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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 116688" data-attributes="member: 22">1968Pauline Fowler: Just before Mark was born, we didn't have two halfpennies to rub together. The biggest row we've ever had — should we ask the old bag for a loan or not?Arthur Fowler: The Dinkys job saved the day.Pauline: Yeah, just in time.Arthur: I was a tough sort of bloke in me younger days, a union man. I lived, breathed and ate the principles of the union. I was protected. We were united and unbeatable. Everyone was me brother. We were angry, and in our arrogance, we held the whip hand. We, the workers, were the backbone of the country. We were indispensable.Pauline: We never knew what was going to happen next, did we? But we managed all right.Arthur: You think you know it all at that age, don't you?Arthur: When we were young, we didn't give a damn about anything, did we?Gary Bolton: When you're young, you don't look to the future. You just want to have fun.Arthur: Do you remember when we were first married and there was just the two of us?Pauline: Oh yeah. Seemed no time at all till Mark came along.Arthur: Then we were dreaming about having the place to ourselves.     Pauline: Never all was a bed of roses.Arthur: No, but we got through.Arthur: I hate waiting about in hospitals. Remember when you had the kids? That was terrible.Pauline: I wasn't having such a brilliant time meself.Pauline to Mark: You were overdue, you know.Dr Legg on Mark: I remember delivering him.Arthur to Pauline: I watched you bring him [Mark] into the world.Pauline on Walford General: I had my firstborn here, right here in this hospital.Mark Albert Fowler. Date and place of birth: 2nd February 1968, Walford.Pauline on Mark: When he was born, it was just him and me.Arthur on Mark: Ever since he could open his mouth, he only had to ask for something and it was there.Ethel Skinner on Mark: I remember the day he was born. We was in the Vic and Arthur came in, all excited. "It's a boy!" he said. Oh he was so proud, bless him.Dot on Mark: It was Lou's first grandchild by her daughter. Pleased as punch, she was. Stood a round at the Vic. Unheard of, that was.Jim Branning: I bet you girls wet the baby's head, didn't you?Dot: Oh, Lou, Ethel and me — yeah. Well, Lou and Ethel did. I suppose I sipped me sherry, sat in a corner, watched it all pass by, worried what people might think of me, that I might make a fool of meself. I wish I'd stood on a table, got drunk as a lord, sung a song and danced and not give a fig what people thought. I wish I'd raised the roof because life is a blessing and every little tiny moment is precious and shouldn't be wasted.Pauline: When I had Mark, I was up and about in no time.Den Watts on Pauline: I remember the day she brought Mark home from the hospital, smiling all over her face, and Angie said she would have thought she's the first woman ever to have given birth.Blossom Jackson on her grandson: You should have seen Alan [as a toddler]. A little beauty he was.Thomas Banks: Date of birth 05 Feb 1968Pauline: I remember when I had Mark, I used to bring him to bed with us and I'd wake up every two minutes just to make sure he's still breathing. You don't know what to do for the best, do you?Pauline to Mark: I remember standing [at the bottom of the stairs] when you were three weeks old. I was crying my eyes out. I'd gone to check on you and I couldn't hear anything, I couldn't hear you breathing. I was so frightened, I couldn't touch you. I was just crying. You were my firstborn. It was all so new to me. Then Arthur picked you up and you started crying. And then I realised how much my life had changed, that I would rather die than lose one of my children.Pauline: When Mark was nine weeks old, he managed to roll off the bed.Natalie Price: How old were you when you got married?Kathy Beale: Old enough to know better.Kathy on herself and Pete: When we got married, I was so happy I thought I was going to burst.Kathy on her and Pete's wedding presents: I got a dinner service, a set of knives and forks, three toasters.Kathy on a necklace: Lou gave it to me when I married Pete. Something old. She got it from her grandma when she got married.Pauline to Kathy: Lou always said that about you — "Keep your eyes on that one. She'll have the coat off your back as soon as look at you."Pete Beale: Do you remember our wedding day, Kath? You was twenty minutes late. I thought you wasn't coming.Kathy: And you had a button missing from your suit jacket. All that going on, all those people, and all I could think about was, you had a button missing. Silly, really.Pete: You looked beautiful that day, you really did.Kathy: You looked pretty smart yourself.Pete: