My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (2 page)

It was many years after my childhood before I began to discover some of what had happened in that missing year. My family guarded myriad secrets and lies; it was all a tangled web of deceit. Some of it I have recently unravelled; other strands I will never know – they are locked away for ever. My mother, the keeper of the keys, took them with her when she died, and her generation have all gone too, taking any remaining secrets with them to their graves.

What I do know is that when I was a year old or so, we moved back to Seghill, the Northumberland pit village where my mother had grown up in a large mining family. Most of the men in Seghill were miners, and all the women knew each other and helped one another. Everyone watched. You couldn’t walk along the street in a new coat without the whole village knowing it.

We lived in a plain grey-rendered house with a slate roof on the corner of Barrass Avenue; two up, two down, stained with soot and next to the miners’ social club. Downstairs we had the living room and kitchen, always called the scullery in our house. Next to that was a shivery-cold room with a basin and a bath – a luxury in Seghill. But the only toilet was outside at the back, freezing in winter, next to my father’s shed. Upstairs were two bedrooms.

Seghill colliery, down the road, dominated the area with its vast buildings and giant machinery reaching to the sky. Wherever you stood in Seghill, the black pit-heaps rose up like mountains to blot out the morning and evening sunlight. They blocked our views of the surrounding farmland too. Some of the older boys used to lay planks up the sides of the heaps to climb up and slide down. Every now and then an accident happened and the horrified adults forbade us from going too close. But soon the planks came out again.

The shrill pit whistle sounded across the village to mark the end of each shift. It was the same whistle that was used to broadcast pit disasters, though I don’t remember that happening while I lived there. I watched the men walk past with their long, weary strides, hands and faces as black as night from their day at the coalface. One or two would pause and wave at me in the window, their white teeth bright against the black.

Inside our house we had a huge coal fire, just as everyone had in Seghill, since coal came free from the mine. The wagon would come trundling along the street to unload the sacks of coal, drawn by a great big shire horse with blinkers and feathery ankles, his head hung low. I had to count the sacks as the coalman emptied them into our coal-hole. Sometimes I lost count because I was so busy watching the horse, willing him on. Finally he would oblige with the longest pee I have ever seen pouring endlessly onto the stony road and into the gutter, the steam rising in the winter’s chill.

I remember the acrid smell of smoke and the air thick with the coal dust that shrouded the village. It made for a lot of dusting.

Grandma, aunties, uncles and cousins lived all around us. Some of them lived in the same street, others round the corner, but all within a hundred yards. My mother was the ninth of ten children. When she was little, everyone spoiled the baby that came after her, but she rarely had any attention. Even Grandma had little time or energy to lavish on Mercia. She had to fight to be noticed.

The house we lived in was Auntie Minnie’s house. I don’t know why. It had been rented out, but now it was empty. She lived in another house down that street, so when we unexpectedly turned up in Seghill, Auntie Minnie said, ‘You can live in that house.’

My father resented this arrangement. He had to be king of his castle and couldn’t bear having to take charity from his wife’s family. ‘It’s all your fault,’ he told me on many occasions. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But, remember,’ he would say, wagging his finger at me, his face reddening, ‘I am master in this house. You will do as I say.’

I never dared move. I didn’t know why it was my fault, but from my earliest memories I just accepted it.

I slept in with my parents for a long time when I was little. George slept in the other bedroom, the box room. When I was two or three, I remember the joy of tearing into his room early in the morning to jump on him while he was still asleep. He never moaned when I woke him up like that.

‘Come on, tiger,’ he’d say. Then we would do some tiger-wrestling – his tiger a great deal gentler than mine, of course. Having fun with George was my escape from the vagaries of life with my parents. He was my champion in that house. He always looked out for his ‘kid’ sister.

After our tussle, George liked to do his exercises, starting with push-ups. He’d lie on his back. ‘Come on, kiddo.’

I would stand on the palms of his hands and try to keep my balance as he lifted me up by the strength of his arms and held me there. I felt I was touching the sky when he raised me right up towards the ceiling.

When I was still in my parents’ room, I used to be out of bed sleepwalking every night. One day they woke up at three in the morning to find me on the window sill trying to climb out. I was taken off to the doctor.

