My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (8 page)

‘Come again soon,’ my mother called, waving after them, a broad smile on her face – till they disappeared round the corner. Then there was a sudden switch as she dropped her party mask and scowled at me, back to normal again. ‘Clear the table and put the dishes in the scullery,’ she said. ‘And don’t drop any of them. I need to put my feet up. I’m worn out.’

My father was almost as much an enigma as my mother. As a prisoner of war, he had suffered many ignominies that challenged his need to control everybody in his life. He talked about it very little, although he did tell me once that every morning for ten days the Japanese guards told him he was going to be shot.

‘We shoot you. Ten days.’

They came up to his bamboo hut every morning, forced him to kneel, blindfolded him, cocked their pistols . . . and, as one day followed the next, backed out at the last moment, laughing at his fear. He was sure they would carry out the execution before the last day. The tenth morning came. They went through the same ritual, and this time he was certain it was his last breath. They paused for a long time. Then they told him to get up.

‘You go. Go . . . go,’ they laughed.

Can you imagine how that must have affected him?

On another occasion the guards ordered him to stand and watch as they said to a group of his fellow prisoners: ‘OK. You can go. Just go. Run. We let you go. Run.’ They made the men run away from them, though in their weakness they could hardly walk. They moved as best they could, and as they tried to run the guards shot them in the back, one by one.

My father never forgot that. Never forgave them. He burned with that flame of fury all his life. Maybe that’s what made him the tyrant he became in our house. He couldn’t be in control when he was a prisoner of war, but he could now. And he was going to make sure it would stay that way.

I remember Tommy’s husky voice – deep and rough from being such a heavy smoker, I suppose. His voice was a danger signal because when he was angry it rose in pitch. Rage shook his whole body – it was like an illness that overtook him. Perhaps it was an illness. The only way he could respond, his only remedy, was physical aggression towards anyone who happened to be there, me included. If I couldn’t get out of the way of their fights, as so often when I was little, I was knocked to the floor. They never seemed to realize I was there. I tried to make myself as small as I could, curling up into a ball in the corner and protecting my head. They moved about so much, I used to call it the dance of anger. It was a macabre ballet of the furies.

I’m sure my grandma and the others knew. But it was that old custom – what goes on behind the front door, or in a marriage, or what a parent does to a child . . . you can’t interfere. So they knew, but they did nothing.

When my mother wasn’t there I saw my father in a different light. Dad drove a huge brick wagon in those days. The bricks were loaded by hand onto the lorry, and after a lengthy journey, he then had to unload them by hand again at the other end. Sometimes he took me on long-distance trips with him. I rode all day on top of the engine cowling in between the seats in the cab. I liked the warm hum of the engine beneath my tummy as I lay across it, holding my head up to watch the road through the windscreen. Dad used to steer one-handed as he went round a corner, reaching out to put his free arm over my back to stop me from sliding off down to the floor.

Once we arrived at the building site, Dad would share his lunch with me – usually jam sandwiches packed in an old Oxo tin. He called it bait. The sandwiches were always dry and stiff from being made the night before, but they tasted good to me. We washed the crusts down with a plastic cup of hot tea from his Thermos flask. Dad used the big cup and he gave me the little one. I can still taste that tea – hot and sweet, with the tang of plastic. It seemed to me the best tea in the world.

After our lunch, I watched Dad unload the wagon four or five bricks at a time. It seemed to take for ever. As he worked, he laughed and joked with the men on the site, and sometimes they came over to help him. Occasionally one of them would come and give me a couple of toffees, softened by the warmth of their pocket. Half-melted, it would take all of my concentration to extricate them from their wax papers. But they were worth it.

On the long journey home, the rhythmic heartbeat of the Leyland engine and the flapping of the windscreen wipers to and fro, to and fro would soothe me off to sleep, wrapped in the old tartan rug that my dad kept in the cab of the wagon, with its delicious aroma of petrol and engine oil.

As we neared home in the dark of the evening, my dad would stop the empty wagon outside a certain confectionery shop. It was always open. I woke up, excited to go inside this magical grotto with him. He would buy me a tube of Smarties, or some Fry’s Chocolate Cream chocolate, which we ate together on the last leg of the journey. Finally we would arrive home and the wagon seemed to heave a sigh of relief as my dad picked me up and carried me inside on his shoulder.

