The author in 1965 (© CC BY-SA 4.0 – David Stoker)I recently returned to Crawley for the first time in more than a decade, to attend the cremation service for an old friend, Don Nunn. At the ceremony I met several other friends from my school days and afterwards we…

My father, Anthony Stoker, was the eleventh child of a devout Catholic Irish immigrant couple living in Southport, Lancashire. He was born in May 1918, but his mother died six months later, during the Spanish Flu pandemic. His father was unable to cope with a new baby as well as…