‘There’s only one thing for it,’ he advised them. ‘You’ll have to put bars over the window.’

They put bars on all the upstairs windows after that and moved me into George’s room. I think my sleepwalking settled down once I was away from my parents. It was fun sharing with my big brother. We used to have riots in there.

George tried many times to protect me, which only made things worse for him as he became the brunt of my father’s abuse on those occasions, But his bravery rescued me from some of Tommy’s worse excesses. One of these was the cat-o’-nine-tails whip that my father kept hanging on a nail in the scullery. He would often take his anger out on me by thrashing my bare legs with it. That thing scared me rigid, hanging on the wall as an unspoken threat.

One day it disappeared.

As soon as Tommy noticed its absence, he turned on George. ‘What have you done with it?’ he shouted, the blood rushing to his face.

‘What makes you think it’s me?’ George said, standing as tall as he could.

‘I know it’s you!’ Tommy closed in on him. ‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You stole it, didn’t you?’ Tommy shrieked, pushing his face up close to George’s.

‘No I didn’t.’

‘I know you did. And you’ll suffer for it.’

So the interrogation unfolded in front of me. I put my hands over my ears, but I could still hear it all. I was torn between fear of my father and admiration for my big brother, but also anxiety for him, and for me too. They shouted at each other louder and louder, and Tommy dominated the argument.

‘You bloody well will tell me!’

‘I’m telling you – I didn’t steal it.’

Tommy slapped George across the face. ‘I’m the master of this house!’

It went on for what seemed like hours, and eventually I tried to get away, but my father saw me and barred my way.

‘You needn’t think you’re going to escape!’ He said. ‘You’re next. When I find that whip, I’ll need to make sure it’s working.’

I was quaking, but while Tommy tried everything he could to intimidate George, my brother refused to reveal where it was. I was surprised when Tommy finally gave up. Thanks to George, I never saw that instrument of torture again.

On the day of the Queen’s coronation when I was three, several of us gathered round to watch it on Uncle Marcus’s new TV. It was the first television I had ever seen. It had a tiny screen, but it seemed like magic to me. I think most of the family were there, and we squeezed in around the small room, with all the children sitting on the floor. To start with, I was sitting next to Patricia, who was some kind of second or third cousin (I never knew exactly). She was nearer George’s age than mine but I always liked her. Auntie Dorrie beckoned to me. ‘Come away, pet,’ she said as she moved me across to the other side of the room. I was always being moved about; I never knew why.

George was there too that day, and with so many of us crammed into Uncle Marcus’s little cottage, there was a lot of noise. All the adults talked and laughed together as we waited for the procession to begin. It was pouring with rain outside, so there was no parade or street party like some folks had, but we had sandwiches, and someone had made a special cake. I was looking forward to that.

But suddenly there was silence. Someone must have said something. My parents stood up, my father face-to-face with Uncle Marcus. My mother pulled me up and dragged me across the floor, trampling over my cousins, and as she propelled me towards the door, I saw the two men spitting sharp, angry words at each other, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying, or perhaps I was too young to understand. As I was pulled out through the door, I caught George’s eye and his rueful expression as he stayed on to watch the coronation.

As soon as we arrived home, my father grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard, then clipped my head. ‘That’s a warning to you,’ he said. ‘You will go straight upstairs and stay there. I don’t want to hear another word out of you. Understand?’

‘Yes, Daddy.’ I answered. I always had to call him Daddy or Dad as he didn’t like the Northumberland ‘Da’. He was fanatical about using correct grammar and not swearing, though he didn’t always stick to it himself.

Upstairs I went, while the whole of Seghill watched the coronation without me. I was upset to be missing the fun and the party, but I didn’t understand its significance, and at least I seemed to be out of the danger zone now. I shut myself into my room and lay on my bed with a pillow round my head, trying to block out the angry voices downstairs, which rose to shouts and screams, then other frightening noises and the slamming of doors. I was frightened, alone, and disappointed that this exciting day had been spoilt.

