OUR father would tell us true life stories, mixed with a little humour. It never ceases to put a smile on my face whenever I see a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera HMS Pinafore advertised.

Our father was brought up in a tough South Wales mining town. Fatherless at a young age, poor and an only child, he would spend a lot of time on the slag tips searching for pieces of coal for the home fire.

Circumstances changed when his mother remarried and with her new husband opened a boarding house for the local theatre’s visiting actors. It was so successful that there was rarely a spare bed. With no room, dad was assigned to the attic to sleep.

Every morning, he would have to get up early and clean the actors' shoes, toast bread over an open fire then make his way across town to the grammar school.

Dad remembered Hughie Green, best known for presenting the TV show Opportunity Knocks, coming to stay. However, dad also had fond memories of when the Playhouse had a production of the fairy tale Snow White. A knock on the door and expecting new guests, dad was asked to greet the new arrivals. Dad opened the door only to be pushed back by a large troupe of small people.

During the troupe’s stay, dad had to stack bricks up at every basin so the troupe could have a wash.

It must have been down to meeting all those thespians, but I never knew dad stuck for something to say.

So naturally at the outbreak of the Second World War (still in his teens) dad joined the Royal Navy and trained as a radio operator.

He spent the entire war in the North Atlantic with the Royal Navy, apart from a 12-month spell with the Canadian Navy, which is another story.

WILLIAM ABRAHAM Rodbourne Swindon