I have always remembered those trips in the big wagon, the togetherness of me and my dad, and his deep voice singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ to me as my eyelids drooped and I dozed off into a peaceful sleep. I think having me on the truck with him, sharing that time with me, was the closest he was capable of being.

Even my mother had her lighter moments. At Christmas time every year she made a lot of ginger wine, which she loved. My big treat was when she filled the miniature ginger essence bottle with some ginger wine for me. This was a great excitement, like having something forbidden, but with permission. It was delicious.

The Christmas Eve when I was five, I raced into the kitchen from the bathroom, wearing my new pyjamas, their Christmas present to me, to have my coveted bottle of ginger wine. I found it on the dresser, unscrewed the top and drank it all down. What I didn’t know was that my father had been varnishing something in his garage, had poured the leftover varnish into an empty bottle, just the right size, and left it where he found it in the kitchen. As soon as I’d taken in the golden fluid, I started to choke and retch by turns. In panic I tried to catch my breath.

My mother sent the neighbour to call the doctor, who rushed over. I remember he poured copious amounts of salt water down my throat to make me vomit. It worked, with dramatic speed – up came all the varnish, along with my tea. The only other thing I remember is the misery of being sick, continually, throughout Christmas Day, while my parents danced from room to room to the music of Glenn Miller, giggling like teenagers.

I don’t think I ever did get my ginger wine that Christmas. My parents carried on in their usual way, frivolity and combat, turn by turn. Maybe it didn’t seem like an important incident to them. ‘Ah well, Mercia, wrong train again,’ my mother smirked. ‘Better go and have a bit more shuggy on the grate.’ It’s what she always said when something didn’t turn out right.

It might have been trivial to her, but the memory still shocks me now. It’s an example of their carelessness, isn’t it? Their indifference to the dangers they exposed me to every day.

I do remember the doctor giving my mother a very strong telling off. ‘Helen could have died, you know.’

But she shrugged it off when he’d gone. It was Christmas. She wanted to be pampered and enjoy herself. She wasn’t going to let me spoil it.

CHAPTER 7

Helen

Talking to the Cows

When I was six, my parents had to move. Either my father’s job changed, or they fell out with the family, or maybe Auntie Minnie needed the house for someone else. I suppose they had nowhere to go, nowhere that they could afford, anyway. My mother took a job as part-time domestic help in a farmhouse, working every morning, because it came with a tied cottage, rent-free, in Murton Village. I don’t remember the day of the move, but I do recall how far that five miles seemed from all I knew in Seghill and the sanctuary of my extended family. There seemed to be a chasm between us now.

There was no easy bus ride between the two places and we rarely saw the aunties, uncles and cousins. Or Grandma. We went over to her house for tea a couple of times when we first lived at Murton, and I remember the lovely baking smell as we went in and saw the table laid for tea with scones, jam and her delicious Victoria sandwich – my favourite. My father also picked her up to bring her to tea at our house two or three times. I was so surprised when she took her coat off and I saw she wasn’t wearing a pinny! I’d never seen her without one. On one visit my father persuaded her to sing some old Northumbrian songs and recorded them with his Grundig tape recorder. I have no idea what happened to that tape. I wish I had it now.

Though we rarely saw her, Grandma used to write a letter every week to my mother, asking when she was going to come and see her, and giving her the family news. I don’t think my mother often wrote back and I don’t remember her going over to Seghill on her own, though she might have done. In with her weekly letter, Grandma always put a silver sixpence for me. That was the only pocket money I ever had as a child. Thanks to my Grandma, I could buy sweets and other treats at a shop near the school.

At least we had a nice house. It was in a tiny hamlet, which was made up of just the farm and a few cottages and was surrounded by fields and hedgerows, not a pit or a slagheap in sight. The view was clear to the horizon, the air clean and bright. I can still picture the farmer, Mr Potts, and his wife – both large, jovial bodies with rosy cheeks and friendly, smiling faces, in contrast to my parents.

