Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking
Pauline Prescott

with Wendy Holden

This book is dedicated to John, the memory of my parents, and for my three wonderful boys: Paul, Johnathan, and David; and for my beautiful granddaughter Ava Grace

Smile, though your heart is aching

Smile, even though it’s breaking

When there are clouds in the sky

You’ll get by

If you smile

Through your fear and sorrow

Smile and maybe tomorrow

You’ll see the sun come shining through

For you

Light up your face with gladness

Hide every trace of sadness

Although a tear may be ever so near

That’s the time you must keep on trying

Smile, what’s the use of crying

You’ll find that life is still worthwhile

If you just smile

(John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons)

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

I LAY ON MY NARROW METAL-FRAMED BED, HANDS ACROSS MY TUMMY, AND felt the life inside me stir. Relishing the silence of the dawn, I knew that Sister Joan Augustine would burst into the dormitory any minute, clanging her bell to get us up and bathed for morning prayers.

It was 25 December 1955. Enjoying a few more seconds’ peace, I allowed my mind to drift back to the fifteen Christmases I’d already known or at least those I could remember. Each year, my mum and dad would roll the carpet back and dance across the living room to the songs of Fats Waller or the Ink Spots playing on the gramophone. Under dangling paper chains Dad would waltz me laughingly around on his feet, clinging to the back of his legs until I was giddy.

The best part was when my brother Peter and I were allowed to open the presents my parents had placed either side of the fireplace for us. Apart from the usual apple, orange and banana, there would always be some special gift they’d saved especially hard for – like my brother’s bicycle or the sleeping baby doll I’d coveted ever since I’d spotted it in Garner’s Toy Shop window. When the doll was replaced by another just before the school holidays, I cried all the way home. To my astonishment, there she was on Christmas morning, batting her long eyelashes at me. From Mum’s wages as a part-time cleaner and my father’s as a bricklayer a little money had been put into a savings club until there was enough.

Now aged sixteen, I was about to give birth to my own baby doll, the one I prayed would bring back its airman father from wherever he’d returned to in America. I’d written and told him about our child but he hadn’t replied yet. Maybe once the baby was born, he’d divorce his wife and send for me to marry him as he’d always promised he would.

I thought back to Christmas two years earlier, the first that Mum, Peter and I had faced a few months after we’d watched Dad’s coffin being lowered into the ground. That Christmas, I was invited to a party at the local American airbase for children who’d been orphaned or bereaved. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, I’d stepped nervously into that mess hall and thought I’d been transported to Hollywood. The scene was like something in the movies that transfixed me every Saturday afternoon at the Regal Cinema in Foregate Street, Chester. The hall was filled with clowns, balloons and entertainers. A trestle table groaned under oversized platters of exotic food. There was cream and frosted icing, the likes of which I’d never known because of rationing. Smiling shyly at the handsome men in uniform who reminded me of Rock Hudson or Clark Gable as they handed out gifts, I was star-struck.

Had that Christmas party only been two years earlier? Before my brother got sick? Before my widowed mother had her accident? Before I met the father of my baby? It seemed like a lifetime ago. The words of my favourite song, ‘Unchained Melody’, sprang unbidden into my head.

Oh my love, my darling,

I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time. And time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. Are you still mine?

I need your love…God speed your love to me.

The bell ringing in Sister Joan Augustine’s hand snapped me from my reverie. Her long black habit making her seem taller than she really was, she stood in the doorway of our dormitory as she had every morning for the three months that I’d been a resident at St Bridget’s House of Mercy, a home for unwed mothers in Lache Park. Apart from Mother Superior, whose office I’d tremblingly approached with my suitcase that first day, Sister Joan Augustine was the nun I feared the most.

‘Come along now, girls!’ she cried, clapping her hands together impatiently. ‘Stop dawdling.’ Dutifully, and in various stages of pregnancy, we twelve teenagers heaved ourselves upright, grabbed our wash bags and formed an orderly queue for the bathroom. With one bath shared between each dorm, we were only allowed a few minutes each before we had to dress and troop down to the chapel.

Because it was Christmas, the nuns had decorated a small tree in the room where we’d be permitted to greet family and friends later that afternoon. Its sparsely decorated branches were a bittersweet reminder of happier festivities beyond the former convent’s walls. There would be no traditional gatherings by the family hearth for any of us that year. No pile of presents. No oranges or cute baby dolls. Instead, we’d quietly eat our breakfast cereal in the refectory, each lost in memories of Christmases past. Then we’d fall in for normal duties: peeling potatoes in the kitchen, working in the laundry or scrubbing the cloisters’ floor. We were young, some the victims of sexual abuse, others (like me) too innocent to understand the consequences of what we’d done. All of us were waiting for babies we were expected to take home or hand over uncomplainingly for adoption.

In a few days’ time, my turn would come. Excited and terrified in equal measure, I dreaded the birth but fervently hoped my baby would arrive before those of two other girls in my dorm whose babies were due imminently. Sister Joan Augustine had promised the first child a beautiful Silver Cross pram that had been donated to the home by a well-wisher. That pram was gorgeous, with its cream enamel paintwork with a silver flash and its grey cloth hood. Not since I’d spotted the doll in the toy-shop window had I wanted anything quite so badly.

What I longed for even more, though, was to gaze into the eyes of the infant whose steady heartbeat matched mine. I ached to hold its tiny fingers. I wanted to kiss its cherub face. I was convinced that one look at those innocent features would change my mother’s mind. Setting eyes on her first grandchild, she would announce (I felt sure) that we couldn’t possibly give it up and that somehow – even though we both worked full time and couldn’t afford help – we’d manage.

Kneeling in the chapel that cold December morning, my swollen tummy pressed against the pew, I bowed my head. ‘Please God, let me keep my baby,’ I whispered, my knuckles white through the skin of my hands. ‘Don’t let them take it away.’

If my prayers could only be answered, that would be a million times better than any doll or any pram. It would be the best Christmas present ever…

One

I DON’T KNOW WHAT MY MOTHER’S CHRISTMASES WERE LIKE WHEN SHE WAS a little girl, but I don’t suppose they were much fun. Christened Minnie Irene Clegg but known to all as ‘Rene’, she rarely spoke of her childhood except to tell me that her father Joseph had died of war wounds when she was three, leaving her mother Ada to raise four small children.

From a devout Salvation Army background, Ada met another man and had six more children by him, making ten in all, although some died along the way. Sadly, the man Ada ended up with was a violent and abusive drunk, so my mother, her younger sister Ivy and her two brothers were sent into a children’s home and then into service. Auntie Ivy, who was known as ‘Little Titch’, was much taller than my mother who stood at just over five feet. Despite her diminutive height and the fact that there was only a year between them, Mum was ‘the boss’. The two women were so in tune with each other that they could sense if the other was unwell or in trouble. If one had an accident, the other seemed to a few days later. We named them ‘the Golden Girls’.

When Ivy moved to Southampton to take up a position in a country mansion owned by a lord, Mum had no choice but to remain in Chester where she had a job as a maid in one of the old houses owned by the Welsby family of wine merchants. She missed her sister terribly, even more so after Ivy married Len, a bus conductor and later had a daughter, my cousin Anne. In the privacy of her attic bedroom, my mum would shed tears for the sister from whom she’d never before been separated. Looking mournfully out over the rooftops, she’d wonder where Ivy was and what she was doing. On one such day, her eyes fell upon a good-looking young man clambering about on the roof of a hotel across the street. Spotting my mother in the window, he smiled and waved.

From that moment on, my mother’s mood lifted. Every chance she’d get, she’d run up to her room, heart pounding, to see if the handsome bricklayer was still working on the roof. Each time she saw him, she’d wave happily and he’d wave back. Eventually, he waited for her by her employer’s back door to ask her name. His was Ernest Tilston, and within a year they were wed.

Ernie was the youngest of twelve children, ten of them boys. Their father George, who was originally from Wales, became a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Cheshire Regiment during the First World War and sported a splendid waxed moustache. Ernie was such a good football player as a lad that he’d been offered a place with Tranmere Rovers but his father, a builder and master scaffolder, wouldn’t let him take it up and insisted he got a trade. Ernie’s brother Fred was a world-class boxer known as ‘Little Tilly’. Ernie worked for his dad and lived with his parents but once he and my mother were engaged, they began saving for their first home, a red-brick terraced house in the village of Boughton Heath, in the suburbs of Chester. They married when they were both just turned twenty.

A few years later in 1937, my brother Peter was born. I came along twenty months after that in February, 1939. My timing was just right because when I was seven months old, war broke out. I was very young but I can still remember bombing raids in Chester; hiding in ‘the glory hole’ under the stairs with Mum and Peter; eating emergency rations by torchlight. As a pupil at Cherry Grove School, I’d run to the concrete air-raid shelter with my Mickey Mouse gas mask with its sticking-out ears whenever the sirens sounded. I hated that horrible-smelling rubber mask. It made me feel sick every time someone clamped it to my face. After the school day was over, I’d play on the bombsites with my brother and his friends, using wooden doors that had been blown off their hinges as makeshift slides. It was all good fun until I got splinters in my bottom and my mother had to pluck them out.

My father enlisted in the Royal Marines and was posted to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands where many of the British battleships were based. Albert, one of my mother’s brothers, lived in Glasgow with his wife Nan and three sons so once, when my father was given leave, we took a train north to meet him there. German bombs rained on Glasgow too, especially the area round the river Clyde, but there was never a suggestion that we shouldn’t go and what a time we had. Being in Scotland felt like being on holiday and we’d never had a holiday before. Dad brought us enormous duck eggs from the Orkneys, which were such a luxury after years of powdered egg. In the local sweetshop he treated us to pear drops, strips of liquorice and humbugs that changed colour as you sucked them. Because of the sugar shortage, these were things we’d rarely had except as a monthly treat from the family ration book. One of my happiest memories is climbing the hills outside the city with Dad to pick some heather for Mum, my small hand swamped by his as he lifted me squealing above the carpet of purple flowers.

People couldn’t help but love my father. When he was in the Marines, he used to MC all the dances and shows, and was a popular member of their football team. He bore more than a passing resemblance to a young John Wayne and was a natural joker whose favourite comedian was Al Reed. Occasionally he’d repeat some of Al’s jokes, which could be a bit naughty. Mum would nudge him then and scold him with: ‘Ernie!’ When the war ended and we knew for sure that Dad was safe and coming home, we celebrated at a street party held locally for VE Day. There was bunting and cakes and jellies. Trestle tables lined the lane at the back of our house. A few days later, Dad came marching proudly down the street to the music of the band of the Royal Marines, which still moves me to tears each time I hear it.

After the war, Dad was offered a job as a master bricklayer for British Insulated Callender’s Cables, in the works’ maintenance department eight miles away in Helsby. They not only wanted him for his bricklaying skills but for their football team. Each morning, he’d put on his overalls, pick up his haversack with his sandwiches, and whistle to himself as he got on his old bike and set off to work. On Thursday nights he’d come home with his little brown wage packet and wander into a corner with it, my mother peering over his shoulder. If she wasn’t looking, he’d slip us a tanner each, especially if we’d done something to please him.

Once a month, Mum would check his pay packet and say, ‘But you’ve already opened your wages.’

‘Yes, Rene,’ Dad would reply. ‘I had to pay my union dues to the agent.’

Mum would nod and put the rest of his money away. I never knew what union dues were but I knew they were something my parents both took extremely seriously.

Although he seemed to like his job and got on well with his colleagues, my father preferred nothing more than to spend time with us. Every Saturday night he’d take us to the pictures. We always had to get there early and queue for the cheapest seats, right in the front row. He’d always buy us an ice cream in the interval and then we’d go home on the bus. Dad’s hero was Fred Astaire, so we saw all his films like Three Little Words and The Belle of New York. My favourite star at the time was Elizabeth Taylor, who at seven years older than me was the most glamorous young woman I’d ever seen in my life. I think I saw National Velvet three times.

