Packing Up The Family Home
BBC Radio 4

This profoundly moving half-hour (24 September) featured the four children of Joyce and Arthur Bird – three of them in situ, one on the end of a telephone – going through their parents’ possessions in the family domicile in Preston. Joyce had died eight years before. Arthur, now in his late eighties, was in a care home suffering from dementia. It was time to be moving on.

As well as releasing a cache of memorabilia hoarded over the years – letters, postcards, even the Dictaphone on which youngest son Geoff had practised his journalism – Packing Up The Family Home also offered a little parable of social mobility. Joyce was a stonemason’s daughter from Ireland. Arthur was a working-class boy who had passed the 11-plus and become a GP. The house, consequently, was a symbol of their success.