One of Your Own (5 page)

‘Any good in me comes from my gran,’ Myra wrote to her idealised father figure, David Astor, three years before her death. ‘She was a wise, gentle, polite and kindly lady who had not had an easy life and worked her fingers to the bone to make ends meet. She loved me dearly and I loved her more than anyone in the world.’
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After years of accommodating her children and their spouses, Gran felt as if she rattled like a pea in a bucket alone in the house on Beasley Street. She suggested to Nellie that four-year-old Myra move in to keep her company, perhaps hoping it would help diffuse the tension between Nellie and Bob. He was opposed to the idea, Myra recalled: ‘I wanted to go back to Gran’s but Dad wouldn’t let me . . . eventually he said I could but had to come home for meals.’
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She doesn’t explain why her father was against the move; it may well have been that he feared his daughter would become spoiled by living with her overindulgent grandmother. Myra had three disparate examples of adult behaviour guiding her through her childhood: her strict father, her extremely lenient grandmother and her inconsistent mother, who would let Myra do as she liked one minute, then wallop her for relatively little the next.

Myra’s permanent departure from home to Gran’s house is often perceived as an unnecessary upheaval of Dickensian cruelty, instilling her with ‘a lurking sense of rejection’ and the fact that ‘there had never been any question of Moby being the one to go’ made her banishment seem complete.
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In reality, there was no discussion about which child should be sent to live with Gran for the simple reason that the request for Myra came from Gran herself; Maureen was then a very young baby who needed her mother. The two houses were so close that Myra could skip between them in a matter of minutes, and she certainly wasn’t the only child in Gorton to live with a grandparent: it was a practical arrangement in the overcrowded terraces where working mothers had to rely on family members to mind the kids. And Myra was pleased with the move. Living with Gran meant respite from her bickering, irritable parents. She continued to eat at home because her father insisted upon it but was soon telling her mother that Gran was a better cook, and received a slap for her cheekiness. She was ‘forced to eat meals, especially fish, which I hated. I would eat it and be sick rather than get a good hiding.’
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When she was older and refused to eat what was on her plate, Nellie resorted to serving a side dish of chips at every meal, determined that Myra would leave home with some food in her tummy.

A year later, Myra and Gran moved to 22 Beasley Street. Their new home was scarcely an improvement on the last. As before, the front door opened straight into the front room or ‘parlour’, where there was a stove and an open staircase, and the second of the two ground-floor rooms was a gloomy space with a lean-to scullery where cold water wheezed from a single tap into a Belfast sink. Upstairs, the wintry back bedroom overlooked the toilet shed in the yard and faced the back window of the Hindley house on Eaton Street. The room was too cold to be functional; Gran slept downstairs next to the stove, while Myra had the front bedroom, sleeping on a tick mattress on a lumpy bed. The furnishings were few: a wardrobe, a chair, a rickety marble-topped chest of drawers and a handmade rag-rug to brighten the floorboards. Gran followed the usual custom of piling old coats on the bed at night for warmth, together with bricks she’d heat in the stove and wrap in newspapers before pushing them under the blankets.

Myra began school in 1947. Gran accompanied her on the three-minute walk there and back to Peacock Street Primary, a sooty, two-storey building opposite the foundry. By the age of seven, Myra was allowed to trot to and from school on her own; she was an independent little girl and sensible enough to be relied upon not to wander off. She soon made friends, though most of the boys and girls were children she already knew, having played with them on the street. A few of them thought her bossy and spoilt, and one lad decided to see how tough she really was by scratching his nails down her face. Myra ran away, crying – and it wasn’t Gran to whom she rushed for comfort but her father, who gave her a few tips on how to get the better of her tormentor, then sent her back out to put the theory into practice. In her autobiography, Myra describes the confrontation that followed: ‘I set off up the street to meet my persecutor and I quickly concentrated on the things Dad had told me and shown me. As Kenny’s hands came up, I shot out my left hand, fist bunched, towards his head. As I had predicted both hands went up to protect his face and I lifted my right hand and slammed it into his tummy, hitting his tummy. With a gasp, Kenny Holden’s knees crumpled and, before he could recover, I slammed my left fist into the side of his head. Kenny was so shocked he sat down heavily on the floor and burst into tears. I stood looking down at him, triumphantly.’
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Her detailed account is imbued with gratification at having beaten her opponent, even though the event itself was long past.

