The First Snows
The first time I met the love of my life I could have cheerfully throttled him. It was winter 1953 and the boys and girls were holding a delightfully wicked snowball fight across the iron gate that separated our playgrounds at Lawson Street School, Middlesbrough. The air was full of children’s shrieks and laughter as handfuls of snow burst into clouds of fluffy white, sending us scattering in different directions as we wiped flakes out of our eyes. I was good at this game, easily dodging the boys’ clumsily-aimed throws and flinging fistfuls back without a pause.
The teacher’s whistle signalled the end of lunchtime break but we were having so much fun we didn’t pay attention the first time, and it blew two or three more times before we finally brought an end to the match. Just as we were making muttered truces with the boys over the way, an object came hurtling through the gate and smacked me full in the face – a final snowball with a stone concealed inside. I was furious. I glared at the gaggle of boys being herded inside but I couldn’t tell which of them had thrown it.
‘Joan!’ shouted my teacher impatiently, summoning me inside.
I rubbed the side of my face where the ice had hit me and went to the girls’ toilets to determine the damage – my cheek had turned a fetching shade of beetroot red. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the entire afternoon. What a nasty thing to do!
As soon as the bell rang for the end of the day I threw on my winter coat and rushed outside to wait by the boys’ entrance, plotting how I would have my revenge. A sheepish-looking boy emerged from the crowd and came over to the gate to speak to me – shuffling through the snow, which had turned to an unpleasant grey sludge covering the playground. As the culprit came closer I entertained the thought of scooping up a fistful of slush and lobbing it at him. Instead, I gave him a piece of my mind – thoroughly lacing into him. But to my surprise, he was so sweet and apologetic that in the end I just had to forgive him.
Byron was a tall, dark-haired young man of thirteen – just a few months older than me. The snowball incident forged a friendship between us that blossomed into courtship by the time the snow had melted away into the smoggy springtime air. After school we would go home for tea, change our clothes, then meet up with the other kids from various parts of North Ormesby and Cargo Fleet. I was allowed to stay out until nine o’clock on the long summer evenings, but as the freezing winter settled in and the nights drew out my curfew was cut to seven. I was under strict instructions that if I was even one minute late I would be in bother. Mam would stand and wait for me on the front doorstep, looking up the street towards the Trinity Church clock, which chimed on the hour. Most nights I would hear the bells begin to ring before I’d even started to think about coming home. Fortunately, I was a fast runner – but I often couldn’t speak for panting by the time I reached our front door.
Of course, Mam didn’t know I was seeing Byron at first. She would have been furious if she’d realised I was hanging out with a boy at that age, so I told her I was with my friend, Anne James, instead. By the time I turned fourteen the following year, I was getting braver and thought I’d test the boundaries by asking Mam if I could invite Byron over to ours for tea. She agreed, and after that I officially had her permission to court him.
We would meet up on the corner of South Bank Road and Cargo Fleet Lane and walk around the streets hand in hand, peering into shop windows and picking out the beautiful clothes and jewellery we’d buy if we had all the money in the world. Once a week, if we could gather up enough pennies between us, we went to the pictures. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Carousel was the first film Byron and I saw together, and I was in heaven sitting on the back row of the Majestic Cinema with him. Whenever I think of that film, with its beautiful songs and tragic storyline, I remember the warmth of Byron’s arm around my shoulders, and his gentle kiss on my cheek.
One evening, after we’d been going steady for a few months, we bumped into Jean – a nice, smiley girl with freckles and mousey-brown hair, who went to our school. The three of us stood and chatted for a while, and afterwards I teased Byron because it was obvious that Jean liked him. Funnily enough, she went on to marry him, so I was right. But look at me, getting ahead of myself…
My parents, Eleanor May Garbutt and John Maxwell Burns, married young – younger than most, even though people tended to pair up quickly after leaving school in those days. Mam fell pregnant at just sixteen (Dad was only a couple of years older), and that was a major scandal in the 1920s. Couples who found themselves in that predicament had little choice but to marry, no matter how difficult it must have been for them to commit to loving one person until the end of their days when they had barely started courting. They had experienced little of life, and I doubt they could have imagined what marriage or parenthood really meant. Whenever I look at Mam and Dad’s sepia-toned wedding photograph I always think they look like a couple of kids dressed up in their parents’ clothes, the loose fabric hanging off their skinny frames. They were only children themselves. Despite everything that happened afterwards, I do know that they were in love. But as Mam often tried to explain to us, although they would always care about each other, in the end they just couldn’t be together.