We never went to church as a family so every Sunday Dad would switch on the wireless to listen to a pianist called Charlie Kunz who played Gershwin, Fats Waller, and Cole Porter songs. The carpet would be rolled back and Dad and I used to tap dance or waltz across the living-room floor, laughing all the while. Dad loved to dance and would copy all the steps he’d seen at the pictures. I inherited that passion and his love for swing music. His favourite song was ‘Ain’t Misbehavin” and even now when I hear it, it makes me smile:

I know for certain the one I love; I’m through with flirtin’, it’s just you I’m thinkin’ of. Ain’t misbehavin’, I’m saving my love for you.

My brother preferred modern jazz, which he’d play in his bedroom. Listening to those songs drifting through the walls, I soon fell for artists like Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck and the MJQ or Modern Jazz Quartet. I remember loving one song in particular by the Tommy Dorsey band which was called ‘A Sinner Kissed an Angel’. For my birthday, Peter would buy me Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan records. Being nearly two years older than me, Peter had his own friends and I was often just the kid sister who got in the way. It wasn’t until we were grown up that we became much closer and now we’re the best of pals.

Since I didn’t have a sister to play with, my closest companion was Joyce Ashford, who lived in the same street. She and I used to put on dance and puppet shows in her garage. Her younger sister Barbara sometimes joined in, but she once spied on us rehearsing and put on her own version of our show before we could. I don’t think we ever quite forgave her.

I never felt poor but in comparison with our family Joyce and Barbara were definitely better off. Joyce’s father was a bookie who owned a car, a television and a garage, none of which we possessed. My dad only had a bike and we all used the buses. If ever I wanted to see something on television, I’d go round to Joyce’s after school. We loved Muffin the Mule and watched all the important public events, including the Coronation in 1953. I remember holding my breath as the glittering crown was placed so solemnly on the Queen’s head and thinking how incredible it would be to meet her one day. Aged fourteen, I never thought my wish might come true.

A tall, skinny kid, all I wanted was to be a television ‘Topper’ when I grew up: dancing in a troupe of glamorous girls in support of a main act. I couldn’t think of a finer job than to be paid to dance. A proud member of Miss Eve’s Morris Dancing Team, by my early teens I was touring all over the Midlands, Wales and the North to compete in regional finals. Mum would travel with me on the bus and we had such fun getting me into my costume each time, with its little skirt and frilly knickers. At Christmas, I’d put on my ‘Fred and Ginger’ outfit for the family (I was always Fred, in a top hat) and do a little routine bursting balloons with high kicks and the splits as Mum, Dad and Peter all laughed. I have such carefree memories of those years.

I was thrilled when my parents found the money to send me to the Hammond School of Dance on the Liverpool Road, which was the best in the North of England. There was a price to pay, though. When Peter was given a new bicycle one year I was told I couldn’t have one as well as my classes. I didn’t mind. As far as I was concerned, I had the better deal.

I loved school and there were several subjects I was good at, especially drama. I even played the Virgin Mary in the school nativity play. Having a vivid imagination, I was also good at English and would make up little stories in my head. Because of my dancing, I was sporty and my long legs were ideal for running and the high jump. I was always in the middle of my class academically, and only ever came top in needlework and cookery so I guess I was destined to be a housewife. It wasn’t that I was thick, I just didn’t apply myself. When I failed my eleven plus, which meant I couldn’t go to the City High School in Handbridge with my friend Joyce, I was devastated. For the first time I felt the stigma of being labelled ‘stupid’, something my brother (who’d passed his eleven plus the previous year) took great delight in rubbing in whenever he could.

I was sent to Love Street secondary modern school instead, where my party trick was to do handstands against the wall with my skirt tucked into my knickers. I threw myself into athletics until I was made sports captain and finally felt I’d achieved something. Then, when the rest of my class voted me house captain I decided that I should try harder to live up to the little badge I proudly wore on my lapel, and – with a little application—I came second in the class that year.

Coming home on the bus with all the posh girls from Queen’s School and City High, I was painfully aware that my differently coloured uniform defined me as ‘not one of them’, so I did all I could to blend in. I’d slip off my navy-blue blazer and try not to draw attention to myself. One day, I watched in horror as my father stepped on to the bus in his overalls, his haversack slung over his shoulder. I was sitting halfway down and shrank into my seat. Dad didn’t see me so he sat right at the back, legs apart as always, chatting and laughing with everyone around him in that real working-class Cheshire way of speaking that he had. To my eternal shame, I can remember thinking, Please, don’t embarrass me! I still hate myself for that, because the one thing I can’t stand is snobbery.

I was thirteen years old when my father began to complain of feeling unwell. He had a bad back and other ailments and used to take all sorts of herbal remedies when the medicines the doctor prescribed didn’t work. Unusually, he took time off work but he never seemed to improve, even with bed rest. I think, like us, he assumed that an aching back was something that went with his job. After a year of pain which nothing seemed to ease, he discovered a lump on his neck. Mum, who’d taken on extra cleaning to make ends meet by then, told us a few days later that Dad would need an operation to remove it.

‘First of all, though,’ she said, ‘we’re going on holiday!’

I couldn’t believe it. We were to spend a week at the Middleton Tower Holiday Camp near Morecambe, Lancashire. Dad was to be admitted for surgery soon after we got back but I didn’t worry about his operation in the slightest. All I could think about was our impending break, which was the first proper holiday we’d ever had. The camp was like nothing I had ever seen. Set in sixty acres with nine hundred chalets, its dining rooms and cafeterias could feed three thousand people. The main building, which had a theatre and a dance floor, was modelled on a Cunard cruise ship called the SS Berengaria. We were joined by my mum’s mother Ada – or ‘Nanny’ as I called her, who was a traditional cuddly grandmother from Ellesmere Port. Then there was Aunt Bessie, who brought her daughters, my cousins, Barbara, Linda and Janet. My brother Peter, who was sixteen, brought along a couple of friends.

Even though my father wasn’t very well he still drew people to him and he and my mother were so lovely on that holiday – like newlyweds. They danced together most nights and I can remember watching them on the dance floor and feeling a little jealous. Later, my lovely dad made sure to dance just with me. Best of all, he won a bingo prize of sixty pounds which more than paid for the holiday. He was so happy.

Soon after we came home, Dad was admitted to Chester City Hospital where he was expected to stay for two weeks. We were planning to visit him one night after school but Mum said there had been a complication and that he needed peace and quiet. ‘He’ll be home soon,’ she told us, sensing our disappointment. I couldn’t wait. The house felt so empty without his laughing presence.

The day he was due to be discharged I hurried back from school, excitedly skipping along in front of our row of terraced houses, the gardens of which sloped to the road. As usual, the other mothers were standing by their gates or leaning across their garden fences, chatting to each other as they waited for their children to come home. But on that particular afternoon, something unusual happened. One by one, the women stopped talking, turned, and walked back up their paths without saying hello to me. I remember thinking how strange that was as I danced on by.

Dad wasn’t waiting at our garden gate as I’d hoped he might be. Swallowing my disappointment, I ran inside and found my mother in the kitchen. ‘Is he home?’ I asked breathlessly.

She bent down and took my hands in hers. ‘Yes, Pauline, but he’s in bed. He’s still not very well. Why don’t you go up and see if he recognizes you?’

I ran up the stairs two at a time wondering what Mum meant. Of course Daddy would recognize me – he’d only been away two weeks. But the man lying in my parents’ bed hardly even looked like my father. The shock froze me halfway across the room.

‘Dad?’

His eyes flickered open and he turned to look at me, but didn’t respond. Taking a step forward, I reached for his hand. It lay limply in mine. ‘Daddy? It’s Pauline.’

He closed his eyes again and I stood stock still, uncertain what to do. If only he’d open them and say, ‘Hi, baby.’ He often referred to me as ‘baby’, which I loved.

My mother came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Something happened during the operation,’ she said. Her voice was strange. ‘It’s left Daddy a bit confused.’

He remained ‘confused’ for the rest of the day and by evening Mum was so worried that she summoned a doctor, who called an ambulance. I stood silently on the landing as two men manhandled my father past me on a stretcher.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Dad asked them, his eyes fearful.

‘To a lovely hotel, Ernie,’ one of the ambulance men replied, giving his colleague a conspiratorial wink.

I was furious. How dare they talk to my father as if he were stupid! I wanted to push them down the stairs and out of the house.

Visiting the hospital over the next few days wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it would be. When we got there we had to sit quietly at the side of the bed while Mum gently woke my father. Sometimes he would recognize us but often he didn’t. The doctors said he’d suffered a blood clot on the brain during the operation. Only once did he seem to know who I was. He looked at me, turned to my mum and said, ‘The baby’s too skinny. She’s doing too much dancing.’

He never called me baby again.

When Auntie Ivy came up from Southampton with her husband Len and daughter Anne, I knew things were serious. A week later, on 8 July 1953, my father died. We didn’t have a telephone but they somehow sent word from the hospital. He had a type of cancer known as Hodgkin’s disease, the doctors told my mother, although it didn’t really matter that it had a name. His death certificate also cited cerebral haemorrhage as a secondary cause of death.

Dad did come home then, but in a wooden coffin that rested on trestles in the middle of the living room so that friends and family could pay their respects. I was terrified of that open box with the white gauze cloth draped loosely over my father’s frozen expression. I was only fourteen years old; I’d never seen a dead body before. The room had a sweet, sickly smell, which I suppose was to mask the formaldehyde. All I knew was that the cloying scent stuck to the back of my throat.

For three days, people came and went. Whenever I was summoned by my mother to say hello to our guests, I would creep in and cling to the walls, walking around the edge of the room and averting my gaze. My mother finally asked me, ‘Why won’t you look at your father, Pauline?’

I hesitated before whispering, ‘I’m frightened.’

Mum sat me down. ‘He never hurt you when he was alive,’ she told me, ‘and he certainly won’t hurt you now that he’s dead.’

Dad had been a choirboy at St Mary’s in Handbridge, so his funeral was held there. Mum bought me a lovely new skirt and top and everyone kept hugging me and creasing it. The church was filled with flowers and people, including fellow Marines and colleagues from the BICC factory where Dad had worked. The vicar, who’d known my father as a boy, said that he’d been an excellent footballer, a model member of the community and a good family man. My mum was more upset than I had ever seen her and kept dabbing her eyes behind her spectacles with a white lace handkerchief. I didn’t know what to do to stop her crying. Peter was as white as a sheet and didn’t say a word.

Dad was buried in the family plot at Blacon on the other side of Chester. As I watched clods of earth shovelled on to the lid of his coffin, I thought to myself, Well, he was forty. That’s really old.

Going home to an empty house felt stranger still. No more coffin; no more sickly smell. People didn’t come to pay their respects any more and it was just the three of us with no Dad bursting in from work to put on a record, roll back the carpet and pull my mother or me into a laughing waltz. It was peculiar going back to school without even Peter for company. I was the only child who’d lost a father in my class and that made me feel very different – older, I guess, and more lonely.

My mother had one really good black-and-white photograph of my dad, which she cherished. A few weeks after he died, she took me with her to Will R. Rose’s, a famous photographer’s studio in Chester. ‘I’d like this hand-coloured and enlarged, please,’ she told the man behind the counter, handing him the precious photo.

‘Certainly, madam,’ he said, studying the picture of my smiling dad. ‘Tell me, what colour are his eyes?’

My mother faltered. ‘He had the most beautiful blue eyes…’ she said, trying to hold herself together. After that, she couldn’t say another word.

Two

I THINK WHAT SAVED ME DURING THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS AFTER MY FATHER died was my dancing. By practising daily and trying to ignore the pain in my heart, I managed to work my way to the top of my tap class and was all set to try for a silver medal. I already had my bronze, which was my pride and joy. I kept it in a special place in my bedroom, touching it like a talisman whenever I passed it.

Then one day my mother broke some bad news. ‘I’m so sorry, Pauline,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to give up your classes. I can’t afford them any more.’ I knew that money had been tight since Dad had died and that luxuries were out of the question but nothing much else had changed; we still had a lamb roast every Sunday and it hadn’t occurred to me that my dancing might have to stop. I was devastated but, looking at my mother’s expression, I could tell that she had no choice.

