My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (12 page)

Sometimes we drove up the coast of Northumberland to a windswept beach at Embleton, where the seals played and the kittiwakes wheeled over the sand dunes. We had to walk across the golf links to reach the beach. I sat and built sandcastles or paddled in the rippling stream, beneath a low cliff. At the top there was a higgledy-piggledy group of little wooden houses where people came to stay.

There was always a group of children playing games behind the houses, or on the beach nearby. Sometimes I watched them swimming out in the bay and wished I could join them. They were mostly older than me, and strong swimmers.

I have a photo of me with a wide smile, sitting in the shallow water at Embleton. To the right of the picture stands my mother, detached. She didn’t want to be in the picture with me – she always preferred to do her model pose on her own – but my father insisted on snapping the two of us together that day. She wasn’t happy about it.

When it was done, I saw a girl standing on top of the dunes looking down at us. I caught her gaze, then she ran off.

George was now progressing well in his engineering apprenticeship at Wallsend ship yards. We didn’t know at the time, but he had met his future wife, Joan. They were both seventeen and very much in love.

Soon George brought Joan over to meet us. He didn’t have a car and there was no bus back to Wallsend, or to Whitley Bay, where she lived, so if they came on a Saturday evening, they used to stay overnight and go home the next day.

When Joan and George stayed, I had to move into the spare room and share a bed with Joan, while George slept in my room. I didn’t mind – it was fun because I liked Joan. She was always kind to me and easy to talk to. She used to talk about her family.

‘My dad’s a ship’s captain,’ she told me with a wide grin and a sparkle in her eyes. ‘He’s away at sea a lot, and we all miss him, so it’s lovely when he’s home for a while.’

Joan was a typist at Tyne Brand Foods. She used to tell me stories about things that happened at work, or about her two younger sisters and the mischief they got up to. To me, their lives sounded so much more interesting than mine.

The thing that fascinated me most about Joan in those early days was her hair. I never knew what colour it would be – every time she came it was different. She kept it short and I used to watch her back-comb it every morning. There wasn’t a mirror in the bedroom, so she’d say, ‘What do you think?’

I’d put both thumbs up. ‘Champion!’

Then I’d watch her, mesmerized, as she put on her eye make-up and lipstick, and giggle as she did up the suspenders to keep up her stockings. Her clothes were amazing – full dirndl skirts over layers of stiff lacy petticoats, with little bolero tops over broderie-Anglaise blouses. Or sometimes flouncy satin or chiffon dresses with stripes or swirly patterns. For a child with very few clothes, this was heaven, but I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous.

The atmosphere in the house was tricky on those weekends, with George and Tommy resentful of each other and a cold disdain hanging between them. But Joan was such good company that even Tommy tolerated George’s presence.

In fact, Joan and George sometimes used to listen to their fifties music on our radio. My father hated Elvis’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’. ‘I won’t have that screeching rant in my house.’ But he didn’t mind some of the ballads, like the Everley Brothers’ ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’.

My parents’ favourites were the big band productions of the thirties and forties, especially Glenn Miller, which they danced to all over the house on their good days. I think their favourite fifties singer was David Whitfield, who sang with Mantovani’s orchestra. We all used to sing along to his ‘On the Street Where You Live’.

After a few months, George and Joan split up for a time and George had a series of different girlfriends. Every Saturday night I was uprooted from my own room to share a bed with another girl who was a complete stranger to me. I hated this. I didn’t know any of them and dreaded the weekends. Why couldn’t he go back to Joan? She was always my favourite.

When his wages as an apprentice went up, George bought himself a sleek black overcoat with a black velvet collar. Very trendy at the time. When he came round one day wearing it, my father went ballistic.

‘Get that bloody coat off,’ he yelled at George. ‘I will not allow you to wear that coat.’

George refused. ‘No. I bought it with my own money. I’m going to wear it.’

I sat at the top of the stairs in a state of consternation, watching this altercation in the hall.

My father picked George up by his new coat collar and slammed him back against the wall. He pushed his face into George’s. ‘You look like a hooligan. Take that coat off.’