After she had trounced Kenny, her father ruffled her hair and said he was proud of her. He decided to teach Myra how to stick up for herself by passing on a few more boxing techniques. She never forgot his advice: ‘Don’t put both your hands up. If you can’t deflect the first punch with one arm, keep the other one ready to protect your stomach.’
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Professor MacCulloch cites this as an example of Myra being brutalised by her relationship with her father, but Bob Hindley knew that bullies wouldn’t pick on his daughter if she were an equal or bigger threat to them. Myra recalled, ‘He would make me fight back if anybody tried to hurt me. I think he would have liked me to be a boy.’
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Bob’s advice stood her in good stead, not only during childhood but also in prison, where she was frequently the target of attack. Tricia Cairns, who grew up in Gorton but didn’t meet Myra until she was in prison, admits that you either fought back on the streets or risked being bullied. Myra was able to protect herself and other, more timid children, but only used the skills her father taught her in self-defence.

Myra’s relationship with Bob was still unsteady; his awkward efforts at affection were never a success. She told her prison therapist that when she was eight: ‘I was sitting in front of the fire in my nightie, and Dad picked me up and sat me on his lap. He suddenly kissed my forehead. I was so shocked it made me jump and I knocked his fag out of his hand. It burnt my shoulder and I ran out of the house screaming that he had burnt me with a fag end . . . Poor man, he was only trying to be nice to me, which wasn’t often, and I accused him of child abuse. Mam had a go at him for hurting me, so he gave her and me a beating for causing such a fuss.’
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She maintained that from then on, rather than letting her parents see when she was upset, she developed ‘a strength of character that protected me a lot from emotional harm . . . from a very early age I learned to keep [emotions] under control, to refuse to cry when being chastised, except in the privacy of my bedroom at Gran’s house, to never let my feelings show, to build up layers of protective buffers, to tremble, rage, cry and grieve inwardly.’
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Living with Gran proved a godsend to Myra; there were no raised voices or hands itching to slap in the house on Beasley Street – just softly spoken, doting Gran. Photographs from the time show Myra with a disarming, ready grin and, regardless of her parents’ bitter squabbling, she has the look of a confident, happy child, full of mischief and humour. Gorton was her world, familiar as her own reflection.

Beasley Street was in a cluster of terraces set within Gorton Lane to the north, the privately owned houses of Furnival Road to the south, crofts to the west and Casson Street recreation ground to the east. The area was dominated by the two buildings on Gorton Lane that served as the twin custodians of local life – religion and work: the monastery and Gorton Foundry, with trains shunting by on the railway line behind that led into London Road station (renovated and reopened as Piccadilly Station in 1960). Stippled about the neighbourhood were a broad variety of working men’s clubs, pubs and cinemas. Home was the domain of women, while the streets belonged to the children. Life was a constant routine: the fish-and-chip tang of Friday and Saturday nights,
Housewives’ Choice
blaring from tinny radios, stray dogs barking, the whiff of Woodbines from the corner shop – even the starlings settling on the rooftops seemed rooted to Gorton.

Despite the drunken rows Bob and Nellie conducted on the street, the Hindleys regarded themselves as respectable. Nellie was vigilant about her daughters’ clothes and cleanliness, and though she didn’t ‘hold’ with religion, each Sunday Myra was allowed to walk hand-in-hand with her auntie Kath to worship at St Francis’ Monastery, joining a congregation that poured in from every corner of the city. Because Kath fasted before morning Mass, Myra did the same, and entered the great church feeling light-headed with hunger and piety. The monastery captivated her, from the hallowed, luminous beauty of the stained glass to the cool grace of the stone arcades. Each Sunday, Myra sought a place at the end of a pew, hoping to catch a drop of the rich, spicy incense as the priest swung it back and forth along the aisle, and she listened with eyes tightly shut and head bent as the hypnotic cadences of the Latin Mass – which she didn’t understand – rose and fell. When she was a bit older, she visited the monastery alone through the week, lighting candles and peeping at the folded pieces of paper bearing scribbled prayers. She loved watching the Whit parades too, when whole communities dressed in their best proudly bore embroidered banners through the crowded streets.

