Cruel twist of fate

My parents, Dot and Sid, never really had much in life. Born to large working-class families in the 1930s, they were forced to leave school when they were 14. Dad became a farmworker and mum, before she had a family, briefly worked in a factory, but was forced to leave when she became engaged (those were the days!)

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that their house, where I was born and lived along with my parents and elder sister, was fitted with hot running water, an inside toilet and a bathroom. The dark old house never had a damp course and, as a result, was always cold and miserable. Income covered the basics, but clothes had to come mostly from jumble sales and we never had holidays and rarely went out.

Mum and dad dreamed of having a better life, so like many of their generation assiduously filled in a pools coupon every week in the hope that they might win big. Mum, who was educationally subnormal (sorry, I don’t know what the PC term for that is nowadays), always used the same numbers every week.

Inevitably, the introduction of the National Lottery replaced the football pools, with mum again continuing to use the same set of numbers to try and hit the jackpot in this new game of chance.

On 26 November 1998, my parents’ lives changed forever, when my father suffered a severely debilitating stroke, resulting in the loss of movement in the left side of his body. Mum cared for him until he died of heart failure in February 2003.

The only time my mum failed to fill in a lottery form was on the week of the stroke; she couldn’t, because she had to spend most of the time beside dad in the hospital. And it was on that week that her numbers came up. “We would have been millionaires,” she told me afterwards, although she wasn’t in any way bitter, despite the fact that they really needed the money. However, not to be put off, the very next week, and up until the end of her life, she religiously continued playing the lottery, using the same numbers as she ever had.

Sometimes, life can be inordinately cruel.

Barry Cross

Ashford, Kent