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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 119586" data-attributes="member: 22">1988Roxy Mitchell: The last book I read was probably the photo stories in My Guy Annual, 1988.Danielle Jones: My brother’s called Gareth. My mum had a thing for the bloke in the coffee ads.Little Mo: Remember the Easter Egg Hunt? I was always useless. Mum used to give me little slips of paper with clues on.Kat: My dad used to secretly eat the back halves of our [Easter] eggs and then pad them out with foil so that we wouldn’t notice.Heather Trott: ‘One More Try’ [by George Michael] released April the twentieth 1988.Heather on the Eurovision Song Contest: I haven’t missed one since 1988.Minty on Eurovision: When did Switzerland win it and with what song?Heather: That would be 1988, ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’ by Celine Dion.Derek Branning on his son Joey: I’ve missed more than his first steps over the years.Carol on Alan: He's always been there when [Bianca] needed someone. He's put food in front of her. He's been a father to her and a good one.Robbie: Alan was more of a dad to us than anyone.Jean Slater on Sean: He was a boy and a half when he was small. Do you know, once he ran off because I didn’t bring home the right sort of sweets? That was before [Stacey] were born. I searched everywhere. Frantic, I was. I found him in the end in the playground down the road, sitting on the swings in the pitch dark.Masood Ahmed to Syed: You always liked the swings. Do you remember that little park by the red house? “Just one more push, Dad, please!” You always wanted to go that little bit higher. I wasn’t much more than a boy myself. I was always terrified you were going to let go of the swings.Robbie to Sonia: You used to love playing on the swings when you were little. I was always frightened you might fall off. Things were simpler then. I was the big brother with all the answers.Jim Branning: You've always been a bit squeamish, haven't you?Sonia: No, I haven't.Jim: What about the time you broke your tooth when you were playing football with Robbie?Sonia: Granddad, I was about three years old.Jim: There was blood all over the place. You screamed the place down.Carol: The number of times I’ve had to get in-between Robbie and Sonia when they were kids.Jim to Sonia: You was a lovely little girl.Jim: Never got a peep out of you when you was a nipper.Sonia: Yeah well, with Bianca and Mum, it was like a bleeding war zone in our house.Jim: You were always the sensible one.Sonia: I had no choice, did I?Carol: Sensible was never my strong point.Jack Branning: Sensible was never really my strong point.Sonia: When I was little, all I got at a birthday party was a bit of cake in a napkin.Bianca to Carol: Do you remember my party when that little girl gave me the red balloon and I just let it fly away?Carol: I remember me and my mum making you a costume for your school’s fancy dress. You insisted on going as a bunch of grapes.Bianca: Oh, yeah!Carol: So we blew up all these green balloons and sewed them onto your T-shirt, only by the time you got to school they’d all popped or deflated so you just had a load of saggy balloons hanging out of you.Bianca: That was the worst fancy dress costume ever. I had a proper tantrum.Archie Mitchell: Balloons, fizzy pop, ten sorts of crisps, banners, cakes, pass the parcel — it took a couple of years but in the end, we had perfected the children’s party.Glenda Mitchell on Ronnie and Roxy: I spoilt them rotten as children.Roxy: We have been spoilt.Ronnie: Tell me you’re joking!Roxy on her birthday parties: We used to have the whole class. Little cakes with icing, musical statues and that Kevin Linsel got his head stuck in a chair under the dining table. Blind man’s buff, water balloon fights until Ronnie concussed that David whats-his-name in the garden.Kat: The only animals we had at parties when I was a kid were nits.Sonia: Every birthday cake, me mum used to say to me, "Blow the candles out and when you do, make a wish,but you can't tell no-one because it might not come true." I [used to] ask for a pony.Robbie: When I was younger, I always wanted [a toy race track].Hazel Hobbs to Garry: You always wanted one of those American T-shirts with “I Heart New York” across it, but