Instead of tip-tapping my way through dance classes after school, I turned my feet in the direction of a house in Queen’s Park, just over the suspension bridge in Chester, where Mum now worked as a cleaner. Wandering through the lofty rooms of that beautiful red-brick Georgian house, its silver and brass gleaming from all her polishing, I’d wonder what it would feel like to own such a place. Not that I ever imagined I would. I reckoned I’d probably stay in our little terraced home for the rest of my days, taking care of my mum and helping her pay the bills. I hated that she had to work so hard. As well as cleaning, she had a full-time job at the Ideal Laundry in Boughton Heath, which rented out linens to big hotels and restaurants. She operated the hot iron press and came home smelling of starch.

Peter, at sixteen, was now the head of our household. Still just a boy but trying to be a man, he took his responsibilities very seriously. My father had always teased him that he was ‘the brainy one’ and would never end up getting his hands dirty. Once Dad died though, Peter left school and went to work at the same factory, albeit behind a desk as a trainee in the sales department. The personnel welfare officer who’d offered him the job had been one of those who’d come to the house to pay his respects when Dad died.

Within just a few months of starting his first job, though, Peter started to lose weight and became quite poorly. He went to the doctor on several occasions but, as with Dad, no one seemed able to help. By the time he finally went to see a specialist, it was discovered that he had pleurisy and his lungs were filling with fluid. He was rushed to hospital and ended up in the same ward Dad had been in. My poor mother must have feared the worst. Peter’s pleurisy then developed into tuberculosis and the doctors warned my mother that he’d ‘outgrown his strength’.

Peter was sent away to the three-hundred-bed Cheshire Joint Sanatorium at Loggerheads in Staffordshire, where he remained on a ‘fresh air and rest’ cure for the next eighteen months. Every Sunday, Mum and I would take the bus all the way out to beyond Market Drayton to take him magazines, fruit and a fresh pair of pyjamas. He was very poorly, and so pale. TB was a killer in those days and was treated very seriously. The nurses gave Peter enormous pills to swallow, as big as an old penny. Only one visitor was allowed into his room at a time, so Mum and I would take turns. Later, the nurses would wheel his bed out into the fresh air to help improve his breathing. All wrapped up in blankets over his striped pyjamas and dressing gown, he virtually had to sleep in the grounds overnight, so convinced were they of the benefits of oxygen. Mum and I would stay for an hour or so before making the long journey home to a house that felt emptier still.

I knew the day was looming when I’d have to leave school too and decide how to earn my keep. Because I was good with my hands I often made my own clothes. Dad had bought me a sewing machine a year or so before, although when he tried to mend his overalls on it once he’d broken it. Maybe I could become a dressmaker or work in a ladies’ wear shop? My interest in fashion probably came from all the classic films I’d watched as a child. My parents had both been dapper and I loved dressing up in Mum’s clothes, especially her hats.

There was a wonderful hat shop in Chester run by a lady called Mary Jordan. It was in the Rows, a sort of medieval shopping mall that I used to skip down as a child. The Hollywood actress Margaret Lockwood, star of The Wicked Lady, used to go there to have hats specially made for her. That really impressed me: a big star like her coming to our town. I dreamed of working in Mary Jordan’s, making hats for film stars like Joan Collins, Audrey Hepburn or Jean Simmons. When I learned that the shop was offering an apprenticeship I wanted it with all my heart but another girl from my school was offered it so my chance was lost.

Disappointed, I heard from a school friend called Norma Hignett that a big new development was about to open in Chester as part of the Lewis group, which owned the famous Bon Marché department store in Liverpool. There’d be a shop, a restaurant, a jazz club, a bar, dance floor and a hairdressing salon, all under the name Quaintways.

‘They’ve got vacancies for trainee hairdressers,’ Norma told me. ‘You don’t need any experience; I’ve been taken on already. The salon opens in a week. If you like, I’ll see if I can get you in.’

Hairdressing, I concluded bravely, was fashion too. After all, film stars had to have good hair as well as fancy clothes. With Norma’s help, I applied for a job at Quaintways and was signed up for a three-year apprenticeship with a starting salary of three pounds a week. I’d begin as a trainee learning how to wash hair and give manicures before moving up to the position of ‘improver’. By the end of five years, I’d be a fully qualified hairdresser and manicurist with my own clients and the chance to make up my income with tips. Aged fifteen, I left school on the Friday afternoon and started work when Quaintways opened the following Monday morning. I could tell my mother was relieved. Although our house was like a new pin and she always kept a good table, she was undoubtedly struggling without my father’s weekly pay packet and mine, though small, would make a difference.

On my first day at work I wore a skirt I’d made myself from a favourite Vogue pattern. Conscious of being so thin, I’d added layers of petticoats underneath to make it a dirndl skirt, which I hoped would make me look shapelier than I really was. To hide my overly long neck, I wore a high-necked polo sweater. The whole look was finished off with a little waspie belt and flat shoes. Oh, and a matching umbrella cover: I made one for all my outfits and they became my trademark.

I arrived at the salon on opening day with the ten other juniors who’d been taken on. We were all given pink overalls to wear and I slipped mine on. Because my skirt stuck out so much, the overall rode up and didn’t cover anything. Miss Jones, the manageress of the salon, laughed. ‘You’ll never get near the wash basin,’ she told me. ‘You’ll have to take off your skirt.’ I was horrified. I knew that wearing the skimpy overall on its own would make me look thinner still but I had no choice. The next day I made sure to wear a less bulky outfit.

Try as I might, I couldn’t gain weight. The film stars I most admired had curves in all the right places, none of which I possessed, although I did at least have a bust. Mum had already taken me to see the doctor about it. After examining me, he asked how much I ate. ‘Like a horse,’ my mother replied, which was true.

‘Please, doctor,’ I asked him, ‘how can I get bigger?’

‘Take more exercise,’ was his reply. Mum and I looked at each other in disbelief I had never stopped dancing and even after I’d had to give up my classes I kept practising at home. When my mother told the doctor this, he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Being skinny must be in her genes,’ was all he could suggest. It was just as I feared; I was a hopeless case.

Not long after I joined Quaintways, something happened that completely took my mind off gaining weight. I was told I had a telephone call at the salon, which shocked me. We’d never had a telephone at home and I’d hardly ever used one. Taking the unfamiliar receiver I listened as a woman from the Ideal Laundry told me that my mother had been taken to hospital after an accident at work. I threw off my overall and hurried across town to the same Chester City Hospital where my father had died and where Peter had first been admitted for pleurisy.

My mother’s left hand was heavily bandaged and she was in a great deal of pain. She’d been working on the double press, smoothing down the sheets and tablecloths while another woman stood by operating the floor pedal which brought the hot iron thumping down. On this particular day, her colleague wasn’t paying attention and she accidentally hit the pedal while Mum’s hand was still smoothing under the iron. When they managed to extricate her hand from the machinery, her wedding and engagement rings were so flattened and embedded into her flesh that they had to be cut off. Her fingers were horribly disfigured and burned down to the bone. She was told that she’d have to endure a series of grafting operations, using skin taken from her thigh.

My great-aunt Mabel and my cousin Rita, who lived next door, helped look after me while Mum underwent her operations. Rita took me shopping or to the pictures, but I still remember feeling terribly lonely. My father was dead; Peter and my mother were both in and out of hospital. I couldn’t help but feel abandoned.

Mum had trouble with her left hand for the rest of her life and was never able to do manual labour again. She eventually received compensation from the company after a drawn-out legal process. They didn’t award her a huge amount, considering how disfigured her hand was, but it certainly seemed enormous to us. She took me into Liverpool on the train and bought me a beautiful fuchsia-coloured coat with a fur collar, which I kept for years. She bought herself and Peter something special too, and then put the rest of the money away. As soon as her hand was mended, she took a job behind the counter in Woolworths in Chester where she was brilliant at dealing with people. From there she went to work in a shop that sold raincoats and umbrellas. The manager couldn’t believe she’d ever been a manual labourer because she was such a stylish little lady who could speak to anybody. My mother wasn’t a snob, though. She’d take any work as long as it paid.

At around the same time as my mother was recovering from her accident, she began dating a local man called Harry Dawson, who was an inspector on the buses. I knew his two daughters Pat and Shirley from my dancing days. Harry was a widower and a lovely man. Although it had been not much more than a year since my father had died, I was happy that she had someone to share her life with, especially during such a difficult time. After all, she was only in her late thirties.

Everyone else around me seemed to have new interests too. Once Peter was discharged from the sanatorium after eighteen months, he was transferred to the Wrenbury Hall Rehabilitation Centre near Nantwich. Under the care of the Red Cross, he gradually gathered his strength although the TB had weakened him terribly and he would spend another thirteen months recovering. He was placed on the Disabled Persons Register until he was twenty-one.

Joyce, my childhood friend, got engaged to her future husband Peter and moved to Ellesmere Port and we lost touch for a while. I became friendlier with her sister Barbara, but then she found herself a regular boyfriend as well. I didn’t realize it at the time but my loneliness and the feeling that life was happening to everyone else but me made me vulnerable.

At least I had my job, which I loved, although most of the girls at work had busy social lives too. The other juniors especially became like a second family to me. From day one, we were ‘the Quaintways Girls’ and I became known to all as ‘Tilly’ Tilston, a nickname which stuck for life.

Quaintways soon became the place to go in Chester and ours was the premier salon. With a food shop, restaurant and nightclub, it felt more like a luxurious social club than a place of work. We even put on little modelling shows after hours for customers with each of us wearing a new outfit chosen from the store. The Quaintways restaurant was very popular, as was the Wall City Jazz Club run by a man called Gordon Vickers, who became a lifelong friend. He booked acts like the clarinettist Monty Sunshine and the Chris Barber Band. When one new group from Liverpool asked if they could play at the club, Gordon told them they could only if they cut their hair. The Beatles refused.

Several of the senior hairdressers who’d been brought into Quaintways from all over the country had famous clients like the singers Alma Cogan, Rosemary Squires, and Dickie Valentine, who’d come to Chester to sing at the Plantation Inn on the Liverpool Road. Through them, the hairdressers were often invited to the Oulton Park race circuit to attend parties with Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn and other famous drivers. There was even glamour among some of my fellow juniors too. One called Trish Fields had a fabulous voice and was a part-time singer at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, taking her turn between bands like the Swinging Blue Jeans and those rebellious kids who wouldn’t cut their hair.

The older women in the salon seemed so grown up and worldly-wise to me. They dated everyone from sporting heroes to servicemen; they drank, smoked and stayed out late. I used to listen to some of their whispered conversations and wonder what on earth they were giggling about. My mother had never spoken to me about being intimate with a boy and there had never been any sex education at school. Because Peter had been in hospital throughout my teenage years I’d not had a big brother to advise me and I’d never even had a boyfriend, apart from one nice lad who lived across the street and who sometimes took me to the church hall dance. I’d had a silly crush on another boy at school who sometimes let me ride on the crossbar of his bicycle but it had never gone beyond holding hands.

One hairdresser in particular often spoke to me about the airmen she dated from the USAF bases nearby at Sealand, Queensferry and Warrington. ‘The Americans are great company,’ she’d tell me during breaks. ‘They love to dance and they really know how to treat a girl. Why don’t I fix you up on a blind date, Tilly?’

I resisted at first, feeling shy and awkward, but the more she spoke about her ‘lovely Americans’ the more I thought back to the party I’d attended that first Christmas after Dad died. The airmen there had been so charming and kind. Where would be the harm? Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask Mum if she thought it would be all right.

‘OK,’ she said as she was getting ready to go out with Harry one night, ‘but make sure you’re back by ten.’

My friend originally set me up with an airman called Joe but he was sent back to the States so I ended up with someone I’ll call ‘Jim’. He’d just turned twenty-one and I was not quite sixteen when we first met. He knew how old I was but what he probably didn’t realize was that I’d never even been kissed. He took me to the Odeon in Chester to see a film called Johnny Dark in which Tony Curtis played an engineer who’d designed a racing car. I don’t remember much about the film because I was too excited by the company I was keeping. At six feet two inches tall with smouldering good looks, Jim was quiet, courteous and kind. Better still, he was a singer of country and western songs and he played in the clubs and bars on the American bases. He sang to me on the way home and had a really lovely voice, a bit like Jim Reeves. I was convinced my music-loving father would have approved.