‘No.’

Tommy slammed him against the wall again and punched George hard in the face, making his nose bleed. With that, my father released his grip a little and George took the opportunity to wrestle himself free. He walked straight out of the front door and slammed it behind him. To his credit, he did not fight back or retaliate in any way. But I think if he had it would not have gone well. When Tommy was in a rage, he acquired a physical strength that conquered all.

George never came round again. If only I could have left with him.

CHAPTER 10

Helen

The Madhouse

When I was about ten, my father became a bus driver and we moved to a two-bedroom flat on the top floor of a Victorian terraced house in Whitley Bay, which I later found was about three miles from Murton.

My mother packed the boxes and Tommy ordered the removal van, the day came and we were ready to go. I had mixed feelings about it. I thought it seemed like a bit of an adventure, but I was apprehensive about having to start at another junior school and being the ‘new girl’ again. They loaded up the car to its roof. It was so full that I wondered how I would squeeze in.

Then I noticed something.

‘What about my bike?’ I didn’t want to leave that behind.

‘You can ride your bike to the new house.’ This was an order. I could see from my father’s set expression that I had no choice. ‘You’ll have to follow the car.’

They didn’t give me the address or tell me the way.

‘Make sure you keep up with us,’ added Tommy as they climbed in and started up the engine.

I loved my bike and enjoyed riding it the mile to school, but I had never gone any further than that. I had no idea that day how far we were going and had no time to hesitate. They were off.

I got on and pedalled furiously as they pulled away at some speed. With each bend or turning, panic set in as I felt sure I would lose them – I couldn’t turn my legs fast enough. I’d only cycled on country lanes before and the open roads and urban streets were packed with traffic that morning. I was especially afraid of the buses and lorries, whose lumbering wake nearly blasted me into the gutter. I suppose my father must have slowed down when I fell back, because I never entirely lost their trail, but I was petrified I would. Then what would I do? Somehow I managed to stay on and keep up until we reached our destination.

Exploring the new place didn’t take long. We had two bedrooms, a living room, dining room and kitchen, plus the eighteen stairs down to the hall and the front door. We also had the divided half of a stone staircase down to the back door and the back yard. This kind of arrangement was known as a Tyne flat. We had a tin bath under the kitchen counter, but the toilet was down the back stairs and outside in the yard. My father used to hang an oil lamp in there in a vain attempt to prevent it from freezing in the winter.

Although our new flat was fairly cramped, I did have my own bedroom. My window overlooked life in Eskdale Terrace, a busy side road, just off the seafront. No cows or tractors, but plenty going on – people bustled by or paused to chat, seagulls squawked on roof-tops, and when I opened my window I sucked in the tang of salt in the air. We were near the middle of town, with a roundabout at one end of the street and the sea at the other. Great excitement!

My parents crammed in their furniture as best they could and my father set about redecorating the whole flat. His first job was to knock out a huge black range along one wall in the dining room. It was so big and heavy that it took him a week to get it out. He replaced it with a neat modern fireplace. Next he wallpapered the dingy walls of the main rooms with floral wallpaper, which came untrimmed, so it was my job to sit for hours trimming the wallpaper on both edges, as straight as I could.

Later Tommy divided the kitchen up to make a small bathroom, just big enough to squeeze in a proper bath, but nothing else. He put up washable wallpaper in what was left of the kitchen – a pale blue background with red teapots and vegetables all over it, and bought a cheap kitchen table and chairs at the auction rooms, painting them bright red to match, though my mother always covered the table with an oilcloth. Against one wall was the only other piece of furniture – a wooden kitchen cabinet with glass sliding doors and a drop-down flap which doubled as a worktop.

Once we’d settled in, my mother, released at last from doing housework at the farm, took a new job in the local laundry, five minutes’ walk away. I quickly made friends at my new school and everything began well. I felt strangely optimistic, but I think I knew this couldn’t last.