I never did get you one, did I?Bianca: I remember when you were giving up [cigarettes]. You were awful to live with.Carol: I know. That's when I was pregnant with Billie. Alan nagged at me so I did.Jean to Stacey: I went off sweet things when I was expecting you.Jean: The trouble with Stacey is she forgets I carried her around for nine months, not the other way around.Bianca: When I was a teenager, I could never understand why anyone would want to have kids. Seeing my mum churning them out one after the other — always knackered, always in a mood, always poor.Shirley to her daughter Carly: As a kid, you [threw] tantrums and sulks.Ronnie, speaking to Roxy in 2008: What are you going to do, Rox? Are you going throw yourself on the floor, are you? Bang your little heels? You going to pout until you get what you want? That may have worked when we were kids.Archie on Roxy: She used to [put her fingers in her ears and sing] as a kid.Roxy on Archie’s antique fountain pen: He used to write all his letters with it. Said it had the personal touch. He was a scribbler. I always wanted to use [it] when I was a little girl and Dad would never let me.Glenda Mitchell: Always had a crayon in you hand when you were a little girl.Roxy: Wasn’t I mainly redecorating the hallway?Glenda: Oh, I hated that wallpaper anyway.Roxy: I used to go off all the time [as a child]. There was this old bomb site ...Roxy: “Poor little Ronnie. Delicate little Ronnie. Careful not to step on her fragile emotions.” I have had to tiptoe around your precious feelings my whole life.Archie to Roxy: You always were a thoughtful girl.Archie to Ronnie: You [were a] dirty little adolescent.Ronnie on Archie: He never approved of anything I did.Archie: When I look back, I honestly do not know where I went wrong. Call me a sentimental old fool, but those two girls of mine, they were just a pair of blonde-haired blue-eyed angels when they were younger, couldn’t do enough for you. God knows what happened.Billy: They grew up.Archie: No, they didn’t. That’s the problem. They just stopped listening.Archie on Ronnie: That’s where it all went wrong — not giving her her freedom.Christian Clarke: What did people [at school] think of you back then? Was it, A) Vivacious Veronica or B) Veronica Vile?Ronnie: B), OK? My hobbies were humiliating the girls and castrating the boys.Roxy on Ronnie’s control issues: She was the same even at school. She used to pack her bag the night before.Ronnie: I’m organised.Roxy: You colour-coordinated your pencils.Ronnie: I wanted to be just like you, trotting out one-liners, making the whole class laugh. I wasn’t exactly popular even back then.Roxy: Yeah you were.Ronnie: Whereas you — you can win anyone over can’t you? Even Melanie Cann.Roxy: Melanie Cann? She was a hard-faced cow with no boobs and a big gob and mascara like blue spiders' legs.Ronnie: Yeah but she invited you to her birthday. You were putting her down, she ended up laughing. I tried to do the same. I ended up with biro all over my new bag so I went for her. Made the whole thing a lot worse.Roxy to Ronnie: Everywhere I went, I was always just Ronnie Mitchell’s little sister and never quite as good. I borrowed your black pencil skirt and I bust the zip by accident because I just wanted to see what it would be like to be you. I wanted to be you, you silly mare. I didn’t do cross country because I liked it, Ronnie. I did it because I wanted sexy legs. Did I ever come first? No.Karen, Ronnie’s classmate: You always said you hated [school], the few times you were actually there anyway.Kim Fox, speaking to Jordan Johnson in 2010: Anytime you want to get out of biology, you just fake a migraine. Worked for me enough times.Kim: When my school had asbestos, yeah, I was out with my mates having fun.Ronnie to Joel Reynolds: I remember you at the school disco. You used to dance like a performing seal! That was in my Madonna phase. You always used to tease me because I wore those bangles and I rattled all the time.Roxy: I had a pair of lace gloves. Ronnie nicked them.Dr Al Jenkins: And how did you ever forgive her?Roxy: I burnt her legwarmers.Shirley on Tina: Always did have bad taste. Used to wear shell suits and legwarmers. Cora Cross on Tanya: Lace fingerless gloves, little black mini-skirt, leather, all topped off with a bright orange