For the next six months I was in a whirl. My lonely days were at an end. Jim was just like a film star, and he was mine. I thought about him night and day and the feeling appeared to be mutual. When we weren’t together he’d call me up on the telephone and sing to me down the line, which made my knees buckle. He took me to a dance at one of the bases to meet some of his friends. They were all much older and more sophisticated than me but with Jim on my arm I felt invincible. I wasn’t ‘Tilly’ to Jim, I was his ‘Paula’ – the name he always used for me – and I suddenly felt so grown up.

He’d meet me in Chester after work and walk me home. More often than not, my mother would be out working or courting Harry so we’d have the place to ourselves. I’d play house – cooking him a meal and making him tea and imagining what life would be like if this was how it always was. I even presented him with my most precious possession – my bronze medal for tap dancing. He said he was thrilled. When he held me in his arms and told me he wanted to marry me, I believed him completely and gave him all that he asked. In my heart, I was still a little girl and he was my first love. I barely knew what I was doing, although I did know it was naughty and that if my mother ever found out she’d be furious. Nobody had ever told me about taking precautions and Jim never said anything, so I carried on obliviously.

All I could think about was that Jim was going to marry me. Excitedly, I blurted out the news to my mother. She was my best friend in the world and I couldn’t wait for her to share my joy. Her reaction wasn’t at all what I expected. ‘You’re far too young to think about marriage yet!’ she told me, horrified. Although I was disappointed, I was too blind to take any notice.

Then one day she sat me down after work. ‘I think you should know: Jim’s married already,’ she said. I looked up at her in disbelief. ‘Harry’s sister-in-law works at the base. She found out.’

I was shattered. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me, although I knew she’d never lie. A day or two later, my mother summoned Jim to the house to confront him. I had never seen her so angry. All five feet of her stood up to his lanky frame and she dominated the room. I just sat there, crying and trying to take it all in.

His response relieved me enormously. ‘Yes, I have a wife, ma’am,’ he told her, looking genuinely contrite, ‘but I’m getting a divorce.’ He pulled out a photograph of a baby daughter he’d also never mentioned. My head was in a spin. I didn’t know what to think, but then he told my mother, ‘I love Paula, Mrs Tilston, and I want to marry her. I’m going home to arrange the divorce and then I’ll send for her.’

Having veered from shock to despair, I was on cloud nine once more.

Mum wasn’t at all happy but she knew how strongly I felt about Jim so she reluctantly agreed that I could carry on seeing him until he left for America. I pined for the end of each day when I’d be seeing him after work. Although I dreaded him leaving the country, I couldn’t wait to join him and would lie awake at night imagining what our life together would be like across the Atlantic. He told me that we’d be living on a military airbase to begin with and he tried to prepare me for what to expect. He said I’d have to go to a special school to learn about American culture for my citizenship exams. I told the girls in the salon all about it and we chattered excitedly about me moving abroad. Secretly, I was terrified by the idea. I’d never lived anywhere but Chester; I’d not even been to London, and I hadn’t ever flown in an aeroplane. But as long as Jim was waiting for me, I knew I could do it – even if it meant leaving everything and everyone that I’d ever known.

I planned our romantic farewell over and over in my mind. I imagined myself tearfully waving him off at the train station or kissing him goodbye at the gates to the airbase. The fairytale ending I’d dreamed of crumbled to dust when he called me late one night to tell me he’d be flying home early the following morning.

‘My leave’s been cancelled,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no time to say goodbye.’ He gave me the forwarding address of his new base and promised to write soon.

I placed the telephone back in its cradle and burst into shuddering tears. At least he had my tap-dancing medal as his talisman but it was all so sudden. I could hardly believe that in a few hours’ time my Jim, the love of my life, would be flying away from me.

Three

I’D HAD SUCH AN EMOTIONAL FEW MONTHS THAT I FELT PHYSICALLY AND mentally drained. It seemed that everything that could have happened to me in my life had happened in that very short space of time. Well, almost everything.

When my period was late that month, I honestly didn’t think anything about it. I’d not been eating well and I’d hardly been sleeping. I told myself the distress I’d been suffering was bound to have an effect on my body. But as the days passed and nothing happened, I began to grow more fearful, terrified of what this might really mean.

Four months after my sixteenth birthday in February 1955, I finally summoned up the courage to blurt out the news to my mother. The look on her face will remain with me for ever. ‘But, Pauline!’ she cried. ‘What are you telling me? My God, you’re just a child yourself. Your body isn’t even fully developed yet!’

I sat at the kitchen table, my arms wrapped around me as she scolded me, her voice rising with shock and anger. By the end of that night she was too upset for me and too angry at Jim to fight any more and we were both too exhausted to try. The following morning, she hugged me and took me to the doctor’s surgery where I’m certain she hoped he’d tell her I was mistaken. When he confirmed her worst fears, I’m sure she secretly hoped he’d tell me how to get rid of the baby I was carrying, but doctors didn’t do that sort of thing back then.

The thought of an abortion never even crossed my mind. This was my baby. I loved its father with all my teenage heart. He was going to marry me and we’d live happily ever after in America. Of course I was going to keep it. I was so shocked when, on the way home from the surgery, Mum turned to me on the bus and said, ‘You won’t be able to bring the baby home, you know. I’m working. You’re working. Peter’s in hospital. There’s no one to look after it. How can we possibly give this baby the home it deserves?’

I knew she was upset and decided that she just needed time to get used to the idea. As far as I was concerned I had little reason to worry. The minute Jim found out I was pregnant, I was certain he’d hurry through his divorce, send for me, and we’d be wed before the baby was born. Even if there was a delay, it wasn’t unheard of for women to become pregnant out of wedlock in Chester. There had been a couple of examples very close to home. A girl across the road from where we lived had a baby by a local boy when she was young and had married the father so they could raise the child together. My next-door neighbour became pregnant in her early twenties by an American long before I’d even met Jim. She didn’t marry her airman or move to the States, but she kept her daughter nonetheless.

I wrote to Jim straight away at the address he’d given me, telling him my momentous news. I’m going to have our baby, I wrote, choosing my words carefully. I hope you’re as happy as I am. Every morning in the days and weeks that followed, I watched and waited for the postman to bring me a blue airmail envelope, a postcard, anything…but nothing came. The daily disappointment made me feel even sicker to my stomach.

After a while, my mother decided to take matters into her own hands. Taking Harry along for moral support, she made an appointment with one of the senior officers at the airbase where Jim had taken me to the dance and demanded to know his whereabouts.

‘We have no airman here by that name,’ the officer told her blankly. ‘We never have had.’ Even my indomitable little mother could do nothing against the immovable might of the United States Air Force.

I refused to lose heart and continued to believe that Jim would write any day or, better still, turn up on my mother’s doorstep, his cap pushed to the back of his head the way it always was, with that huge grin on his face. There must have been a problem with his wife, I convinced myself. Maybe she was making things difficult? Maybe the USAF was? After all, they’d pretended he didn’t even exist.

I’d lie on my bed in my room, playing the number one hit ‘Unchained Melody’ by Jimmy Young over and over on my little gramophone, hoping that somewhere across the Atlantic Jim might be listening to it too. Time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. Are you still mine? The words seemed to have been written specially for us.

The hardest part was going to work at the salon each day, my baby growing secretly inside me. The girls stopped asking if I’d heard from Jim. They could tell from my puffy eyes that I hadn’t. They were kind and supportive but they left me alone. There was no more happy chatter about my new life in America or what sort of wedding dress might best suit my beanpole frame. I told no one about the baby and fortunately didn’t really suffer from morning sickness so no one suspected. I covered myself up well, despite the fact that I was suddenly not quite so skinny any more.

Then one day, when I was about five months’ pregnant and still holding myself in, Doreen ‘Dors’ Jones, my manageress, told me that the boss of Quaintways, Mr Guifreda, wanted to see me in his office. I’d never been summoned to see him before and I couldn’t imagine what he might want. A Sicilian in charge of the restaurant, salon and just about every aspect of the enterprise, he was a kind and friendly man so I wasn’t afraid, but I was a little nervous. When Miss Jones came into the office with me, closed the door and stood behind me, I felt my knees begin to tremble.

Mr Guifreda told me to take a seat. ‘So, Tilly,’ he began. ‘Have you anything to tell me?’ He gave me a gentle smile.

I looked at him.

I looked up at Miss Jones.

Then I looked down at my hands.

‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’

His statement wasn’t really a question and I began to cry.

Miss Jones placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder and passed me a handkerchief. Mr Guifreda looked almost as upset as I was. ‘Now, now, don’t cry,’ he soothed, patting my hand. ‘We’ll take care of you. Everyone will.’

He was true to his word. From that day on, they all did. Within the hour, everyone knew about ‘Tilly’s baby’ or ‘the Quaintways’ baby’ as it was sometimes known. Bowls of nourishing soup were sent to me with the compliments of the chefs in the restaurant. Clearly, they thought I needed fattening up. The other girls in the salon made sure I didn’t do too much or strain myself lifting anything. Most of the regular customers soon suspected and started to give me extra tips to buy ‘something nice for the baby’. Everyone was so kind and took such special care of me. I couldn’t have been in better hands.

Back home, the atmosphere was far more strained. My mother, who was a very proud woman and worried about the prying eyes of the neighbours, had been summoned to Quaintways by Mr Guifreda, who reassured her that my job would remain open for me. She thanked him but told me not to tell anyone else. Insisting that she was doing what was best for the baby, she contacted social services and the Church of England Children’s Society. Between them, they arranged that when I was seven months’ pregnant I would go to St Bridget’s House of Mercy in Lache Park, beyond Handbridge.

I adored my mother but I pleaded with her to allow me to stay at home. ‘Can’t I have it here?’ I begged. ‘Then we can just look after it ourselves.’

‘How?’ she’d cry, shaking her head. ‘Who’ll look after it when we’re both out at work all day? There’s nobody but us here now and neither of us can afford to give up our jobs. You have to be sensible, Pauline. It would be cruel to the baby to do anything but this and they’ll take better care of your baby than we could.’

There were no crèches in those days and, even if there had been, we couldn’t have afforded one. I earned just over three pounds a week with tips and, although my mother earned a little more, every penny was spoken for. We had few relatives nearby and those we had were working too. Peter knew nothing of my pregnancy and was still at the rehabilitation centre. Nobody could help us.

I was assigned a social worker, a middle-aged Dutch lady called Mrs Cotter, who visited me regularly as the pregnancy progressed. ‘You’ll stay in the mother and baby home for three months after the birth and then the baby will be put up for adoption,’ she told me. ‘If suitable parents can’t be found, it will be placed in a state nursery until they can.’

I watched the words fall from her mouth but I never really thought they would apply to me. Jim would be back by then, I kept telling myself, or, if for some terrible reason he wasn’t, my mother would change her mind at the last minute and let me keep the baby. I was certain of it.

Still in denial, I didn’t tell any of the girls at work what was happening. Nor did they ask. All they knew was that I was going away to a special home for the final months of my pregnancy. The worst part was telling Peter. He was finally well enough to come home for a weekend from the rehabilitation centre and Mum, who’d kept it all from him until then, broke the news. He was very upset and worried for me. I guess when he’d last been around I’d been a child. It was a shock for him to accept that I was old enough to have a child of my own. Happily, once he’d calmed down he finally became the big brother I’d always wanted, protective and kind whenever he was home from hospital. We have been close ever since.

As my time drew near the girls at work grew more and more excited. They clubbed together and raised enough money to buy me some maternity clothes. Miss Jones took me shopping to the posh department store Brown’s of Chester and helped me choose three beautiful outfits, a pencil skirt that expanded at the top and some smock tops. ‘You’ll be the best-dressed girl there,’ she told me with a hug.

The closer the date came to me going into St Bridget’s, the more nervous I grew. I’d heard stories about those sorts of places: former convents where unmarried mothers were regarded as bad girls. Up until now I had been treated with nothing but kindness. There had been little stigma to what I had done mainly because everyone knew I was a good girl. The story had gone round that the man who’d ‘got me into trouble’ was married and had then ‘run away’, which I guess protected me in many ways.

Having said my farewells to the Quaintways Girls, I packed a small suitcase and went with my mother to St Bridget’s, a bus ride away. We hardly said a word on the journey, which was just as well because I could barely swallow. Mum just held my hand tightly the whole way. When we arrived, we found the place was more like a church than an institution. It had cloisters and was deathly quiet. Nuns padded silently by, heads down, in long black robes. I was terrified. We were led down a long corridor to the main office and if I hadn’t been so pregnant I think I might have turned and run.