Myra was less spellbound by school. She joined other skiving children to play in derelict houses or to run down to the reservoir where ‘we would skim stones across the water or try to build rafts out of old doors’.
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Gran knew about the truanting but ignored it, even when the authorities stepped in; it seems that none of Myra’s family took a great interest in her education. Myra recalled: ‘I remember the school board man coming to Gran’s house. She would tell him I was ill. I don’t know what ailment I didn’t have as a kid . . .’
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But Gran was an asset in other respects: ‘She helped with my schoolwork,’ Myra remembered. ‘I liked reading and writing the best. Gran was the main reason I became good in English.’
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Myra discovered a passion for books. She enjoyed
Swallows and Amazons
, and all Enid Blyton’s books, particularly the Famous Five series, identifying with the tomboy character of George, whose best friend was her dog. Gran acquired a collie named Duke, whom Myra loved. Duke disappeared once and was missing for several days. The local newspaper wrote an article about it, and Duke was found, chipper and unharmed, and reunited with his owner and her ecstatic granddaughter.

Myra’s favourite book was one she had to study at school:
The Secret Garden
by Manchester-born author Frances Hodgson Burnett. She read the book again and again in her bedroom at night by candlelight, rapt by the story, whose setting is an isolated mansion reached by a ‘rough-looking road’ through a ‘great expanse of dark apparently spread out before and around them . . . a wind was rising and making a singular, wild, low rushing sound like the sea’.
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Curled up on the tick mattress in Gran’s house, Myra imagined she was Mary, the girl in the book, whose guardian reassures her that it isn’t the sea she can hear but ‘the wind blowing through the bushes . . . It’s a wild, dreary enough place to my mind, though there’s plenty that likes it – particularly when the heather’s in bloom.’
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It’s the moor through which they drive, and the girl in the story is instinctively afraid of it: ‘On and on they drove through the darkness . . . Mary felt as if the drive would never come to an end and that the wide, bleak moor was a wide expanse of black ocean through which she was passing on a strip of dry land. “I don’t like it,” she said to herself. “I don’t like it,” and she pinched her thin lips more tightly together . . .’
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Myra’s best friend was Joyce Hardy, a lively little girl with blonde hair in an urchin cut. Joyce lived on Beyer Street, just behind Peacock Street Primary, and after school she and Myra would play marbles together and buy sweets, if they could afford them, from the herbalist. They used to perform a trick made popular by the comedian Harry Worth: standing in the glass doorway of the dry cleaner’s, extending one arm and one leg to make it look as if they were levitating in their reflection. They invented games based on ones they already knew; Britain in the early 1950s was an ascetic place in which very few people could afford bought entertainments and most had never seen a television. Children were baffled when adults ‘reminisced about eating oranges, pineapples and chocolate; they bathed in a few inches of water, and wore cheap, threadbare clothes with “Utility” labels . . . Austerity had left its mark, and many people who had scrimped and saved through the post-war years found it hard to accept the attitudes of their juniors during the long boom that followed.’
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The ‘long boom’ didn’t begin until well after Myra left primary school. In her final year at Peacock Street, she was nicknamed ‘Beanstalk’ because she was so tall and lanky. Her hair had grown long and poker-straight, and she caught nits from someone at school. Gran parked her by the sink, rubbed vile-smelling liquid into her hair and dragged a steel comb through the dark-blonde lengths. She got rid of the nits, but when Myra went outside to play she was spotted by Eddie Hogan, who jeered, ‘Nitty Nora!’ Myra was furious. She raced up and pummelled him to the ground while a crowd of yelling children gathered. Gran, hearing the commotion, came out and hauled her off Eddie, who limped away, ashamed at having been beaten by a girl. Myra records this fight, too, in her autobiography, adding with characteristic remembered glee, ‘Eddie never called me Nitty Nora again.’
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