My mam would approach every subject in that matter-of-fact sort of way. She was opinionated, headstrong and full of life – admired by those who knew her for her formidable, unflappable nature. I think she was born at the wrong time, because she firmly believed that women could hold their own against men in every way, demonstrating her capability to lead, manage and organise all through our youth. She was resilient to her core, and refused to settle for the life of meek servitude that women were expected to accept in those days. What’s more, she had a charisma that drew people to her, and a conversational sparkle that was irresistible. She was so popular that it seemed to me there wasn’t a man or woman she didn’t know. My earliest memories are a carousel of smiling faces, formed by Mam’s many friends and acquaintances, who all wanted to stop and say hello to her and her little ones whenever we were out, on the bus or at the shops.
Even with a complete stranger, Mam would never be short of a few words to say to spark a conversation. Then again, people seemed to be much friendlier in the decades when I was growing up. They valued the simple pleasure of small talk. I suppose chatting together was one of the few forms of entertainment that didn’t cost anything. Connecting to others paused the grey monotony of daily labour by allowing people to escape into another life, even if only for a little while. Wise older women would share home remedies for colicky babies if they ran into a struggling young mother, asking only for local news and gossip in return. Men of all ages would find common ground over football, or the latest developments over at the works. Money was scarce and we didn’t know a single person who didn’t have to work hard and struggle just to survive. But our community was kind and caring, and we always looked out for one another.
Mam was born in May 1909 in Louisa Street, North Ormesby, the eldest of seven children belonging to Ellen Elizabeth Nightingale and William Robert Garbutt. Her dad had died young after being exposed to mustard gas in the trenches during World War One, leaving his widow to bring up all those children on her own. North Ormesby was known, even then, by the unflattering nickname of ‘Doggie’ – nobody seemed to know why. Like most of Middlesbrough, the area grew in the wake of the discovery of iron ore in the Eston Hills almost two centuries ago, when thousands of people began to flock from all over Britain and Ireland to the new communities springing up on Teesside, holding nothing in their hands but the promise of honest work.
As Mam grew up she learned that she had a talent for dancing, which blossomed into one of the great joys of her life. She was a teenager when she met Dad in a dance hall, and she’d seen little of life outside the three or four streets she called home. Her life had revolved around schoolwork, helping out in the house and going out dancing, and the news of her unplanned pregnancy threw all this out of orbit. Every woman reacts differently when she learns she’s going to have a baby, but I never asked her about how she felt when she received the news. I could easily have forgiven her for being terrified – and regretful, because she would never be able to pursue her dreams after that, but maybe she was thrilled at the prospect of becoming a mother. In the end, she probably felt a little of each. She could have been a magnificent dancer – but she also had an adventurous spirit and a passion for breaking the rules, and that ended up changing the course of her life.
My dad was born in February 1907, in South Shields, and was the third of five children. When he was four or five, his father – a Scottish joiner – found work at Smith’s Dock, so his family moved from Tyneside and settled in South Bank (then a thriving working-class community in the heart of industrial Teesside). Dad hardly ever went to school – he said he hated it. He would tell us stories about how he had to walk through the school gates with no shoes on, and the other kids would swarm around making fun of him and chanting nasty songs, which is daft when you think about it because their own families were probably nearly as hard up as his.
Despite the fact that he never had a conventional education – or maybe because of it – he was a sharp bloke. He could turn his hand to anything. I have early memories of him sitting in the warmth of the hearth-side with a cobbler’s iron last between his knees as he mended our shoes by firelight. He could cook, too, which was an unusual skill for a man to have in those days because they never normally needed to learn when their wives and mothers were always around to do it for them. He could sew with the same nimble delicacy as a woman and he was a talented carpenter, just like his father.
Even though we had no money we had all sorts of toys that he made for us when we were children, including a scooter with wheels taken from a broken pram, and a beautiful doll’s house which opened at the front so we could play with little clothes-peg dollies in the various rooms. He carved all the minute pieces of wooden furniture by hand and even fitted tiny torch bulbs to provide our dollies with battery-operated lighting. Over time he painted and decorated the miniature house to look just like our real one, and I’m sure it would have cost a fortune to try to buy such a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.
The doll’s house became a labour of love for our dad, but I’ve often wondered if he poured so many of his wonderful skills into it as a way to avoid the real complexities of family life. Dad was old-fashioned in his thinking, belonging to an era when women were supposed to want nothing more than a life devoted to looking after children. Although he could have cooked, cleaned and darned socks with his eyes closed, as far as he was concerned these were tasks for women, whose place was fundamentally bound to their home.