perm. Suddenly, this flash of orange comes tearing out the chemist, Tracey, her best mate, legging it behind her. The security guard’s a big fella and he comes huffing and puffing ...Lauren Branning: So they were nicking stuff?Cora (sarcastically): No, she was working in a charity shop. So, anyway, she realises the security guard hasn’t got a chance in hell of catching up with them so she jumps on this bench, lifts up her top and flashes him, right there in broad daylight. The look on her face, cocky little ... That’s until she clapped eyes on me. I give her a wink, just to let her know what she was in for later. Should have seen her jaw drop.Lauren describing Tanya: So there’s this girl, she’s about thirteen, gobby as hell. We won’t dwell on the bright orange perm. One night, her and her mate Tracey thought it would be hilarious to reenact 'The Exorcist' for her little sister Rainie. So they waited until she thought everyone had gone out and started moving stuff about. Well, Rainie got so worked up, she started screaming her head off. Five minutes later, the police turn up to find the girl with the bright orange perm holding a pack of peas to an eye that her sister had just punched.Tanya: They were not amused. “Time-wasting is a very serious offence, Miss Cross,” apparently.Ronnie on schoolmate Lee Thompson: [He was Joel Reynolds’] best friend. Those two were never apart. Him and Joel were such big mates.Lee on his secret love for Joel: It was all pretty hopeless anyway, especially once he’d fallen into [Ronnie’s] clutches.Ronnie: Do you remember that fancy dress party when Sarah Clarke came dressed as a gooseberry?Joel Reynolds: You looked fantastic that night.Ronnie: I was dressed as a wicked witch.Joel: I just remember you being the prettiest girl there.Ronnie: Do you remember the first time we kissed? Twenty-first of July, 1988. Jessica Hughes’ fourteenth birthday party.Joel: Glenn Medeiros was number one.Ronnie: Do you remember our first dance? I was so nervous I couldn’t stop shaking.Ronnie: Me and Joel, it was first love. It was never going to last.Roxy: You two were crazy about each other.Ronnie: We were just kids.Roxy: Joel was a fit bloke.Lee to Ronnie: You always did get the best looking blokes.Roxy: You and Joel always sneaking up the pavilion. You left me with Gina Langley and her dolls.Ronnie: You used to have a motorbike at school.Joel: Did you ever go on it?Ronnie: All the time! I bought my own helmet. Don’t you remember? It had flames on the side. It was really cheesy. That bloke in the bike shop sold it to us.Joel: No no no. That was my helmet. You never went on that bike because you was too scared.Ronnie: I spent most of my summer on that bike! It was the best time of my life.Joel: There were things about that summer that I’ll never forget.Ronnie: I guess you must have had a lot of girls on the back of that bike.Joel: Not really. Stopped working in the end. I just stuck it in the garage.Amira Shah: I’ve never ridden a bike.Ronnie: Me and Joel, we get talking, Dad appears — end of discussion.Garry Hobbs: Don't knock Skegness. I had the best holiday ever there.Mark Fowler: I'm not, but you were seventeen and with half a dozen of your mates, and I don't think [everyone] rates a holiday by how many times you can puke up on the pavement.Ronnie on herself and Joel: I used to think that we were Romeo and Juliet. It was us against the rest of the world and we’d always talk about how we’d run away as soon as I was sixteen, where we’d go, what we’d do. And then I got pregnant.Archie to Joel: You’re the spotty little oik that knocked up my fourteen year old daughter.Ronnie on getting pregnant: What a stupid cow I was.Ronnie: As soon as I was old enough to have a mind of my own, you couldn’t stand it.Archie: Mind of your own - flipping on your back for some spotty oik, getting pregnant? Yeah, great choice. Smart move.Ronnie: I was fourteen and I bunked off French to do a [pregnancy] test in the school toilets. My hands were shaking so much I could barely do it and when it finally came up positive I remember feeling more afraid than I’d ever felt in my whole life.Ronnie on being pregnant: The mood swings, the morning sickness.Ronnie: My life would have been much better if I’d had an abortion.Tanya: I can’t believe how bad my taste in music was