I needn’t have worried. Mother Superior was warm and friendly as she welcomed me to St Bridget’s and offered to show us both around. She led us into the kitchens first where I was relieved to find several pregnant girls, some much bigger than others, all smiling at me and waving shyly. I’d had no contact with any other pregnant women before and seeing one who looked as if she could have her baby any minute I stopped in my tracks. Oh my God! I thought, staring at her huge tummy. That’ll soon be me!

Mother Superior then took us to the nursery, where crib after crib of newborns lay sleeping, closely supervised by nuns. It was like a room full of perfect baby dolls, their tiny hands and feet just like the gorgeous one I had at home. Then we were taken to the laundry where we found more pregnant girls ironing and folding sheets. My mother was impressed with how clean and neat everything was. As we were led along the cloisters towards the chapel I found myself shivering. There’s bound to be a ghost here, I thought. I was almost more frightened of the ghosts at St Bridget’s in those first few hours than of what might happen to me and my child.

When it was time for Mum to go, I could tell she was as upset as me. We hugged and said our goodbyes and she promised to visit every weekend. I dried my eyes as a nun led me to an upstairs dormitory and my metal-framed bed, one in a room of twelve. I was given a locker and began to unpack my case. Slipping into my new brigkt red pyjamas which did up to the neck, I felt a little embarrassed as fellow dormmates wandered in to introduce themselves and admire my clothes. They seemed terribly nice, though. There was no cattiness as I had feared and everyone was happy to help each other because we were all in the same boat. After a supper that was surprisingly good, we retired to the dorm until lights out when I lay shivering under my blanket as some of the girls told scary stories in the dark. ‘There’s definitely the ghost of a girl in the laundry,’ one announced. ‘Oh, yes, and several ghostly nuns who walk the cloisters at night!’ piped another. I didn’t sleep a wink.

Over the next few days, the other girls became curious about my story and I about theirs. Some, it seemed, had been too promiscuous and were paying the price. Others were the victims of sexual abuse, which horrified me. Two girls had been raped by their fathers. I had only ever known kindness and love from my dear old dad and I couldn’t imagine what they had gone through. Strangely, though, they still defended the men who’d abused them. I found that even harder to understand. Most of the girls were relieved to be giving up their babies for adoption but a handful were taking their infants home to be cared for by their relatives, something I was still convinced would happen to me.

The nuns kept us busy, running and managing our own little kingdom. There were strict routines and everything was well organized. We went to chapel every morning and evening but we were never preached to and were mainly left to quiet prayer and contemplation. If we weren’t washing, ironing or cooking, we were cleaning the walls and floors, but we didn’t really mind and soon got into the swing of things. I liked working in the kitchen best. The cook was a lovely woman who used to tell us to strain the cabbage water and drink it for the extra iron. Her food was good and wholesome. It reminded me of my mother’s cooking, and we all gained weight as our babies thrived.

There were six nuns under Mother Superior, each in charge of a dorm. Sister Joan Augustine was in charge of mine but for some reason she didn’t take to me. I think it was because I had more visitors than most. My mother came every weekend, often taking me out to the pictures, but Miss Jones and some of the girls from Quaintways would sometimes come too, always fussing me and bringing me nice things. Sister Joan Augustine clearly thought I was rather spoiled, especially as I kept going back and forth to the laundry to wash and iron my new clothes, determined as always to look my best.

When she showed us the cream and grey Silver Cross pram that had been donated to the home as a Christmas present and told us that the first baby born in our dorm would receive it, my heart sang. Looking around the room, I knew that there were two other girls as close to giving birth as me and I prayed I’d be the first. I was due at the end of December but I knew babies sometimes came early and I did all I could to make that happen. I even volunteered for floor-scrubbing duties, thinking of what Sister Joan Augustine had told us when we were on our hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and Vim. ‘This helps get the baby’s head into position,’ she’d insisted.

Beyond the former convent walls, life went on as usual. The American film star James Dean had just been killed in a car crash. Princess Margaret had announced that she wouldn’t be marrying Group Captain Peter Townsend. People who could afford televisions were able to watch a new commercial channel called ITV with its advertisements for soap powder between festive programmes. For us, Christmas came and went, and none of our babies showed any signs of arriving. On New Year’s Eve, I took part in a little show we put on for each other as we counted in 1956. Even though I was so heavily pregnant, I did a full Fred Astaire tap-dance routine that had been one of my dad’s favourites in the hope that it might bring something on. As midnight struck and the most momentous year of my life drew to a close, we were each handed a mug of celebratory cocoa.

I couldn’t help but wonder what the New Year would bring. It was less than three years since I’d lost my father and in that time my brother had almost died and my mother had suffered terribly with her hand. It was two months before my seventeenth birthday; I was still so young, physically and emotionally. I had no idea what to expect in the coming days and months and instead of dwelling on how painful the birth might be or how I might cope afterwards, I could only focus on beating the other girls in my dorm to win my prize.

It was the early hours of 2 January and I was lying in bed when my waters suddenly broke, drenching my nightdress and the sheets. My immediate reaction was one of elation. ‘This is it! I’m going to get the pram!’

Then the pain began.

Hearing my cries, one of the girls ran to get Sister Joan Augustine, who called an ambulance. She came with me to Chester City Hospital, the place to which my family’s fates seemed inextricably entwined. The contractions were getting stronger and stronger and I’d never known pain like it. With only the nun who least liked me for company, I lay on a bed in the labour ward feeling so frightened I thought I might die.

I longed for my mother through wave after wave of contractions, but I tried to be brave. The sisters had explained what would happen during the birth but none of what they’d told us prepared me for the reality. Someone clamped a rubber mask over my face for gas and air but it reminded me of the Mickey Mouse gas mask I’d had during the war and I began to panic. The gas it pumped only made me feel more nauseous. As I retched and writhed, I tried not to engage in eye contact with the doctor and at least six nurses around me. My ankles were tied with bandages to metal poles at the end of the bed. I’d always been such a shy and private person. I had only ever shown myself to one man. Now everyone was seeing everything – and there was so much blood.

‘It’s a big baby but you’re doing really well,’ the doctor told me encouragingly. ‘Push when I tell you.’

There was no anaesthetic, no epidural. The pain was excruciating and became worse and worse as the hours progressed. Where was my mum? Where was Jim? He should have been there, waiting in the corridor outside for our son or daughter to be born. I wept with pain and bitterness.

At seven in the morning, my eight-pound baby boy finally pushed his way out into this world. He was a little jaundiced and covered in blood but they laid him on my chest straight away. Completely overwhelmed, more exhausted than I had ever felt in my life, I cradled his warm body in my arms.

‘Congratulations, Pauline,’ one of the nurses said. ‘What are you going to call him?’

‘Timothy Paul…’ I gasped, barely able to speak.

Unfurling Timothy’s perfect little fingers until they curled around one of mine, I looked down at my baby boy and splashed his face with tears of joy and sorrow.

Four

THE FIRST TIME MY MOTHER SET EYES ON TIMOTHY PAUL, HER REACTION was exactly what I’d hoped it would be. ‘Oh, he’s beautiful!’ she cried when she came to visit. ‘Here, I bought these for him.’ From out of her handbag came a lovely little set of clothes. ‘I’ve been saving in a club. I got them from that shop at the end of the road.’

I could have cried with relief. She’d said her grandson was beautiful and she’d saved for some baby clothes. I knew it: she was going to let me bring him home after all. I didn’t dare ask her there and then but the indications were good. Now that I’d had Timothy Paul, now that I’d held him and nursed my beautiful boy, I couldn’t possibly give him up.

Mum came to see me when she could after work in the week I remained in hospital with Timothy Paul but she was often delayed. Every night at visiting time, I used to slide down the bed and pretend to be asleep until she got there. I was the youngest in a ward of twenty women and the only one who wasn’t married. Through half-closed eyes, I’d spy husbands fussing over their wives and couldn’t help but feel sad. I wished with all my sixteen-year-old heart that Jim would stroll into the ward just like the other men, laden with flowers and beaming with pride. I wrote to him again to tell him that he had a son. My mother contacted his base with the same news, but still there was no word. When she registered my son’s birth for me at the council offices, her voice must have wavered as she told the registrar to put down his father as ‘US airman’ but Timothy Paul’s surname as ‘Tilston’.

After a week, I was returned to St Bridget’s. It was good to be back in what felt like my safe haven and to show off my gorgeous baby to the other girls. Thrilled at having beaten the two who’d had their babies after mine, I couldn’t wait to be presented with the beautiful new Silver Cross pram Sister Joan Augustine had promised. That gleaming buggy had been the one goal my childish mind had focused on. It was all my missed Christmas and birthday presents rolled into one. Whatever the future held for me and my baby—and I knew it would be a struggle—I wanted him to have that pram at least.

Sister Joan Augustine told me then that she’d given the pram to someone else: a tall girl called Mary who’d given birth a day after me but who’d come back to St Bridget’s earlier. ‘Hers was the first baby back from hospital,’ she said. Instead she presented me with a shabby little second-hand pram with wobbly wheels and dodgy brakes. I wept buckets over her decision. I immediately hated the horrid pram I was given; I loathed it even more when I came out to where I’d parked Timothy Paul in it one afternoon only to find the wind had blown it down a slope in the garden. One more inch and my precious baby boy might have been tipped over a verge.

My happiest times in those first few months were those spent with my son. As was the routine, all new mothers would wash our babies together and then sit in a row to feed them. Timothy Paul, dressed in the clothes my mother bought for him, clearly loved that moment best because he’d be so contented at my breast that he’d fall asleep and take longer to finish than the rest.

‘Tilly, you’re always the last,’ Sister Joan Augustine would complain. I certainly made a fuss of my baby, and my fussing seemed to upset her routine, but I didn’t care. I was growing increasingly attached to Timothy Paul and was determined to squeeze in every extra minute with him that I could. My stubborn streak cut in and I’d insist that he be allowed to finish at his own pace.

Every week I’d be summoned to Mother Superior’s office to discuss the future of my baby. ‘Now, Pauline, have you decided for adoption or will you be taking your baby home?’ she’d ask, peering at me over her spectacles.

Mrs Cotter, my social worker, would often be there, along with Sister Joan Augustine. ‘Your mother says neither of you can look after the baby,’ my social worker would remind me. ‘There are plenty of childless couples who’d give him a better life.’

Sister Joan Augustine would add, ‘You must make the decision now before he gets too old.’

I’d sit on my hands and shake my head. ‘I just need more time,’ I’d tell them. ‘You said I’d have three months. After that, we can look at other options. He can go into a nursery somewhere close by maybe? I could visit him every day until I’ve worked out what to do.’

They were clearly frustrated with me and did their best to persuade me otherwise but I stuck to my guns. Every time my mother came to visit it was the same story. I’d plead with her to help me find a solution but she’d just repeat that it would be cruel to Timothy Paul to try to keep him. ‘Adoption is the only option,’ she’d say firmly. There seemed to be no way to make her change her mind.

I was dreading the day when our three months would be up. I kept trying to put the date to the back of my mind. I hoped beyond hope that something would happen or that someone would save us. There was still no word from Jim. My mother was sick of me asking if there had been a letter or a call. ‘You have to forget about him, Pauline,’ she told me testily. ‘He’ll never send for you now.’

I had Timothy Paul christened in the chapel at St Bridget’s, with my mother at my side. ‘I name this child…’ the vicar said, marking his forehead with the sign of the cross. Bless my tiny son, he didn’t even cry. He just lay in my arms looking up at me with that placid expression of his, the one that said he trusted me to take care of him. I could have wept.

Three weeks before my deadline was up, Sister Joan Augustine suddenly announced that I had to stop breastfeeding and wean my baby on to bottles of formula milk. I looked at her in shock. ‘B-but he’s too little!’ I protested.

‘He’ll be just as happy with a bottle, Tilly. Now, don’t make a fuss.’