Except for the button?Kathy: Except for the button.Irene Hills, looking at Kathy and Pete's wedding photograph: Is that really me? Look at my kimono! Ted really hated that. Said I showed him up. Little did he know that was the whole idea. Poor old Pete — I quite liked him. You [Kathy] were too good for him, but then we women usually are.Sharon Mitchell: What did you do [to celebrate]?Kathy: What, when I married Pete? Nothing. Just nipped off to the registry office, didn't we?Sharon: What, no party or nothing?Kathy: What, with Lou Beale and the rest of them, all steam coming out of their ears because I was marrying their blue eyed boy? Lou thought Pete was marrying beneath him.Grant Mitchell: And this was after he'd been married to Pat?Kathy: Yeah, I was a bit offended at the time meself.Pauline: Lou always said Pete was lowering himself the day he married you.Kathy: The Beales weren't exactly royalty, you know.Pauline to Michelle: You know where Kath came from. She got out of all that when she married Pete.Angie Watts to Kathy: You stood up to old Ma Beale when you and Pete got married.Lou Beale to Kathy: When you married Pete, I hated you, hated you for taking him away from Pat and the kids. Skinny little thing, you was. Needed him. Right little hanger on, I thought. But I was wrong.Pauline on Pete: After all he'd been through with Pat, I was just pleased to see him happy again.Pete: [I'm] not very good with words, I suppose.Kathy: I knew that when I married you.Kathy: For the first sixteen, seventeen years of me life, I didn't have any say over what I did — me mum and dad decided everything for me — and then when I married Pete, nothing changed.Kathy: I hate when a bloke's with his mates and he tries to make out you're his property or something. Reminds me of me mother. She'd sit down, me dad would fetch her over a gin and orange, and he'd go and leave her sitting there and join his mates. My old man used to drink heavy. Got paranoid in the end. You know, obsessive. The drink does that.Angie: There was one old boy when I first started [working in a pub], used to go on and on in gory and lurid detail about ... [whispers the rest].Angie: I often wonder, if I had have been sober, would I have married Dennis? Only joking. I never used to drink back then.Michelle Fowler: Did you have a hen party?Kathy: Course she did. And whatever she says now, she was out of her box.Angie: I wasn't used to it. And I still say somebody spiked my drink.Kathy: We ended up in this pub down by the docks, didn't we? We nearly got picked up by a crowd of sailors.Angie: They were Polish, weren't they? Couldn't understand a bleeding word they were saying! Do you reckon they were asking the way to Walford Town Hall or what?!Kathy: Yeah well, judging by their hand signals, it didn't look like street directions to me!Angie: Never mind. We was good little girls, weren't we? We went straight home.Kathy: Well, we might have stopped in one or two pubs on the way. Oh, but she was all right because I was looking after her.Angie: I was looking after you!Kathy: We were looking after each other.Kathy: Me and Angie got up to a few things that might be best forgotten.Cora Cross: I had an alarming experience with absinthe back in the sixties. Two French sailors on leave. Never again.Cora: I always was a sucker for a man in a hat.Angie to Den: Why I married you, I'll never know.Den: Because I was tall, dark and handsome.Angie: Handsome? I've seen better looking ferrets.Pete to Sharon: When [Den] married your mum, she knew what she was letting herself in for.Sharon on Den's signet ring: Mum gave it to him when they were married.Angie: I can't think why my mum cried so much at the church.Pam Coker: We had [‘At Last’ by Etta James] for the first dance at our wedding. A beautiful room — Les filled it with flowers.Cora: Spelling your names out?Den: I remember the honeymoon better. We stayed in that hotel in Perry Bay.Angie: God, it was awful - great long corridors, two flights to the loo. Somebody said Captain Scott stayed there on the way to the Antarctic! It was a laugh, though.Den: Freezing cold room, Angie eating chicken sandwiches, me lying on the bed thinking, "Crikey, what a place to die."Angie to Den: You were a tasty geezer on our honeymoon.Pam: Les and I were on our honeymoon in Hastings. It was the Palace or the Queen’s [Hotel].Angie: We were happy when we first got married.Den: In the beginning, it was good.Den: I was Jack the Lad.Angie: We had lots of plans. I can remember walking down the high street, me and him, talking about all the things we were going to do.Den: We both wanted the same things and we both worked damn hard to get them.Angie: We used to sit in bed for hours on end talking, making plans. He used to