A Significant Date

On this day exactly seventy years ago, as the Nazi and Soviet agents were putting their signatures to the secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, my mother was giving birth in Stepping Hill Hospital to the only one of her three children who lived to tell the tale. And here I am, seven decades later, living in a way which neither she nor my father (both from the poorest parts of Salford) could possibly have imagined. I have spent this celebratory day swimming, reading, and sunbathing with my son and my grand-daughter in this beautiful garden pool in southern Andalucia. Just to have survived is enough; but to have lasted and prospered is a luxury - compared with those poor souls whose lives were signed away seventy years ago.