had no children I might have thought about it but two, four, six, what's the difference. Children are children.

You get problems. There we were trying to make it work and they were doing their level best to make sure it didn't. That was the impression I got [laughs]. It applies to all of them. They'd obviously got a different attitude towards it than we had. I can't think of any particular problems. They were just horrible kids and kids are horrible anyway so I think. Probably Meg more than me it seemed felt it. It seemed more important to her. Women look at it differently to men anyway. She took it more personally. You know. Meg's children were nasty to me. They'd say things like "You're not my dad". Well, fair enough, I'm not. I can understand that. I don't expect them to be nice to me. I mean, they came here. They'd been made to come here and live with me and they didn't particularly

want to. I can see that. They were nasty and abusive and called me nasty things. That was part of it you know. It didn't worry me. I just hoped in time it would all settle down. Nothing particularly stood out. They were just kids reacting to a changed situation. It takes time. Don't let it get you down. It all sorts itself out eventually.

David's changed out of all recognition. He wouldn't even speak to Meg. Now as far as he's concerned he ^ looks up to her more than he does to me (see note 17). It's fantastic. He's grown up. He doesn't get all upset about things that don't matter as kids do of course.

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