I wept as I fed him that bottle for the first time. It was a horrible day. This was one step closer to the time when I knew I wouldn’t be able to see him every day, to change him and wash him, to cuddle him and feed him myself. He took to the bottle quite well but I never did. The next three weeks were a living agony.

As the date approached when I was due to leave St Bridget’s and Timothy Paul would be sent to a nursery, I became increasingly anxious. Mrs Cotter came to see me one morning to tell me what arrangements had been made. ‘The state will help you pay the nursery fees but the rest will have to come out of your wages, I’m afraid. We’ve found him a place. I’ll come with you to settle him in tomorrow. We’ll have to leave early to make the journey.’

‘Journey? Why, where are you sending him?’

‘The Ernest Bailey Residential Nursery for Boys. It’s in Matlock.’

‘Matlock?’ I asked, my panic rising. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Derbyshire.’

‘But how far away is that?’

‘About eighty miles.’ Registering the look of shock on my face she added, more softly, ‘It was the only place that could take him.’

‘E-eighty miles?’ I could hardly get my words out. ‘That’s too far! It’ll take me a day to get there and how much will it cost each time?’

Her expression was as stiff as her resolve. This was her job: to figure out what was best for babies like Timothy Paul. He couldn’t stay at St Bridget’s. He couldn’t come home with me. What else could she do? Shattered, I realized that I had no say in the matter. To this day, I don’t know if that nursery really was the only one that would take Timothy Paul or whether the authorities chose to make it as difficult as possible for me to keep him. At the time, I must say, the decision felt unnecessarily harsh.

The following morning, I washed and dressed my son, fed him and wrapped him in a shawl. Walking to the railway station with Mrs Cotter, I realized that this was the first time I’d been outside the home with him since I’d brought him back from the hospital three months earlier. If it wasn’t for the circumstances I would have been wildly happy: the proud young mum showing off her gorgeous baby boy to anyone who cared to notice. I wanted people to coo and sigh over him as I did. I’d look at other young girls and think they didn’t yet know the joys of motherhood: the smell of him, the softness of his skin, the little gurgling noises he made in his mouth, the look of sleepy contentment in his eyes as he suckled at my breast. Then I remembered where I was and why. Sitting in the carriage, cradling him in my arms as I soothed him above the clickety-clack of the train, I stared at a dozing Mrs Cotter in the opposite seat and contemplated jumping off at the next station and running away.

But I was seventeen years old. I had no money; no home of my own. Where would I go? I was a good girl from a warm, loving family. How could I contemplate a life on the run? Tempting as it might seem, it wasn’t an option. Instead, I did the only thing I could think of to let my son know how much I wanted him close to me. I told Mrs Cotter that from now on, I would like Timothy Paul to be known simply as ‘Paul’.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘It will make him more personal to me – to my name,’ I replied, pushing my forefinger into my son’s open palm so that he clamped his own tiny fingers around it.

All the way to Matlock, I had been trying to convince myself that my son would be safe and warm there, fed and well cared for until I could figure out what to do next. When we walked into the imposing stone building, though, I recoiled against the idea of him being there at all. He wasn’t a waif or stray. He was mine and he was dearly, besottedly loved.

Shivering, I laid him in a high-sided cot in a room full of similar cots and stepped back. Even though the staff seemed very nice and everybody was ready to welcome him, Paul took one look at my face and screwed his own into a tight ball. Somehow he knew that I was leaving him. I listened to his first howl and watched as he geared himself up for his second. Unable to bear the wrench of our impending separation a moment longer, I fled. I could hear his cries all the way down the street, my little-girl heart jolting with each step that took me further and further away from my son.

Paul was to remain in that nursery for the next two and a half years. As Mrs Cotter had assured me he would, he settled in well and the staff continued to be kind and understanding. I visited him whenever I could but the realities of my situation meant that was only every few months at best. His nursery fees were debited directly from my wages, leaving me with little spare. The train fare was expensive and near impossible on a Sunday. I had to take a day off work each time. The journey left me emotionally drained.

Each time I saw my son I couldn’t get over how much he’d grown. He, meanwhile, seemed to be less and less aware of whom I was. After a while, he began to favour one of his young nursery nurses, which cut me to the quick. My mother, who came with me when she could, would walk alongside as I pushed Paul’s pram through a local park, clearly loving every minute of being with her grandson. I always hoped that she’d come up with a plan on those visits; that she’d tell me she’d thought of something and we could take him home with us after all, but she never did. She just told me, time and again, that my visits were doing no good. ‘You have to let him go, Pauline,’ she’d say as I sobbed in her arms all the way home. ‘This isn’t fair on either of you.’

It was true that leaving him each time was a new wrench, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give up my son. Foolishly perhaps, I was still hoping for something to come along and save us. Was it really too much to wish for?

Five

I WAS STANDING AT THE BUS STOP UNDER THE FAMOUS EASTGATE CLOCK IN Chester waiting to go home after a long day working at Quaintways. Having progressed to an improver in the salon by then, I’d been on my feet all day cutting and setting hair.

It was a fine evening and I checked my watch. The bus was late and so was I. Mum expected me home for supper at six. It was shepherd’s pie. I was always amazed how she could eke out a pound of mince until the end of each week.

A voice at my elbow startled me. ‘Hi there. It’s Pauline, isn’t it?’

I turned and found myself face to face with a man I knew only as the ex-boyfriend of a girl I worked with at Quaintways called Barbara Hill. He was a steward on the Cunard and White Star shipping lines, one of the young men known at the time as ‘the Hollywood waiters’ because they were all so well dressed and suntanned. To my surprise, Barbara, who looked like Kim Novak, had dumped him recently for an American airman called Harry.

I smiled shyly. I’d always thought this chap of Barbara’s was rather nice. He was certainly very handsome and, although not very tall, he had the strong physique of a sportsman. I learned later that he was a prizewining boxer among fellow stewards on the ships. It didn’t surprise me. He reminded me of Dirk Bogarde in Doctor at Sea. He had the same pleasant smile and gentle way about him.

Having recently dated a steward called Chris I knew that he and the boy at the bus stop had both just returned from a three-month voyage to New Zealand. As I turned to say hello I remembered his name. It was John – John Prescott.

‘Hi, John,’ I said brightly. ‘You’re back then?’

‘Yes, we docked a few days ago.’ He smiled and his suntan made his teeth look really white.

There was an awkward pause.

‘I was so sorry to hear about you and Barbara,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Oh, thanks, but that didn’t matter,’ he replied, stoically. ‘I had another girlfriend in New Zealand anyway.’ He paused. ‘Are you still seeing Chris?’

‘No. He found another girl. They’re getting married.’

‘So is Barbara. She’s moving to the States.’

‘Oh.’ I stared down at my shoes, trying not to think what might have been.

‘Do you fancy going to the pictures one night, then?’

I looked up. My mind raced ahead of itself. If John knew Barbara and he also knew Chris, whom I’d been introduced to through my cousin, then he probably knew my history and yet he was still asking me out. He was certainly smiling warmly enough.

‘Yes, OK,’ I replied, on a whim. My bus pulled up just as I spoke, so I opened my handbag and fumbled with my purse. Stepping on to the bottom step, I turned and smiled back at him.

‘See you outside the Regal on Saturday night,’ he called out as the bus pulled away. ‘Seven o’clock?’

I gave him a little wave. His hand came up in a sort of salute and I couldn’t help but laugh. All the way home, I hoped that he did know about Paul so that I wouldn’t have to tell him. Not that I was ashamed – I was never ashamed of my son – but it was always a little awkward telling someone for the first time. John seemed a nice enough chap, though. I smiled at the thought of an evening in his company. I was eighteen years old. It would do me good to have a boyfriend again.

I’d always liked men in uniform, which probably stemmed back to seeing my dad in khaki during the war. The Cunard and White Star stewards not only had smart uniforms, they were especially sought after by all the girls in Liverpool and Chester for other reasons. Having experienced the finest luxury the world’s greatest cruise ships had to offer, they knew just how to treat a girl. They earned good money, especially on their longer voyages, and there was something terribly romantic about a man in a navy jacket and black bow tie sending you postcards and messages from around the world.

A few days later, John took me to the Regal to see a film I don’t now recall a single thing about. My uncle Wilf, the husband of my father’s sister Jane, was probably playing the organ as usual, rising out of the floor on the Wurlitzer, but I don’t remember what he played. We sat quite near the front but after a few minutes he suggested we move to the back row. ‘You’re talking too loudly,’ he said, which I’m sure was just a ruse.

I liked John right from the start. He was funny and he made me laugh. ‘You remind me of someone famous, now who is it…?’ he said.

‘Elizabeth Taylor?’ I asked hopefully, always flattered when the comparison was made.

‘No – Joyce Grenfell!’ he replied with a grin.

Chatting over a drink afterwards, I discovered quite a lot about him and what life was like at sea. He told me about one steward on their last voyage who’d kept them awake playing the guitar and singing all the time. His name was Tommy Steele. I learned of John’s strong political convictions and his dedication to improving conditions at sea, even if it made him unpopular with his employers.

I was surprised to discover that John’s father, a disabled railway signalman from Liverpool known as ‘Bert’, was a friend of my boss Mr Guifreda. John’s mother Phyllis was a Quaintways client. I wondered if I knew her and that – if I did – whether she knew about Paul, too.

I found out soon enough because John took me home to meet her a week or so later. I recognized her straight away. She was a striking, terribly smart lady who was also a professional dressmaker and always wore the most beautiful clothes. I thought she was quite posh. Like my mother, she’d been in service. Like my parents, she and Bert had met by chance, although he’d spotted her on a railway platform instead of across a rooftop. We should have got on like a house on fire because of our common interests but straight away I picked up that Phyllis Prescott wasn’t very keen on me. I could guess why. A short time afterwards, my fears were confirmed. Chatting to a neighbour of hers, Phyllis complained, ‘My John’s taken up with a young girl who’s had a baby, you know. I’m sure he could do a lot better.’

‘Oh, what’s the girl’s name?’ the neighbour asked suspiciously.

‘Pauline Tilston.’

Unbeknown to John’s mum, the neighbour was my auntie Jane and she leapt to my defence. ‘Pauline Tilston is my brother Ernie’s daughter and she was brought up extremely well,’ she told her, bristling. ‘She’s a good girl and John’s lucky to have her.’

Despite once being a maid, Pbyllis was always a bit of a snob, although she was proud of her social aspirations. She’d happily recount the story that her neighbours in Rotherham called her ‘Lady Muck’ because she had the cleanest house and the finest clothes. She had a Royal Albert tea service and wore Chanel perfume. It used to embarrass John how his mother would dress – or ‘overdress’, he’d say. He had a special aversion to her hats, especially the frothy ‘jelly bag’ ones that sat on top of her hair. ‘She came to meet me one time with what looked like a pair of knickers on her head,’ he complained. He’s never liked hats since.

Having learned flower arranging, cake decorating and dressmaking to the best of her considerable ability, Phyllis entered her family into a national newspaper competition as the ‘Most Typical Family in Britain’. Much to her indignation, they came second. Soon afterwards, Bert, who’d lost a leg at Dunkirk, received a grant from the British Legion to buy a new semi-detached house in Upton, which – once again – became the smartest in the street. A staunch socialist, a keen fundraiser for the Labour Party and a huge influence on John politically, Phyllis was a force of nature. Nobody would ever be good enough for her eldest son John. She hadn’t dragged her family from Prestatyn via a Rotherham terrace with a lav in the yard and coal dumped in the alleyway for him to take up with a girl who’d had a baby out of wedlock.

Fortunately, John didn’t share her view and after a while – perhaps because of Mr Guifreda singing my praises as well – his mother began to soften towards me. She offered to run me up a couple of nice outfits and was perfectly pleasant to me, even when her own marriage was in trouble.

As well as working on the railways, John’s father Bert was a magistrate, Labour councillor and loveable rogue who’d had several affairs. When John was just a lad, he’d spotted his father on the Chester Walls kissing a woman and was so shocked that he ran to the police station to report him. ‘I want you to arrest my dad!’ he told a sergeant on duty.

‘Go home, son, and don’t tell your mother,’ the sergeant replied, ruffling the hair on his head. John always laughed when he told that story but he felt terribly let down and still does to this day.