say how he'd look after me and I believed him. Mind you, I knew there was other women — I wasn't stupid — but they never really mattered. He was just proving a point, proving he could still pull the birds.Angie: The first time it happened [was] with that bloody female accountant in the first pub we had. [Den] kept talking about her all the time, how brilliantly she did the books. Then all of a sudden, he stopped talking. That's when I knew.Archie Mitchell, speaking about his feelings for Peggy in 2008: Something I’ve regretted not saying for the past forty years.Charlie Slater: The Thomas Crown Affair used to be one of Viv's favourites.Big Mo: Yeah. She always loved Steve McQueen. I reckon that's why she picked you out!Charlie: I remember the first time we saw it down at the Roxy.Charlie to his daughter Lynne: Your mum [had] an attack of the jitters the day before we got married.Charlie: The night before I married my Viv, my old man took me to one side and he did this for me. [Scribbles something on a beermat]. That's a button. "Now if you press that, [the bride-to-be] will disappear. She won't be hurt, she won't think badly of you, but she just won't be there anymore. The question is, would you press that or not? If you would, then marrying her is the biggest mistake you'll ever make."Charlie: Me and Viv didn't have to pay a penny [for the wedding], did we?Big Mo, looking at Charlie and Viv's wedding photo: Don't Viv look lovely? Best day of her life she reckoned.Dot, looking at Charlie and Viv's wedding photo: Don't she look beautiful? You know what that is, and you don't see it often these days, that's true love.Charlie on Viv on their wedding day: She was beautiful. I remember thinking on the day, "I'm the luckiest man in the world." I even said as much to me old man and do you know what he said? "You deserve her, son." I'm not sure I did, but it was nice of him to say that, weren't it?Charlie: There’s only ever been one woman in my life. I made vows. I promised her for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.Big Mo: Till death do you part.Big Mo to Charlie: You had your honeymoon in Southend.Charlie on a tea kettle: It was a wedding present to me and [Viv]. We used it for years.Harry Slater on Charlie: Completely devoted to his wife when she was alive.Charlie on Harry: He's never stuck at a relationship. Wouldn't know how.Pauline: Why did you get married?Derek Harkinson: Because people make mistakes.Pauline: Did you love her?Derek: Not in the right way, no. I tried to make it work.Mark Reynolds [Zsa Zsa Carter’s father] born 24.3.1968Minty Peterson: Lena Marple — you never forget your first love, do you?Sam Mitchell: Who was the last special woman in your life?Minty: Catherine. She was great. We used to hang out all the time together. She lived in this great big house. It was like a castle. It had turrets and everything. I used to think she was my princess and one day I'd save her — you know, we'd get married and we'd live happily ever after.Sam: What happened to Catherine?Minty: Well, she went to a different secondary school and I never saw her again. I was ten.Sam: The love of your life, aged ten?!Minty: Things can be pretty intense at that age, you know. It all went downhill after Catherine.Masood Ahmed: I remember my first crush. I was about ten or eleven. I was in the playground and my friend comes over to me and he says, “Meera loves you.” My heart started to beat faster, I started to sweat and I looked over and there she was just staring right back at me, this beautiful thing just staring.Ayesha Rana: What did you do?Masood: I ran away.Masood: I was never very good at school.Heather on Minty: When he was ten, he had two pet mice called Skit and Hide. He thought they were both boys till he came home one day and found twenty mice crawling in his bedroom.Jean Slater: I lost a tortoise when I was little.Minty: When I was a kid, my dad used to take me out to Epping Forest and we used to walk for miles until we got completely lost, and then we used to have to navigate our way out.Garry Hobbs: You told me your dad was a telephone engineer for the GPO, not a flaming Comanche Indian.Minty: Yeah, he was, but he loved the great outdoors. He wanted to be a ranger.Garry: What — like the Lone Ranger?Minty: No, you muppet, a park ranger, like, you know, National Trust sort of thing.Patrick on himself and Cedric Lucas: We used to sing in this group back in Trinidad, the Five Hectors.Patrick: Cedric, that man used to drink [Blue Devil rum] by the gallon. He was always good at making things complicated. Never known such a live wire. Always had a sense of humour.Patrick: We were playing this little gig. A dive of a place, man — the Monday Night Club. Four people in the