Today’s song is ‘If I Give My Heart to You’. This popular song was written by Jimmy Brewster (Milt Gabler), Jamie Crane and Al Jacobs. The most popular versions of the song were recorded by Doris Day and Denise Lor; both of whom charted in 1954. The song peaked at Number 4 for Doris Day on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in September 1954, whereas Denise Lor’s recording peaked at Number 13.
Other versions of the song followed by Al Martino: Anne Shelton: Bing Crosby: Duke Ellington: Ella Fitzgerald: Nat King Cole: Cliff Richards and the Wright Brothers among many others.
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When this song was released, I was laid up in the hospital with multiple injuries after having been run over by a heavy vehicle. I had been in hospital many months and had been told that my spinal injury meant I would never walk again. During my first month in Batley Hospital (long since closed), I was on the critical list and drifted between the state of life and death. At one time during a semi-conscious moment, I could see the vague outline of a doctor in his white coat telling my mother that I wouldn’t make it through the night. I can still hear the consultant’s words as they tore into the sobbing heart of my dear mother with the savage cut of barbed-wire loss to come, as she received the news that her firstborn would soon die.
At that precise moment, I made a promise to my Maker that if He spared my life, I would use the remainder of it to do good works. If there was one precise moment that I consciously gave my heart to God, it was then! God obviously heard my promise and He has so far more than kept His part of our bargain. I have tried to keep my part of my promise ever since. Sometimes I have failed in my weakness to resist the many temptations of the flesh, but I can truthfully say, that I cannot recall ever wishing anyone harm or intentionally doing someone harm or injustice.
I have always been emotionally expressive in my feelings for self and others and I would also say that I have known love many times because of my willingness to make my heart forever open and emotionally available to its prospect. I have had my heart broken on a few occasions; once through a prior marriage that my wife insisted on ending and a few times when circumstances simply prevented the continuation of a satisfactory loving relationship which had to be broken off.
Other breaks and fractures to my heart were literally physical. I incurred two severe heart attacks 18 years ago whilst being heavily involved in a twelve-year period of intense charitable work, writing over 50 books, raising over £200,000 for charitable causes and visiting literally 2000 schools in Yorkshire. I also did trans-Atlantic work with 32 schools in Jamaica in conjunction with the Jamaican Minister of Education and Youth Culture. All this was performed in addition to my full-time job as a Probation Officer, which kept me occupied between 40-60 hours weekly, besides being a husband and father to five children.
I know that my greatest failing has always been the risk of not being there for my first children after an acrimonious divorce, initiated by my ex-wife. For the first five years of their life, I had to be both mother and father to them after my then wife’s refusal to wash, feed, dress, exercise, clean, cuddle and care for them. At the time, medics had no name for her condition other than ‘baby blues’, but more recent research findings identify the condition as ‘Post Natal Stress’.
Then, after such close bonding between father and children, everything suddenly changed, and instead of having custody of both children as we had agreed, I was prevented from communicating with them and seeing them for over two years by their mother ‘in blatant defiance of court orders to the contrary’. At a time when I wanted to continue giving my first two sons my heart, I would cry myself to sleep for almost two years nightly.
I now know that it was my nil-access to and nil-contact with my children that led me to seek out the love and contact of hundreds of thousands of children during the immediate years following by becoming a children's author and reading my stories in over 2000 Yorkshire schools I visited between 1989 and 2002
In 2010, I was walking up Main Street in Haworth to meet a strange woman who had been widowed several years earlier. We had a coffee and chatted for hours before going our own separate ways back to our respective properties. Within 24 hours my mind and body were responding as though they had met love face on, and by the time our second meet up in Haworth had concluded one week later, we both knew that we were in love with each other.
Since I was blessed in meeting, loving and marrying my lovely wife Sheila, her love quickly mended this old broken heart of mine, adding to our physical, psychological and emotional relationship, a spiritual dimension of marital union I never previously enjoyed; thus truly making Sheila my love, my life and my soul mate. She has been given my heart.
Love and peace Bill xxx