I FIRST met Melv Henighan when I started Longcar Central, as an 11- year-old school student, in 1965.

He was from my old stomping ground, Athersley, and immediately impressed us all because he was the biggest amongst us, could run as fast as a greyhound and scored goals like Roy of the Rovers. He soon became the heartthrob of the girls and the envy of the lads.

Melv and I played in the same school football team for five years and won the league and cup double at Holgate Grammar School (under 15s).

He also demonstrated his talent in the classroom by getting a short story published in the Holgate annual school magazine – no mean feat. However, he was the first to admit that he found it hard to motivate himself when it came to academic studies.

The only big shock was that Melv Henighan didn’t make the Barnsley Schoolboys football team at 15.

However, that year saw an abundance of brilliant right-wing talent – including Stuart Senior and Billy Cherryholme. In any other town, Melv would have walked into the team.

After leaving school, he worked hard to make a comfortable living, being employed for many years as a skilled worker at the Samuel Fox Steelworks, followed by a short spell as the owner of a small one-man firm.

Later, he experienced success in the insurance business, and finally, he used his natural communication skills, as a leading sales-person, in the motor trade.

In his mid 50s he grabbed the opportunity to retire early and ‘live the dream’ with his wife, Pam, in Spain.

“365 days of sunshine a year was just too irresistible for me and Pam,” he told me, as he stared wistfully into space.

In 2011, after 18 months living abroad, he went to see a consultant in Spain after feeling unwell and, following tests, received the devastating news that he was suffering from the early onset of Parkinson’s. After the initial shock, Melv and Pam agreed that they wouldn’t allow the illness to wreck their lives. “I knew of others with far worse diagnoses,” said Melv.

Despite this serious setback, Melv and Pam carved out a beautiful existence for themselves, in a quaint Spanish village, beside the enchanting Mediterranean Sea.

They made many good friends including a song-writer and two male rock musicians.

Melv joined these three ex-pats to form a new music band in which he became lead singer.

“We needed a new name, so, inspired by ‘50 Shades of Grey’ and because of our advancing years, I came up with ‘Four Shades of Grey’. The others were so pleased with it, it stuck.”

Then he noticed something weird: new tunes kept popping into his head. His song-writer friend asked: “Where the devil did you hear that melody? I like it – it’s good.”

“Don’t know,” answered Melvyn, feeling flattered. “It just seemed to come to me when I was daydreaming.”

Thereafter, Melv wrote and recorded many of his own compositions.

Partly because of his illness and partly because of elderly relatives back home, Melv and Pam returned to live in Barnsley.

At this time, he began creating poetry, and discovered he’d a knack for composing rhyming narratives for infants, which he tested out on his own grandchildren.

They loved them, so, with the help of AI (for illustrations) he was able to publish three outstanding, original fairytales.

I asked him: “Did you always feel creative?”

“Not at all,” he replied. “The story I had published in the school magazine, all those years ago, was tweaked a little by my English teacher. So I never claimed 100 per cent credit for it.

“However, my theory is that as Parkinson’s developed, the creative section of my brain compensated for the loss.”

I pushed him on this by asking: “But do you think, deep down, you always possessed creative talent?”

“It’s possible,” he replied. “But I doubt it.”

Melv now spends a lot of his time writing more fairytales and singing some of his own compositions at karaoke sessions.

In fact, despite the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, his own life has also turned out to be a bit of a fairytale.