audience, four, and one of them was a dog! Man, that was the quickest set we ever played.Joy Lucas, Cedric’s widow: The group was very successful in their day. Doo-wop, mainly.Patrick: We all sung harmonies.Yolande: Aubrey [Valentine] used to be in the group with Patrick.Chelsea Fox, looking at a photograph of the Five Hectors: You [Aubrey] were quite a looker.Yolande Trueman: When did you go touring exactly?Patrick, speaking in 2006: That was nearly forty years ago.Patrick to Aubrey: Why you don’t tell them about the time we were trying out that new dance routine on stage? You see, Aubrey, he wasn’t much of a mover so he fell right off the stage! Spent the rest of the tour on crutches after spraining he ankle!Aubrey Valentine: I remember my ankle was so swollen I could hardly walk, but it was my pride that suffered the most. Still — got me a few dates with the nurse that looked me over. Beautiful girl. You know what they say, every cloud.Aubrey, mid-anecdote: It was just supposed to be a little fancy footwork, you know, but with a drink inside him [Patrick], it got a little more fancy — like a sausage popping out its skin!Pat to Patrick: We were just hearing about the night that you showed more than your musical credentials!Patrick: I’m not sure I remember that.Denise Fox: I never met my dad, but he was in a group in the sixties.Yolande: What kind of music did they sing?Denise: Rhythm and blues, I think. The group was called the Five Hectors.Denise on the Five Hectors: Did they tour a lot?Joy: Yeah, all over the Caribbean.Denise: I don’t suppose they ever went to Montserrat?Joy: Yes. Cedric said they played the dance halls in Cork Hill and Salem.Kevin Wicks: Did your mum ever give you an idea which one [of the Five Hectors] might be [your father]?Denise: All she says is, one of them had a lovely smile.Denise to Patrick and Aubrey: It could be any one of the five of you.Patrick: Cedric, he has his fair share of the ladies, and as for Aubrey, he was just plain greedy.Yolande: And you?Patrick: It was the other fellas and them who fooled around with the girls and them, not me.Yolande: Of course, of course. You always said your prayers and got to bed with a good book!Patrick on Joy: Used to accuse me of leading her old man astray.Yolande on Patrick and Cedric: They were smooth operators then.Aubrey: Remember what we used to say, Patrick — “Be there or be square.” “Live and let live” — that was our motto. Give and take. Share and share alike.Patrick on Aubrey: Always one for shirking his responsibilities.Patrick: That Aubrey always took great delight in stealing girls away from me.Aubrey on Patrick: Man’s a fool, always has been. That’s why it was always so easy to take his women.Phil Mitchell: I got older — you know, six or seven — I started going out to play. I was no different to any other kid in our street — a bit of a tearaway, knocking on doors, running away, scrapping, the usual stuff, you know. Dad decided I was turning bad, needed a bit of discipline. It's like he needed to prove that he could control his own kids, you know? Make him more of a man. I mean, I was his first son, it's like he used me to show he was master in his ownhouse.Sharon: He hit you?Phil: It weren't the beatings that hurt, it was just — after a while, that was all there was. If he'd have just come up to me room when he thought I was asleep, you know, and stroked me head or pulled the covers up over me — anything, just so as I knew that he loved me — I'd have forgotten everything.Sharon: But you never did.Phil: No.Sharon: Maybe he didn't know how to. Some blokes are like that.Phil: Yeah, maybe.Sharon: What about Peggy while this was going on?Phil: She did what she could, you know. It was a different world then.Billy Mitchell: It was me ninth birthday. Me old man, he was sober for a change so he took me to the fair. I really wanted this goldfish, but he couldn't win one, you know, so he just bought one off the bloke, and then he bought me a tank, coral and plants in it and everything. He was like a little kid himself setting it all up. Course it didn't last. Next day he was up to his old tricks again. You know, on the sauce.Kat Slater: Well at least you still had your goldfish, eh?Billy: He flushed it down the bog. It was like the good side of him was just too weak, you know? The thing is, I knew that it was in there somewhere.Kat: You keep hoping it'll come back out.Billy: That's why I kept hold of me bit of coral, I suppose. Soppy.Billy: My old man, he didn’t want to know. Stuff like that stays with you forever.Billy: When I was a kid, I could see other people fitting in, but me ...Billy: I had pleurisy when I was a kid.Billy: You used to live on Ifield Road?Gina: Till I was about eight. Mum used to work in a little