On Friday 13 October 1944, Daisy Keates, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, gave birth to her fourth and final son, William George, in the Borough Hospital, Southampton. Bill, as he came to be known, was the first of Daisy’s children born in hospital. After five years of war, being bombed out and moved countless times, she was not in the best of health. Daisy’s husband, Albert, had been working all over the country at whichever dock needed men, so she had to cope with bombs, rationing and three young boys alone. For most of the war, the Keates family had been living in the thick of it, right in the centre of Southampton, either in Northam Street, Lime Street, Queens Walk or Utility Flats, Canute Road. By 1944, they were back in Northam Street, in a two-up, two-down terraced house with no indoor plumbing and a toilet at the bottom of the garden. It was not the most auspicious start for young Bill Keates.