The move coincided with George finishing his apprenticeship, and going off to sea in his new job as ship’s engineer. He would be travelling the world on long trips often lasting a year or more. George had always been my champion and I missed him terribly. but I loved the excitement of receiving his postcards, addressed only to me, from every port of call. I read and reread them and collected them in a scrapbook. I was amazed that these flimsy postcards reached me across the seas from so many countries. I tracked his journeys on a globe at school and looked up the places in our classroom atlas.

I remember one postcard in particular, sent from Japan. This was the early sixties, and transistor radios had just become available in England. I was desperate to have one, but I knew my parents wouldn’t give in. George wrote: ‘I’ve got you a little transistor radio. It’s very small and I’m going to bring it back for you to have.’ Well, you can imagine how excited I was about that, but there were six months of this trip to go and it was hard to wait all that time.

In another card from the Suez Canal he told me he’d bought me a pair of red satin curly-toed slippers, embroidered with gold thread. I was thrilled as they were really fashionable then. In most of his cards he wrote things like: ‘I’m missing you and I hope you do well at school.’ I always rushed to look when the postman came.

When he got back from his first long trip away, he and Joan got back together again, which was a great excitement for me, and when George went off again, Joan missed him terribly and came to visit us every Sunday for tea. I loved it when she came, because I always felt safe when she was there. Joan knew how things were in our home, and many years later we talked about those visits.

‘I loved teatime at the madhouse,’ she said with a giggle. ‘It was like a horror movie. I never knew what was going to happen next.’

How true.

Soon the arguments, the shouts and screams began in our new home. My father found out that our flat was next door to the sister of my mother’s first husband. This was a disaster!

Mercia’s former sister-in-law was quite a lot older and a bit of a terror, not afraid to speak her mind. But she was nice to us at first.

‘Haaway, Mercia, pet,’ she said when she came and knocked on our door. ‘Fancy us being neighbours. What a coincidence. And the family too. Well I never!’

‘Hello, Annie. I haven’t seen you in years.’

‘And how old is your bonny lassie?’

‘Helen is ten.’

‘Well, but. Where have the years gone? She’s big for her age, isn’t she?’ She paused and turned to look at Tommy with a sneer. ‘And this is your new man?’

He bridled at her tone, clearly taken aback.

As soon as the door closed, he turned on my mother. ‘Did you know about this? Did you know she lived here?’

‘No.’

‘You should have told me. I’d never have agreed to move here if I’d known.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she smirked.

‘Don’t you lie to me!’ His face reddened with rage as he grasped her shoulders and slammed her back against the wall. ‘I won’t have her in this house. You will have nothing to do with her. Is that clear?’ This was no question.

Mercia stayed silent, which angered Tommy all the more.

‘Pit-yacker,’ he shouted in her face. ‘You’ll always be a bloody pit-yacker, wherever you live. I’ve had enough of your insolence. I
forbid
that woman to come into our house. There will be hell to pay if I ever see her here again.’

In those days, nobody used to lock their doors, so only the next day Annie came up the stairs and straight into our living room without being asked. ‘I’ve come to see how you’re getting on.’ She cast a scathing glance round the half-wallpapered room and the rubble from the range through the dining-room door. ‘Eee, pet. It looks like a bombsite up here.’

‘Let’s go down to your place,’ suggested Mercia. Then she turned to me. ‘Don’t you tell your father, mind,’ she warned.

I nodded. There was no way I would tell him anything I didn’t have to. But over the next few days Annie continued to come up whenever it suited her. It seemed that, being senior to my mother in age and status in that family, she was fearless. She took no notice of Mercia’s requests not to come up to our flat. Of course, she didn’t know what Tommy could be like.

I suppose it was inevitable that he would find out. One Saturday morning, Annie walked straight in without any warning. Tommy leapt to his feet and stamped over to her.

‘Stop right there,’ he ordered. ‘Who gave you permission to come into this flat?’

She stood her ground. ‘I’ll come when I like, man. I’ll have you know that, as Mercia’s older sister-in-law, I should have the right to enter her home whenever I like.’

Tommy clenched his fists and puffed out his chest as he pushed himself forward, bodily propelling her towards the door. ‘You have
no
rights in my house,’ he bellowed. ‘I am master here and no one can come in without
my
permission.’