sweet shop — Nell.Billy: I remember her, eyes like the north. You couldn't steal any milk bottles when it was her shift.Billy, speaking in 2011: Me and Phil, we used to play in the fields where they’re building [the Olympic] stadium. I say fields — we used to break into the factories that they’re pulling down to build it.Peggy: Grant once had his heart set on joining the circus. He was about six at the time. When his dad said he couldn't, he sulked for weeks afterwards.Bev Williams to daughter Gina: You were murder, trying to get you off to sleep. Cindy was the opposite, good as gold.Heather Trott born July 4th 1968Heather Trott: Mum reckons I was born under an unlucky star.Norman Simmonds: Lady Luck was never a pal of mine. “Accident waiting to happen,” me mother used to say.Norman: Would you be surprised to know that I’ve been married five times? Widowed twice and divorced three times, all before the first anniversary. If that’s not bad luck I don’t know what is.Stan Carter: I’ve drunk and smoked enough for two lifetimes, had more than my share of beautiful women. I’ve been a lucky old git.Heather: I’ve been put on this earth to make everyone else feel better about themselves.Shirley Carter on Heather: She was put on this earth to suffer.Dot on Heather: She struggled all her life.Queenie Trott, Heather’s mother: She’s a drag on me. Always has been. Biggest regret of my life, having her.Charlie Slater: I’ve lived in a house full of women all me life.Charlie: I wouldn’t let my Viv out the house after eight months [of pregnancy].Kat: Was you scared, Dad, when Mum gave birth to Lynne?Charlie: Terrified.Kat: So what did you do?Charlie: I did what all expectant fathers did. I went home, switched the telly on and watched Doctor Finlay’s Casebook.Big Mo: I helped my Viv deliver Lynne on the changing room floor of the Clacton Lido.Big Mo to Lynne and her sister Kat: From the minute you was born, I've been looking after you lot. I've been risking my neck, keeping my eyes open, and down that nick.Big Mo to her granddaughters: I've only ever tried to keep you all safe.Pauline to Mark: When you were teething, you cried for a month.Patrick: When Sir Gary Sobers hit that 6 six [August 31st 1968], me eyes just swell up. I didn't try to hide it, I just let the tears and them flow. I even hug up a fellow who was standing up next to me.Jim: That's true emotion, that is. I bet you didn't even know the geezer, did you?Patrick: Never met him before in me life.Peggy on Phil: He doesn't like surprises, never has, even as a kid. I used to have to tell him what his birthday presents were in advance.Peggy on Phil and Grant: When they were kids, it didn't matter where Dad and me hid the Christmas presents, it was like some inbuilt radar. They always honed in on them.Phil on Christmas: I’d be up all night, too excited to sleep.Ben Mitchell: What was your favourite present?Phil: That’s easy — boxing gloves. Still smell the leather.Phil: I remember getting [an Action Man doll] one Christmas. Clint, his name was.Grant: Yeah, I remember Clint.Phil: Yeah, I bet you do. You nicked him off me.Grant: No I didn't.Phil: Yeah, you did. Then you chucked up all over his combat gear.Grant: Yeah well, you could hardly blame me. I got given some poxy teddy bear, didn't I? Mum gave me a right ear-bashing over that.Phil: Never missed a trick, did she?Nick Cotton, looking at an old photograph: That was the year you bought me an Action Man, do you remember?Dot: No, it weren’t me, it was Ethel. I didn’t approve of violent games. Billy: I haven't played with toy soldiers for years. Used to get them free in packets of cereal.David Wicks to his grandson Liam: Your nanny Pat, she always used to put too much sugar on [my cereal] when I was a kid. I used to love it.Pauline on a bracelet: It belonged to my mum. She got it from her mum.Peggy on a locket and chain: This was my mother’s, the only thing of value she had. Her mum gave it to her.Stan Carter, speaking in 2014: Still using that [trifle] bowl, are you?Babe Smith: It was me mother’s.Masood Ahmed: This is the copy of the Koran my father gave to me and his father gave to him.Zainab Masood on a bracelet: My mother gave it to me.Zainab: Coconut oil. My mum used it on all of us [as a hair treatment] in Pakistan.Zainab: Me, a simple girl from Pakistan.Yusef Kahn: The good old days back home before life became complicated.Zainab: You buy something and you keep the boxes. My mother does that. My grandmother did it.Syed Masood to Zainab: I know you had a sheltered upbringing, Mum.Syed on Zainab: She’s been under pressure all her life.Phil on playing Tinker, Tailor at Christmas: I used to go nuts if I didn’t get Rich Man, didn’t I?</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?