Bert was a big man with a big personality; everyone knew him, this gigolo who never paid for anything and only ever took his family on holidays to places like Bridlington and Scarborough to a trade union conference or to bluff his way into the Labour Party conferences and get a free drink. Phyllis didn’t seem to mind at first. Coming from a Welsh mining background, she was highly political too, hosting local Labour meetings in her home and delivering pamphlets all around the neighbourhood. In the end, though, politics was all they had in common.

Not long after we’d started dating, John’s parents announced that they were getting divorced after twenty-five years of marriage, which was quite something in those days. After years of trying to keep the peace between them, John was the head of the family now and Phyllis came to rely on him ever more. She even asked him to be a witness in the divorce case between her and Bert, but he refused, not wanting to be disloyal to either parent. Maybe because she and I now shared a social stigma, we seemed to get on better after that, even if she was always rather controlling and extremely protective of her son to the end of her days.

My visits to see my son became more and more infrequent owing to my long working hours, my shortage of money and the time I was now spending with John. I found myself speaking of Paul less and less, which felt like a betrayal, but I never stopped thinking of him, and I repeatedly refused to sign him over to the state. Perhaps having cropped my hair for a more sophisticated gamine look gave me the courage to stand firm.

My widowed mother, who was still courting Harry, never stopped working and couldn’t have helped me care for Paul even if she’d had the time or the energy. Harry worked full-time too and, even though he was a kind and generous man, wisely never tried to intervene. My brother Peter had emerged from his years in hospital and returned to work at BICC but had since moved to London to work in their overseas sales department. He’d write sometimes and send birthday presents but he’d never even set eyes on his nephew and Paul was never spoken about. I found myself thinking back to my father and wondering if things might have been different if he’d still been alive. Surely Dad would have found a way for us to keep his only grandchild?

Not long after I’d met John, I’d saved up enough money to go to Matlock again but my mother said she couldn’t go with me. To be honest, I don’t think she had the heart any more. She found it as upsetting as I did. I didn’t want to go alone but couldn’t think whom else to ask. Then I thought of John. The eldest of five children, John had a brother Ray, sisters Dawn and Vivian, and a little brother called Adrian who was born with a harelip and a cleft palate. I’d seen how kind and thoughtful he was with Adrian. He protected him and played with him so sweetly and that gladdened my heart. Nervously, I told John that I was going to see Paul and asked if he’d come along.

He didn’t even flinch. ‘We could make an outing of it,’ he replied. ‘There’s some pretty countryside round Matlock.’ He’d never once asked me about Paul’s father or what had happened between us. He just said he knew all that he needed to know. Part of me would have dearly liked him to have bombarded me with questions. My time with Jim, the lonely pregnancy, being at St Bridget’s, Paul’s birth and everything that had happened afterwards had been virtually erased from my life. John’s family certainly never brought it up. My mother rarely spoke of it and if I raised the subject, it only gave her an opportunity to tell me what I should do next. The girls at work no longer asked after Paul or what my plans for him were.

And so my innocent young son remained the elephant in the room that nobody dared discuss. Yet he was always on my mind and everywhere I looked there seemed to be reminders. John and I would often spend days off at Chester Zoo, and I’d see a mother and son wandering along holding hands and wonder why that couldn’t be Paul and me. I’d flick through racks of clothes in the children’s department of Brown’s and wish I could afford to buy some of them for him. I marked each anniversary privately in my heart: the day I first met Jim; the day I found out I was pregnant; Paul’s birthday on 2 January; the date I had to take him to Matlock and then leave.

There were times when I wanted to scream Paul’s name from the bottom of my lungs and tell everyone who’d listen how much I loved and missed him and thought about him night and day. ‘He’s my son and I want to keep him!’ I longed to shriek but instead I confined the screaming to inside my head.

Going to see Paul with John would be quite different from going with my mother. Ours was a new relationship and I knew I couldn’t blub all the way there and back as I normally did. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do: hold myself together when I walked into the nursery and realized that Paul didn’t know who I was any more. At two years old, he was wearing clothes I hadn’t chosen for him and was playing with friends I’d never met. He was clearly very attached to one particular nursery nurse, and was calling her ‘Mummy’. That broke my heart anew.

John must have picked up on how I was feeling because he was marvellous with Paul. He picked him up and cuddled him and cheerily suggested that we take him out for a walk. He bought Paul a lollipop from a sweetshop and didn’t flinch when my happy-go-lucky, gorgeous little boy tried to force it into his mouth. He brought his camera and took lots of photographs, which are among my most cherished possessions: images of me and Paul, of John kissing Paul, and a few of Paul on his own, gurgling and laughing happily at these two kind strangers who had come to make a fuss of him for a few hours.

Travelling home on the train, I pressed my head against the cold glass of the window and fought back the tears. John sat next to me saying nothing. I was growing increasingly fond of this kind young man who seemed to accept me for who I was, regardless. I couldn’t believe how gentle he’d been with my son. We were a long way off making a commitment to each other; we were both still young, John was away travelling much of the time, and I wasn’t in a hurry to rush into anything again the way I had with Jim.

But could I – dare I – even dream that there might be a brighter future for Paul and me after all? That he and John and I might end up together as a family in the sort of happy home I’d grown up in, the kind I’d always dreamed of providing for my son? Turning and resting my head on John’s shoulder, I squeezed his hand and let out a sigh.

Not long after that journey to Matlock, Mr Guifreda called me into his office and asked me to sit down. ‘Dors’ Jones had left Quaintways by then, to be replaced by Val Pyeman, who was just as nice and who sat in on the meeting too.

‘Our managing director has heard of your problems…er, you know, with Paul,’ Mr Guifreda told me hesitantly. ‘He’d like to help.’

Like Mr Guifreda, the managing director of Lewis’s was a real gentleman who cared for his staff and always took an interest in their welfare. I wondered what he could possibly do to help. A pay rise perhaps? A word with social services to get them to move Paul closer to Chester? I hardly dared hope.

‘He’d like to adopt Paul,’ Mr Guifreda said, as my heart skipped a beat.

‘No!’ I gave my knee-jerk reaction.

Mr Guifreda pressed on. ‘He has three daughters and would love a son. He knows you want what’s best for your boy, and he wants you to know that he and his wife would give Paul a marvellous life in the bosom of a loving and wealthy family.’

I shook my head. I didn’t know what else to say. My mind was in turmoil. I’d resisted adoption for so long, why would I relent now? And why had the managing director waited all this time to ask? Had John’s parents orchestrated this to get my Paul out of the way? After all, Nick Guifreda was a close friend of John’s father. Then I had to remind myself that the managing director was a good man. For a moment, I allowed myself to speculate that if he did adopt Paul, he might let me stay in touch. I might even get to see more of him, being that much closer. Realizing that would be impractical and feeling like a rabbit caught in the headlights, I told Mr Guifreda that the answer was still no.

‘Think it over. Talk to your mother. Remember,’ he added with a smile, ‘everyone just wants what’s best for Tilly’s baby.’

‘Me too,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. The trouble was that – confused, isolated, and pressured from all sides – I didn’t really know what the best for Paul might be.

I can’t now remember how the Derbyshire hospital got in touch with me. I think I must have blanked that particular memory from my mind. But the news they gave me left an indelible mark. Paul was seriously ill. It was meningitis, they believed. I should go to him straight away.

John, who’d taken a job in a butcher’s shop between voyages, kindly offered to take the day off and go with me to Matlock. I don’t think I can have said a word the whole way there. I sat looking blinkingly out of the train window at the beautiful Peak District countryside thinking how ironic it would be if anything should happen to Paul now, just as I’d found the man I might end up sharing the rest of my life with.

Not that John didn’t have his faults. I already knew that any relationship with him would have its highs and lows. He was extremely clever, a man of passion whose fervour for the unions and championing of the underdog I admired, having come from a strong working-class background myself. But with that passion went an inner insecurity and dark moods that I wasn’t sure I could spend the rest of my life dealing with.

It was his sulks I dreaded the most: those awful long silences he’d retreat into when he was upset, usually about something quite trivial. Once he was in that mood, he wouldn’t listen to a word I had to say. Then I had to remind myself that he always came round in the end, apologizing with flowers and surprises. And I was no longer a silly little girl with a crush. I’d matured a lot. I was more cautious and quite capable of my own moods, too. One night, when I’d made a special dinner for him at my mother’s house, he came home so late from a strike march in Liverpool that the meal was ruined.

Pinned to my mother’s front door John found a note which read: Darling/Dear (both scrubbed out), then: John, so glad you’re back from your march and you could make it. Well, I’ve just gone on a march so you can bloody wait for me. I signed it, Love, Pauline, but scribbled out the word Love at the last minute. John still has it.

Another time, when he came in late I asked him what he wanted to eat. He replied, ‘Just put a couple of eggs on the boil.’ I filled a pan with cold water, turned on the heat, waited a few seconds and dropped the eggs in. ‘You don’t boil eggs like that!’ John cried. ‘You mustn’t put them in until the water’s boiled.’

I protested that my mother, who’d been a maid, had always told me that if I boiled them the way he said the eggs would burst. Shaking his head, John said, ‘Well, you don’t even know how boil an egg!’ Within minutes two raw ones were cracked on his head, the yolks dribbling down his face.

Those silly spats all seemed meaningless as I headed towards Paul ill in a hospital bed. Meningitis. What was that exactly? It sounded so serious. What if he didn’t recover? The closer we got to the hospital the more my head whirled with all sorts of wild notions.

By the time we reached the children’s ward and were directed to the little bed where Paul lay, I was all but convinced that we’d be too late. It was such a relief to see him, even if he didn’t seem as delighted to see me. He was sitting up in bed in his little hospital gown and we were even allowed to take him outside in the sunshine for some fresh air. John had brought his camera along again and took some photos of me holding Paul in my arms.

When we brought him back to the ward, a doctor told us the results of his tests. ‘It’s not meningitis after all. He has a slight fever and we’ll keep him in a couple of days for observation, but don’t worry, he’ll be fine.’ I could have kissed him.

The hardest thing was leaving Paul alone in hospital that night. It was late and John and I both needed to be back in Chester for work the following morning. We had to leave straight away and catch the last train, though we’d still not be home until the early hours. I sat alongside my sleepy toddler and stroked his hair. I kissed his face with my tears as he looked silently up at me with those big blue eyes.

‘Come on now,’ John said, taking me by the elbow. ‘You’ll not do Paul any good wearing yourself out.’

Getting to my feet and gathering my things together, I took one last lingering look at my poorly little boy and blew him a kiss. ‘Night, night, darling,’ I said. ‘Mummy will be back soon. I promise.’

Little did I know that it was a promise I would never keep.

Thankfully Paul recovered quite quickly. It was some sort of mild virus, the doctors thought, and would have no lasting effects. I planned to visit him once he was back at the nursery as soon as I could arrange time off work.

Then Mrs Cotter came to call. ‘Paul can’t go back to the Ernest Bailey Nursery, I’m afraid, Pauline,’ she told me. ‘They don’t keep children for more than two years and he’s already been there longer than anyone else. It would be in Paul’s best interests if he was placed in foster care now.’

‘But I never agreed to that!’ I cried.

‘This is what everybody thinks would be best for Paul. We’ve found a lovely couple in Wolverhampton who couldn’t have children of their own. They’re in their mid-forties. He’s a deputy headmaster and she’s a school nurse. What Paul needs now is the sort of one-to-one care only they can offer.’

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘Until his next review,’ she said. ‘In a year.’

My stomach lurched. A year was such a long time in a child’s life. He was already growing so fast. Would he even know me after all that time? ‘Will I be able to see him?’ I asked, afraid of the answer.

She hesitated. ‘That wouldn’t be advisable. He’d find it too unsettling, especially after his recent illness.’

Both Mrs Cotter and my mother were immovable. They had made the decision for me, it seemed. There was no viable alternative that I could offer Paul. In a year’s time, maybe there would be. John had already been so kind. He knew how I felt about keeping Paul and if things developed between us as I hoped they would, then it went unspoken that the boy would end up living with us one day.

OK then, I reasoned, trying desperately to put a brave face on a helpless situation, this buys me a little more time. After all, a lot can happen in a year…

Six

THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS WERE PIVOTAL, NOT LEAST BECAUSE JOHN AND I were growing increasingly fond of each other. Ours hadn’t been love at first sight as it had for my parents, but over time we came to care deeply for each other and it seemed more and more likely that we’d end up together.