After they married, Dad was always working, taking extra shifts at all hours and doing whatever he could to bring in more money to support us all. And like most men, he enjoyed going for a pint in his free time. He had a smooth baritone voice that would stop people dead in their tracks when he started to sing, which made him popular down at the pub. People were always asking him for a song, and his rendition of Danny Boy had such soulfulness that he brought tears to the eyes of his captivated audiences – helped, no doubt, by the large quantities of booze they had consumed. Even though he was out of the house a lot, we all knew we were extremely important to him. And he was also particularly devoted to his mother, Eliza (Grandma Burns).
In February 1927, six months after my parents’ wedding, their first baby, Millicent May – our Milly – was born. In the months that followed, Mam became ill with what was known as ‘milk fever’ (the medical name is ‘mastitis’, an infection of the breast tissue that causes severe pain and swelling). Little more than a girl herself, she struggled to cope with being so unwell. The physical stress on a woman’s body after childbirth was something people never talked about so she was completely unprepared, and the medical profession offered little by way of treatment. She had gone from being a vivacious young woman without a care in the world to having a new husband and a newborn baby to look after, and her illness left her in a dreadful state, both physically and mentally.
Mam’s mother, Ellen Elizabeth (who we all knew as ‘Monna’ because some of her children had been unable to say ‘Mother’ properly) provided the only offer of support Mam ever got. Monna took Milly in, on the understanding that she would look after her until Mam was better. This ended up becoming a cause of friction between them for the rest of their lives, as Monna refused to give Milly back once Mam had recovered. It was a heartbreaking situation because whenever Mam and Dad tried to come and take their daughter home, Monna would threaten to tell the police about them. They were decent people, but to make ends meet they had been keeping the family allowance for Milly, which in Monna’s eyes was dishonest. To make matters even more traumatic for Mam, Milly had also started getting upset whenever Mam tried to take her back, as she had become so attached to her grandma.
I was told this story often when I was a child, to explain why it was that my eldest sister lived apart from the rest of us, but it was only when I had children of my own that I fully understood what a knife in the heart it would have been for Mam. Keeping a loving parent away from their child without a good reason must be one of the cruellest acts a person can commit, and I don’t doubt that this part of my mam’s life ended up shaping her into the fiercely protective mother I always knew.
Contraception was not easily available the way it is now and this simple fact determined the course of virtually everyone’s lives, and especially the lives of women. Young married couples didn’t have television to keep them entertained and instead they would find that one baby quickly followed another, giving women no time to find out who they were aside from their role as a wife and mother. Husbands and wives only knew a tiny sliver about their other half before they wed, which meant they couldn’t make an informed choice about who might be a supportive and loyal life partner. Society also put pressure on people to marry and settle down before they were considered too old to have decent prospects, which meant that girls had little time to reflect on the kinds of qualities they needed to look for – and be wary of – in men, before they made such a serious decision.
Mam was in too deep by the time she recognised the disastrous state of her relationship with Dad. My sister Audrey came along in April 1928 and Alwyn Eleanor, our Ollie, was next – in August 1930. Ollie was a highly-strung child, full of nervous energy. During an air raid one night Mam was screaming blue murder as usual, flying up and down the stairs and in and out of every room as she desperately tried to usher everyone out of the house and into the shelter. As the deafening sirens wailed, Ollie balanced on her tiptoes at the top of the staircase, twirling round and round and singing The Lady in Red, a jazzy dance number from the 1930s:
‘Oh, the lady in red is as fresh as a daisy when the town is in bed
Dancing and dining and shining originality…’
Mam screamed and screamed for her to come down, but Ollie wouldn’t listen, spinning in circles and dancing with her eyes closed, ignoring the chaos that had erupted around her.
‘Oh, the lady in red
The fellas are crazy for the lady in red
She’s a bit gaudy but lordy, what a pretty personality…’
Mam, beside herself and hoarse from yelling, bounded up the stairs two at a time and lifted Ollie into the air while my sister continued to dance furiously, her skinny legs and arms kicking out in all directions as she tried to shut out the immediate danger they were all in. Eyes screwed up, she started to scream once more:
‘The lady in red, the lady in red! The lady in red!’
Ollie was later diagnosed with Saint Vitus’ dance, a condition that affects the nerves that control movement. For people who suffer from it, any trauma or stress can trigger jerky, uncontrollable movements of the arms, legs and even the face. Poor Ollie was only nine or ten years old at the time of the air raid incident, and must have been scared senseless by the deafening wail of the sirens and the thought of the German bombers that everyone knew would follow. It took her a long time to return to her usual self after that night. I don’t know if she ever sang The Lady in Red again, but I certainly never heard her sing it in my lifetime.
