![\"Harry](\"https:\/\/raremusez.co.uk\/Home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/5EBAE34C-8CAB-45C4-AAAB-853A07D25A29-199x300.jpg\")
My mother Ellen Heyes was born in ‘Pool Meadow’ Coventry in 1903. Seventh child of nine. As a baby she only just survived an infection of Scarlet Fever and was not expected to survive her teens. \u00a0When Ellen was a small child her brother taught her to write her name in chalk on a piece of slate in the backyard. She remembered the time when she turned the letters round to spell Nelle and asked her brother how do you say that. From then on she was known as her chosen name Nelle. I remember her stories of the cruel poverty of the times. How she felt privileged to go to school with one brown shoe and one black because many of her schoolmates were barefoot. At fourteen she worked in a mill, a dangerous job cleaning under the looms. At the time her meagre pay was the only household income, no one else had work. Hard times indeed.<\/p>\r\n
Her father was disabled as a young man while bringing a runaway horse and trap under control. For this selfless and heroic act he was given a half-gold sovereign by the husband of the young woman in the trap. As a result he lost the use of his right leg and was unable to find any gainful work. “Lo there goes a Pedagogue”<\/p>\r\n
I am her seventh soul gift to our world. Harry and Nelle lost the first three to cot death and childhood illnesses.<\/p>\r\n
They survived the torture of WW2. through which Harry served as a Submariner aboard the ill fated ‘Thunderbolt” submarine. Famous in Admiralty history previously named Thetis which became stuck in mud on its maiden voyage the entire crew 99 men were lost. Alone sick in hospital in Alexandria Egypt. A\u00a0solitary surviver, \u00a0Thunderbolt sailed without him and was sunk by an Italian Destroyer in 1943. All hands lost. He suffered that loss of comrades through his life. I once overheard him say that Thunderbolt was haunted by the Thetis tragedy. At times they heard and saw things. The ship always smelt of paint, they kept trying to erase the rust line left by the previous sinking. It just came back.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n ABSM Harry Cooper<\/p>\r\n The Submariner (D.Cooper 2002)<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n My father with no bad teeth in his head, he lived on mouldy bread, he said<\/p>\r\n He was a Submariner, a deep tarrier a submariner<\/p>\r\n Fly beneath the ocean waves, many close shaves<\/p>\r\n Fathomless underworld, minnows and whales<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n My father with the dark look to his eye, follow the sirens cry<\/p>\r\n Dark as the Navy Rum, salty eyed spirits rise, comrades with faces that fade<\/p>\r\n Left beneath the ocean waves, watery graves<\/p>\r\n Down where the tides turn, some submariners stayed<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n Alone and standing silent on the shore, as the waves do rage and roar<\/p>\r\n Far past the headland battles of foam and sand, where the white horses sing<\/p>\r\n Songs of the ocean waves, deep coral caves, his heart but an anchor<\/p>\r\n Sea changed… the submariner<\/p>\r\n Somehow they went forward to have my three siblings and I. Post ’45, Harry worked for the Admiralty for over thirty years. A technical officer in Lens optics and telescope development. I had a great collection of glass prisms which I passed on to Darrell Viner<\/a>, for an early day’s Dando ‘happening’<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n They made a glorious garden. Nelle saw ghosts at times in her life. As the seventh child of a seventh child she warned me “never to place a curse on another” Point a finger at another point three towards yourself. My deepest memories, boundless kindness and her singing her favourite songs to me. I used to ask for the ones that made me cry. My version of Barbara Allen comes from her knee.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n![\"Thunderbolt](\"https:\/\/raremusez.co.uk\/Home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Pirate-Dad.jpg\")
![\"HMS](\"https:\/\/raremusez.co.uk\/Home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/15653275-203E-494A-8932-EDC2492B6017_4_5005_c-300x234.jpeg\")