when I was a teenager. I thought I was a right old rebel, smoking and going after bad boys. I didn’t care about anyone else.Lauren Branning: Except your dad.Tanya: Yeah well, I suppose rebelling took my mind of just how poorly he was.Cora: All those years as a kid, off your head on drugs, stealing.Tanya: I didn’t realise how hard it was for you.Cora: We all had it hard, darling.Tanya: The sleepless nights, the drugs, the boys, the drink.Cora: It’s all part of growing up.Tanya: You were a good mum to us, you know.Cora: My husband had cancer. I went back and forth to the hospital with him. He was a proud man, a fighter, but every time, after he’d come out of the treatment, he lost a little bit of fight. I’d take him home, I’d make him comfortable and tell him to keep going. Some days he said yes, some days he said no. And we’d cry and we’d row and we even prayed, and then we’d go back, and little by little, he was wilting. And I didn’t realise it, but I was fading with him. And then, I gave up. I turned my back on him, not that it was him anymore. I couldn’t be with him. I couldn’t stand to be with him.Tanya to Cora: You might have been there for Dad in the good times, Mum, but what about when things weren’t so good, eh? Where were you then? Where were you when he was ill? I’m the one who had to sit there day in, day out, watching him writhe about in agony. Where were you, Mum? Out getting wasted, out having fun, going to parties.Rainie to Cora: You wanted to help Dad at the beginning, but not at the end, no. Once it started getting nasty, all you did was hide yourself inside the bottle.Cora to her daughter Rainie: By the time your dad was diagnosed, he was already terminal. He was always going to die.Tanya on cancer: I’ve been around it. I’ve seen what it’s like. Disease doesn’t just destroy the body. It rots a marriage as well. It takes all that love and it turns it into politeness and resentment. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it with me mum and dad.Cora: You didn’t understand my marriage.Tanya: Yes I did. I grew up in it.Cora: Whatever you may think of me, I never cheated on your father.Tanya: How do we know, Mum? You were never there, were you? You were always out, weren’t you, night after night, getting off your head. We were there, left to pick up the pieces. It was me sat by his bed every night, there to wipe the sweat off his face at three in the morning. His last days, Mum — that was me, me. Where were you? Running away. Anytime you spend at home, Mum, you could hardly look him in the eye, you felt so much pity for him, you were so disgusted by him.Cora: I loved him.Tanya: You didn’t love him. Not in the end, Mum. You were disgusted by him, you pitied him. That’s what your love turned into. I saw it, Mum, I saw it and I will never forget, I will never forget the look in that poor man’s eye, withering away, knowing that the love of his life just felt nothing but pity for him.Tanya: The way my mum used to look at my dad, not a shred of love in her eyes.Cora: You don’t know what you’re talking about. You were just a kid.Tanya: I was thirteen years old and I knew — I knew and you knew I knew.Tanya: I know what it’s like to be the one that knows. I know what it’s like to be the kid worrying about a parent. It is not very nice. It’s not very pretty.Lauren: What about Rainie? How did she cope?Cora: Rainie was young.Cora on Rainie: We kept her in the dark. Seemed the best thing at the time.Rainie to Tanya: I wanted to help out, but when Dad became ill, you just kept him to yourself.Tanya: I used to take mental pictures [of] Dad and store them away.Rainie: You never gave me a chance, not once. Even when dad was ill, you never even let me have a look in.Tanya: Oh, you wanted a look in, did you - nursing a dying man? Yeah, you’d have loved that.Tanya to Rainie: I was trying to think of you, Ray. Didn’t want both our memories of Dad to be about all this.Tanya to the medical profession: You treated my father, pumped him full of chemicals like a load of dry cleaning. It did him the world of good!Tanya on her father’s treatment: It didn’t do him any good, did it?Cora on William: He had a good innings. He didn’t suffer that much.Tanya: I was there every night right till the end. You don’t know what it was like, how bad it got, week after week.Cora: He had it quick in the end. He had a peaceful death. One minute he was there, next minute he was gone.Tanya: He didn’t just go, Mum. Dad didn’t just slip away. He was in agony. He was in pain from the minute he opened his eyes to the minute he went to sleep and in the end, even the drugs couldn’t stop it.Cora on William: I knew him inside out. He was my husband.Tanya: Did you really know him that well, Mum, in the end?Cora: I was there. I was around.Tanya: You weren’t there, Mum. You were out. You were working. You were out down the club.Cora: Someone had to bring the money in. He wasn’t going to, was he? We had to eat. I had to put food on the table.Tanya: Yeah, and a bet on the horses.Cora: I never did that once your dad was ill.Tanya: We used to find the stubs in the bin, Mum!Cora: Once or twice, maybe. So what? I was still a young woman with a sick husband and a couple of kids. I was scared out of my mind. Couple of drinks, the odd punt, it got me through.Tanya: He didn’t blame you. He didn’t. My dad, he was the sweetest, kindest man that ever lived. He used to make me feel like the most precious thing. When he was dying, I tried to make him feel the same, but it didn’t work. Being ill, Mum, it’s hard. It’s gruelling and it’s painful and it’s there, all day, all night. That’s what I learnt. Them long nights, that’s where I learnt was life was really about, Mum, by his bedside.Tanya on her father: It took so long for him to die.Tanya: You were out. He’d done this little drawing for you, you know, like he used to, of the view from his window on a little card. Then he put it on the window sill and I seen it and picked it up and looked at it and he’d written in it, he’d written, “Thanks for being such a lovely wife.” And that’s when he asked me to do it. He asked me to help him end it, put him out of his misery.Cora: He would never have done that, not William.Tanya: He was in pain, Mum. He asked me to. He wanted me to.Cora: And you just said yes?Tanya: Of course not. I fought with him and I begged him, but he was just so sweet because he wasn’t scared or angry, he was just wrung dry. So I got on the bed and we had a cuddle and he just held me like he used to when I was little, but I could feel him, Mum, I could feel his arms and his ribs. He was stick thin, weren’t he? He weren’t like a man. There was hardly nothing left of him and I remember, he put his arm round me and I could see this vein in his wrist just pulsing, this bluey green vein, and his white skin, like it was almost too much effort to pump the blood round. And I looked in his face and he didn’t look scared. He just had these kind eyes and I said I’d do it, I said I’d help him. So I put a pillow under his head and I made sure he was comfy and I gave him a little kiss on the cheek and I gave him the drugs, I did, way more than he should have had, and it was like nothing had happened. I remember the lights. I could see the lights from the flat opposite just glittering and I sat there for hours, just holding his hand. I fell asleep and when I woke up, he’d gone.Cora to Tanya: You killed my husband, never said a word. Cut me and Rainie out, never said a word.Rainie: With Dad, you’re the only one who got to say good-bye.Tanya: Our dad was suffering and what I did, it stopped the pain.Cora to Rainie: All your sister did was put him out of his misery sooner rather than later. What she did, she did out of love.Tanya: He loved you, right to the end.Cora: And I loved him, in my own way.Tanya on her father: He was dead before he was forty.Cora on Rainie: After, it was worse for her than anyone. She didn't have any warning.Rainie on her father: When he died, all I wished was to get one more day with him. I’d have given anything for that, but she [Tanya] took that away from me.Tanya: The only thing I remember about my dad’s funeral is that I was there. It took me a good month-and-a-half and a self-help book before I could even eat again.Cora: After Tanya’s father died, I lost myself in a bottle big time.Cora: My daughters [set me up on a date] once after their dad died. It was this bloke, he smoked cigarillos and drank half pints of bitter. I had to go along with it — I couldn’t let them find out who I was really seeing so what chance did I have?</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?