It’s always fascinated me how different my sisters and I are from each other. All daughters of the same strong mother, not all of us have inherited her ability to give the appearance of brushing off trauma like water off a duck’s back. Ollie just folded under pressure when she was small, although she did become a little tougher as she grew older. I suppose none of us know how we will react to disaster until it hits our own house.
Mam and Dad had been offered a brand-new council house at 15 Berwick Hills Avenue in the newly-built Brambles Farm estate shortly after Ollie was born. It was a three-bedroomed semi with a little square garden at the front and flowers growing on a lattice around the front door, and a spacious flagstone backyard with plenty of room to play – a complete luxury compared to their old street house, or the rooms they had rented before that.
The family had been settled there for a couple of years when Mam discovered she was pregnant once again. Dad was over the moon when John Maxwell Junior was born in January 1934, a baby boy at long last. But heartbreak followed when the baby contracted pneumonia and died when he was just eleven months old, as sadly many babies did during those hard times. Although they had had their ups and downs before this, Dad blamed Mam for their awful loss and this spelt the beginning of the long, slow death of their marriage.
I’ve never understood why he seemed to think she was responsible for the baby’s death, because she’d successfully raised three previous newborns and hadn’t done anything different with baby John than with my sisters. I can’t begin to imagine what a terrible Christmas they must have had that year, and for many more to come. Losing a child is so unbearably painful that it’s only natural to look for someone or something to blame as a way of dealing with the anger, the grief, the what-ifs and if-onlys. At the same time, Mam must already have had an enormous weight of sorrow on her shoulders, having had Milly taken from her arms – and now she had lost a precious baby boy too.
The assumption that Mam was an unfit mother took root, and it began to poison Dad against her. They split up for a while after this tragedy, not for the first time, but they must have been able to put some of their troubles behind them because they were soon back together again. There was no time to dwell on the past at any rate, because my sister Margaret Rose (Margie) was born in February 1936. Dad made no secret of his disappointment at having yet another girl, and soon afterwards my parents temporarily separated once more.
When I was little and I heard the words ‘split up’ I imagined the living room wall in one of the rooms we used to let, which had one long, thin crack running from the floor up to the ceiling. At first, the crack was so fine that it was almost invisible but over time it grew wider and wider, with more cracks stemming outwards from it, then pieces of plaster began breaking away from the wall. Mam and Dad were always papering over the cracks in their relationship but it never solved the problems underneath, and eventually the atmosphere between them became so bad that it was unsustainable. It was just as our Mam used to say, they couldn’t live with each other but they couldn’t live without each other either, and so they started pulling each other apart instead.
By the time war broke out my family were back in the slums of South Bank once again, because of Dad’s health. He had been injured at work some years earlier when the scaffolding around a building gave way while two other men were working on some rigging. Dad was somehow able to grab a rope to hold the rigging in place until the men climbed down to safety. But in saving their lives, he injured his chest terribly, and he started coughing up spatters of blood. Health and safety wasn’t there to protect workers in those days – I don’t think Dad was even seen by a doctor. I’m sure if such a serious accident happened now it would be treated entirely differently, and he would have been hailed as a hero.
As with many men who have seen and experienced traumatic events, he never talked about it but the incident had a profound impact on him. He didn’t realise quite how serious his injuries were until he responded to his conscription at the outbreak of the war, when he was shocked to fail his medical examination. The doctors said the strain of holding on to the rope had displaced his heart within his chest.
Instead of joining up he continued in his position at Cargo Fleet Iron Works, but his condition began to worsen. Cycling to and from Brambles Farm became too much for him, so for the sake of his livelihood my family had to move back to South Bank. To my mam, this was like giving up a winning lottery ticket. Brambles Farm was heaven to her. Dad’s failing health would come to cause him great emotional pain too – his capacity and independence were brutally snatched away from him, and he was constantly reminded of this throughout the war years as the other men went away to fight and he was left to endure the sideways glances of their wives and girlfriends.
On December 23rd 1940, when Britain had been at war for just over a year, I was born in the front bedroom of 13 Lower Oxford Street in South Bank, the last of my parents’ six children. I don’t doubt that my arrival was another huge disappointment to Dad. I can’t say that he ever actually showed it though and I remember him as a loving father to us children. In return I adored him, although I didn’t see much of him when I was little and would feel dejected every time he left for work, knowing he wouldn’t come back home from his shift until well after my bedtime.
Sadness and fear built up in layers during those years, for all of us. People lived their lives in terror and dread of the German bombers that could send everyone scurrying to the shelters at any time of the day or night but beneath that, everyday squabbles turned into serious fights as families were often torn apart by perpetual grief and the grinding hardship of living through a war. Our family suffered just as every other family did. The next time they parted company, Mam and Dad’s unhappy marriage would never be papered back together again.