John was still working on the ships, travelling back and forth to New York, mostly on the MV Britannic. He also went to Canada, the Middle East and South America on exotically named vessels like the Franconia, the Amazon, the Corinthia, the Mauretania and the Saxonia. He visited places I’d never even heard of like Auckland, Panama, Barcelona and Larnaca. Using a cine camera he’d bought in the United States he took footage of himself and his mates on the ships and on days off leaping among the giant stones of the Parthenon, on pleasure boats in Istanbul or walking European streets. More handsome than ever with his longer hair and fashionable sideburns, and wearing drainpipe jeans and winkle-picker shoes, he was quite the cosmopolitan man of the world. In New York, he became hooked on jazz and began to bring records back from around the world. I had already been switched on to jazz by my brother, so we now had something new in common. Whenever he returned from a trip, he’d rush home bearing gifts for everyone he knew and loved. He even brought an American washing machine back for his mother once, wheeling it all the way down Fifth Avenue to the ship, and having it rewired for her back in Britain.

Always so thoughtful, he’d arrange all sorts of surprises for me, not all of them entirely within the rules. He and his fellow stewards used to take turns to do ‘firewatch’ on the Britannic, which meant guarding the ship when she was in dock to make sure she came to no harm. A quick bribe to whomever was on duty meant that John could smuggle me on board to spend the evening with him in one of the ship’s finest state rooms. It was highly irregular but, my-oh-my; we had a high old time in those luxury cabins.

He surprised me another time by announcing that he was taking me to London for the weekend. We’d see all the sights, he said, and he’d booked us a nice double room at the Strand Palace Hotel. I’d never been to London before and was very excited. I wanted to see Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace where, who knows, I might even spot the Queen. When John told my mother what he was planning, though, she imposed one condition. ‘I want to see the hotel receipt,’ she said. ‘Two separate rooms, John. That’s how it will be.’ Poor John did as she’d asked which made the whole trip doubly expensive. Not that we ever used the second room. Exactly the same thing happened when he took me to the Isle of Man.

All seemed to be going well for us but not long after my nineteenth birthday I went down with a bad dose of the flu and was confined to bed. To my surprise, John turned up at my mother’s house to see me. I decided I must be delirious. Wasn’t he supposed to be in New York?

‘I’m not here by choice, Paul,’ he said. He’d always called me ‘Paul’, and I loved the endearment.

I dragged myself up on my pillows and stared at him.

‘I’ve been sacked.’

‘Why?’ I mumbled, my head full of cold.

He grimaced. ‘The air conditioning broke down and it was like a furnace below decks. I went to the captain to complain but he called me a troublemaker.’

I knew John had been pushing to get better trade union representation at sea and I knew that his political passions weren’t popular with his employers, but beyond that, I didn’t really understand. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ I said, relieved his unexpected return wasn’t because of anything more serious. ‘I’m sure you’ll find another passage soon. Anyway, I’ve still got my job.’

‘Um, well, that’s another thing,’ he told me, looking awkward. ‘While you’ve been here sick in bed, I’m afraid Quaintways has burned down. There was a fire overnight and the place was gutted.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The temptation to slide back down the bed and hide under the sheets was enormous. Fortunately, Mr Guifreda and the managing director decided to keep all of the staff on, transferring us instead to the Lewis’s salon in Liverpool for the six months that it would take to rebuild Quaintways. As soon as I was back on my feet I began commuting to Liverpool each morning with the rest of the staff, taking the eight o’clock train for the forty-five minute journey from Chester to Lime Street Station.

John, never a shirker, went back to the butcher’s where he was always welcome between voyages. He also did a paper round. Each morning at ten past eight, when he knew my train would be pulling out of Chester, he’d stop on his round and wait in an alleyway between the rows of terraced houses that backed on to the railway line. I, in turn, would sit in the window on that side and wait for a glimpse of the man I knew I’d almost certainly marry. As the rest of the girls giggled and teased, I’d sit on the edge of my seat until the moment I saw him and then we’d wave madly and blow kisses to each other in the few seconds before each disappeared from view. It was such a romantic thing for him to do and made me think of my parents waving to each other across the rooftops.

After work, I’d walk from the station to the street where John worked and sit in a little café opposite sipping coffee. Watching and waiting, I’d stare and stare at the butcher’s window until I saw John’s hands reach down into the display, pick up a string of sausages and swing it madly from side to side. That was my cue to ask for my bill and it made me laugh every time. He’d be ten more minutes wiping up and putting the meat away before he’d take off his stripy apron and we’d go back to my mother’s for tea.

Mum adored John from the moment she met him. Why wouldn’t she? He was a hard worker from a good local family who was young and handsome with great style and a wicked sense of humour. Best of all, he wasn’t married and never had been. I couldn’t help but notice how differently she behaved around him to the way she’d been with Jim. She loved everything about John, from his tidy steward’s manners to the meat he brought her, wrapped up in paper and tied with string. Amazing as it seemed to her, this was a man who could not only cook but who loved to entertain, often hosting Australian-style barbecues in his mother’s garden with the finest steaks from the butcher’s larder or a cruise ship’s cold stores. There’d always be music – Sinatra, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington – and dancing. John was a very good dancer and we loved to show off our moves.

Whenever John did manage to get steward’s work again and went off on the ships, he’d bombard me with love letters from abroad. Besotted, I kept every one. He became my uniformed hero who travelled to faraway places and telephoned long distance, or sent romantic billetsdoux within hours of arriving in a port. Believe it or not, my John cut his own romantic recordings of tunes like ‘Blue Moon’ or our special song ‘How Deep Is the Ocean?’ in special booths in New York and sent them to me on 45 r.p.m. discs.

‘Darling, I love you,’ the packaging would say. Or he’d write out the words to ‘our’ song and fold them inside.

How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?

How many times a day do I think of you?

I thought that was so wonderful.

John was less popular at sea, where he argued with any passengers who whistled or snapped their fingers to attract his attention, in between rallying fellow crew members to complain about conditions. His various captains, who continued to object to his union activities, sacked him repeatedly, often labelling him as ‘Not Wanted on Voyage’. Back on land, he had to find work wherever he could. Through Mr Guifreda, he was offered a job in the Quaintways kitchens for a while, which was fun for us both. Then he went back to a place he’d worked in as a commis chef once before, a hotel and restaurant in Warrington called the Patten Arms. I’m surprised they had him back, frankly. He’d been suspended a few years earlier for being too disruptive when he persuaded the rest of the staff to strike over pay. His boss there used to joke that commis chef meant a Communist who cooks.

One night in the summer of 1959, John told me that he was taking me to the Patten Arms for a ‘special dinner’. I knew he was going to ask me to marry him; I’d been expecting it for a while. We’d already chosen a lovely antique engagement ring at Walton’s jewellers in Chester. It had fifteen diamonds in a marquise cluster and he’d asked them to put it to one side. We’d discussed buying a house and worked out that we should have saved enough for some sort of deposit in two years’ time.

The question was where, when and exactly how would my dashing steward pop the question? Would he hide the ring in my dessert? Would he go down on one knee in the restaurant in front of all the other diners and his colleagues? (Unlikely, I thought.) Maybe he’d booked us a room and would ask me in private? I couldn’t wait to find out.

I put on my best outfit: a black pencil skirt and a houndstooth jacket with a crisp white collar. I styled my hair, cut short still and not dissimilar to Audrey Hepburn’s. I was excited and looking forward to what would probably be one of the most important nights of my life. Looking in the mirror before I left to meet John, I smiled back at my reflection.

We took the train to Warrington but a few miles out of the station John became increasingly nervous. He’d never been very confident in public in spite of what he did for a living. Secretly, he is full of self-doubt and rather shy. He can’t walk into a room on his own; he always makes me go in first, and then he only joins me if I have found him a seat facing the wall. Not far from our destination that night he suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Listen, Paul, when we get to the restaurant everyone’s going to be watching and waiting for the moment I pull out the ring. It’ll be embarrassing.’

I waited, wondering what on earth he was going to suggest instead. Maybe this was a trick to whisk me off somewhere else.

‘Here,’ he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me to my feet, ‘come with me.’

Before I knew it, my oh-so-romantic husband-to-be had bundled me down the corridor and pushed me into the cramped train toilet. Pressing me up against the basin to slide the door shut behind us, he kissed me hard on the lips and blurted, ‘Marry me?’

I had no time to answer before he whisked out the ring we’d chosen and shoved it unceremoniously on my finger. I was twenty years old. He was twenty-one. I looked at him, glanced down at the ring and burst out laughing.

‘John Prescott!’ I cried indignantly. ‘I see the art of romance isn’t dead, then?’ He looked crestfallen, so, kissing him back, I grinned. ‘Of course I will, you idiot.’

We went on to have a lovely relaxed dinner at the Patten Arms, chiefly because John didn’t have to propose in front of anyone. On the way home on the train, he made up for his unromantic proposal by snuggling up to me in our empty carriage.

‘John, don’t,’ I giggled, pushing him away. ‘People can see in!’

Jumping up, he unscrewed the light bulb in the ceiling, plunging us into darkness. ‘Now they can’t,’ he said, silencing my laugh with a kiss.

My mother couldn’t have been more delighted. After all she and I had been through together, she wanted nothing more than to see me happily married. Rather naughtily, John decided to test his own mother’s true feelings for me by telling her that we’d broken up.

‘Oh, John, I’m so pleased!’ she cried.

‘No, Mother. I was just seeing how you’d react,’ he told her. ‘Now I know how you really feel about Paul.’ He never quite forgave her.

Despite her disapproval, his mother put on a good show and kindly offered to host our engagement party in her large garden, usually used for Labour fundraisers. John filmed the whole thing on a state-of-the-art 8-mm cine camera he’d brought back from the States. No one had ever seen such a thing before. All the Quaintways Girls were there, of course, many of whom had also recently got engaged so we were excited about each other’s forthcoming weddings. Some of John’s ‘Brit boys’ from the Britannic came, as well as friends and colleagues from hotels and the other places he’d worked. It was a lovely do, and his mother even offered to make our bridesmaids’ dresses and my going-away outfit, which was very sweet of her. She was a fabulous dressmaker and I was lucky to have her.

Throughout our long engagement John continued to be very active in the National Union of Seamen, which pretty much began to take over his life. Furious at what he called the ‘cosy’ relationship between the ship owners and the union bosses, which he claimed led to poor pay and conditions, he regularly attended marches and strikes or spoke at rallies addressed by leading union officials. He put so much effort and research into his speeches and would practise them over and over until he – and I – knew them off by heart.

I wasn’t that interested in politics, even though my family were always strong Labour people. For John, I was more of a sounding board. Mostly, I made endless mugs of tea and coffee when his union friends came round. I have to admit that sometimes I fell asleep waiting for them to finish their heated late-night debates. What I did come to appreciate, though, was that John had made enemies at the top of the NUS by becoming an unofficial shop steward. I didn’t realize how serious that might be at the time; I just loved the maverick side of him that fought so passionately for what he believed in regardless of the consequences.

Knowing that politics was a side of his life that I didn’t really understand, despite how much it meant to him, I decided to go to a rally to hear him speak. This particular one was held at the Roodee racecourse in Chester. A huge crowd had gathered, some sitting in the tiered stands, the rest forming a large circle. People stepped up and spoke into a microphone in the middle of the circle if they felt like it or until they were booed off. John, who was far younger than most of the men around him, had to push his way through a huge crowd of hecklers to take his turn. I held my breath as he began falteringly. I knew how nervous he was. After a few minutes, though, he got into his stride and became more and more impassioned, delivering each sentence with conviction and flair. I was so proud of him, I could have burst.

I only wished my father could have been there to see him. Each week, without fail, Dad had paid his union dues out of his hard-earned wages to ensure that his rights and those of his fellow workers were respected by his employers. Now here was the son-in-law-to-be that he could never meet representing all that he believed in and more. The man I was going to marry was someone of principle with strong working-class beliefs. Watching him bringing his speech to a climax at that microphone, I had never been more certain that I was doing the right thing.