I must have fallen asleep. I was too young to understand any of it, yet this sort of thing happened most days in our house. I was safely out of the way that day, but it wasn’t always so. With George out with friends most evenings, I was often alone. My bedroom was not, for me, a safe haven.

CHAPTER 2

Jenny

Bumpy Down the Steps

‘Why isn’t there a photo of me as a newborn baby?’ I asked my mother one day when I was a child. I was looking through my baby album.

‘I don’t know, pet.’ She shrugged.

I turned over a page and found a picture of me at a few months old sitting on Auntie Dorothy’s knee. We were all smiles. ‘I like this photo, Mam.’ I showed it to her. ‘But where’s Barbara?’ Barbara was Auntie Dorothy’s own baby, just a month older than me.

My mother looked at the photo. ‘Oh, that’s when Auntie Dorothy was feeding you. I had no milk,’ she explained, ‘so she breastfed you for a few weeks. She had plenty of milk, enough for two.’

I didn’t realize as a child how unusual that must have been.

Born on 2 December 1948, I was the only child of older parents and the centre of their lives. Sid, aged forty-two, and Connie, forty-four, doted on me so much that they missed no opportunity to provide the very best they could for me. My mother used to tell me a story about the bonnet she crocheted for me when I was a baby to stop my ears from sticking out by holding them tight to my head. I had to wear that bonnet most of the time. One sunny day, my dad wanted to take me out for a walk in my pram.

‘Don’t forget to put her bonnet on, Sid,’ said my mother.

When he brought me back, my dad made a great commotion about my bonnet.

‘That thing doesn’t fit our Jen at all,’ he complained. ‘I put it on and tied it like you said, but it kept flopping down over her face every few yards and I had to keep adjusting it. Hundreds of times it was.’

My mother came over to look at me in the pram. ‘No wonder, Sid. The poor bairn has the bonnet on back to front!’

We were an ordinary hard-working family, full of love and laughter. Both my parents worked, Dad as a gas showroom manager in Newcastle and Mam as a hairdresser in our home in West Jesmond. It was a working-class area of terraced houses facing each other across cobbled streets with back lanes behind. Very few families had cars, but we had a black Austin 30. It was great, but whenever my dad wanted to turn right, I had to hit behind the place where the indicator hand flapped out. That always made me giggle.

Many of the flats and houses were rented, but most of them were kept clean and well-painted, and some of them had tiny manicured gardens in front. My mam was very proud of her annual display of roses, much admired by our neighbours. Her secret was that she used to dig her customers’ hair cuttings into the soil around each rose bush together with the cold tealeaves from the bottom of the teapot.

For years before they had me, Sid and Connie shared a love of golf, so when I was six months old they bought a holiday hut on the edge of Dunstanburgh Castle golf links beside the beach at Embleton. My parents called the hut a bungalow from the start. It was a wooden-framed building perched in the lee of a low cliff, with steps down to the beach on one side and the third green on the other. There was no running water in the bungalow when we first had it, so we had to use a chemical toilet behind a partition. Mam cooked on Calor gas, which fuelled our lights as well. We went down every weekend through the spring and summer months, and on holidays too.

My dad was a practical man, skilled with his hands. He enjoyed woodwork, so he set to every weekend and improved the bungalow, turning the shack into a second home. He added two rooms, doing all the work himself. It was quite a little palace when he’d finished it.

Embleton was and still is an idyllic spot amongst the sand dunes of the North Sea coast. On National Trust land, it was peppered with pill-boxes and concrete bunkers, parts of the wartime defence systems. Landmines had been set at random into the beaches and dunes. When I was very young a band of army conscripts came to dig out all the mines they could find, but for several years we still used to see odd ones uncovered by the spring tides. We learned to walk carefully.

Ours was one of a cluster of bungalows right by the sea with Dunstanburgh Castle rising up eerily in the distance, high on the hill, at one end of the bay. Below us was the most beautiful stretch of sands with a shallow stream running through. Further along the beach towards Newton was a group of flat rocks, the Emblestones, from which the village of Embleton got its name. The golf course ran right round the bay, hugging the beach in its outstretched arms. In all these years it has barely changed – it remains unspoilt to this day.