There was friction from the beginning. My mother did not want this job, but she had no choice. She railed against it every day.

‘This is no life. I’ve been put out to work so that we can have a house to live in. I’m nothing but a skivvy here. Work, work, work! Just when I’ve finished at the farmhouse, I have to come home and start all over again. It’s all your fault!’

I wasn’t sure if she was talking to my father or to me. She seemed to blame us both.

‘It’s your fault I have to work to earn this house.’ She looked at me, then she looked at him. ‘Where would you live if it weren’t for me? I work my fingers to the bone for you. No thanks I get for it.’

‘Oh shut up, woman!’ barked my father. ‘Do you think I wanted to come here? It was your bloody idea.’

‘Well, you didn’t come up with a better one.’

‘Pit-yacker. Pit-yacker,’ he taunted.

‘Up yours,’ she snarled. ‘When I married you, I didn’t think I’d end up being put into service.’

So it went on, day after day. We dwelt once again in the shrine of my mother’s martyrdom. Worse still, my father didn’t want to live here either. The man who needed to be in sole control felt forced to move from one house belonging to his wife’s family to another secured entirely by his wife. Only this time, as the ultimate blow, it was by dint of her work, rather than his. He was now a tipper-truck driver on the pit heaps at Wallsend. No house came with that job. Tommy was a man fuelled by pride in his superiority as the master of the house, and this was an open wound that ate away at him day by day. He had to reinforce his position in this family somehow, and there was only one way he knew how to do that.

If I closed a door too noisily, he would shout, ‘Get back here. You did that just to annoy me, didn’t you?’

I always said nothing. I had already learned it was safer that way.

‘You will open and close that door silently – not a sound – twenty times. I shall count, mind.’ He sat down to look at the paper.

‘Yes, Daddy.’ I started my penance. Twenty times I opened and closed the door, trying my hardest not to make a sound. If I did, he would make me start all over again.

After a meal, he would point at me. ‘You – dishes, now.’

So at six years old I washed the dishes after every family meal. If he wasn’t happy with the way I did them, I would have to start all over again . . . and maybe again. I had to jump to every command. Total obedience. I knew that to argue or protest would lead to something worse.

Every time my father ordered me to do something, my mother chimed in with her sarcasm. ‘Let’s bow and scrape to the master! He has to be the big man, bossing a little girl around.’

There were no other children at Murton and I had to get used to playing on my own. I became a ‘country kid’, and I soon got to know every burrow hole in Murton village. I knew the feral cats in the farmer’s barn and played with their kittens. I counted the newts in the village pond and investigated their markings. I found a weasel colony and watched them foraging for food. I revelled in the freedom of endless sunny summer days as I wandered alone through fields of wheat between meadows of sweet buttercups and cowslips. I made friends with the hedgerow animals and enjoyed many a conversation with the farmer’s cows.

My new school was more than a mile away across the fields, at Monkseaton. I dawdled on the way home, spinning out the time before I would have to enter the house again and its aura of menace. Halfway I stopped to pick handfuls of the juiciest green grass before climbing a stile. As I strolled through the field, grazing cattle put up their curious heads to look at me. I offered them the new grass and a few of them snatched it, their velvet lips brushing my skin. Gradually they became used to me feeding them by hand with such tasty morsels from the other side of the fence.

Before long the cows came to meet me at the same time every afternoon. This loving herd of raven-black cattle nodded their heads when I arrived and followed me back to the farm. ‘What’s it like to live in this big field, with all your brothers and sisters?’ I would ask. They listened, their wise eyes focused on me. ‘Where are your mammy and daddy?’ I used to talk to them as if they were people. They accepted all this with earnest contentment. I thought myself the Pied Piper of Hamelin on those carefree afternoons.

‘I wonder if I’m going to be in trouble when I get home tonight,’ I confided to them. ‘I expect it will be my fault. It always is.’ I used to talk to the cows about everything, and they listened with great reverence, it seemed to me, their soulful expressions responding to every word of the small human who poured out her heart to them, sharing her woes, day after day. I always felt, with a nod of their heads, that they understood. In this way we walked in a solemn procession together across the field.