Britannia Street E-Book

Beth Cox

• Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. When life unravels for Beth after the break up of a long marriage, she finds herself reaching back for answers. Into her past as a troubled, pregnant teenager in a home rapidly falling apart. Into the life of her great-grandmother, using her skills as a researcher and psychoanalyst to find the truth behind family secrets. Moving between past and present, through parallel stories of family disintegration and lives knocked off course, and exploring how secrets resonate with shame down through the generations, Britannia Street is a story of how a woman carries trauma to her family and the world. A story with which so many will empathise. Will Beth be able to discover the lost parts of herself buried beneath the roles of daughter, wife, mother, nurse? Can she learn to understand and forgive herself? Will she emerge to find love again, and with who? Sometimes we have no idea why we make the choices we do, but for Beth, there is the chance to make the right choice. Family secrets and resilience weave together in this compelling story of how we deal with loss of so many kinds, even the loss of self. From historical fiction author, Beth Cox, Britannia Street is a vivid, compassionate fictionalised biography that will grip you from beginning to end.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Part 1

Chapter 1 — Great-aunt Annie’s Table

Chapter 2 — Breakdown 2004

Chapter 3 — The End of Childhood 1958

Chapter 4 — Changes 1958

Chapter 5 — Britannia Street 1881

Chapter 6 — Down the Railway Line 1958

Chapter 7 — Britannia Street 1891

Chapter 8 — Growing Up 1959

Chapter 9 — Yarrow Place 1901

Chapter 10 — Smoking, Shopping and Make-up 1959

Chapter 11 — Britannia Street 1871

Chapter 12 — The Party 1959

Chapter 13 — Lancaster 1861

Chapter 14 — Mother 1959

Chapter 15 — Life and Death 1851

Chapter 16 — School 1959

Chapter 17 — Melling 1841

Chapter 18 — Gareth 1960

Part 2

Chapter 19 — Tom 1961

Chapter 20 — Secrets and Lies 1962

Chapter 21 — Pregnancy 1962

Chapter 22 — Marriage 1962

Chapter 23 — Alicia 1963

Part 3

Chapter 24 — Gareth 2004

Chapter 25 — Losses 1967–1978

Chapter 26 — Melling. Then and Now 2004

Chapter 27 — Tom 2005

Chapter 28 — Towards the end

Britannia Street

Beth Cox

Published by Leaf by Leaf an imprint of Cinnamon Press,

Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ

www.cinnonpress.com

The right of Beth Cox to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2021, Beth Cox

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-929-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-78864-950-6

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset by Cinnamon Press. 

Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.

Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress.

Acknowledgements

Thank to Jan Fortune and Adam Craig for bringing Britannia Street to the world. Thanks also to all who read the manuscript, David, Alison, Joanne and Rachel, Deborah Grace, Theresa Taylor and Judith Godfrey. Thanks to Sarah-Clare Conlon for her editing. Sally Cline’s mentorship was invaluable in encouraging me to keep going. Thanks also to my tutor Geoff Ryman and Professor Jeanette Winterson at the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University for their suggestions and support.

Britannia Street

To David

Part 1

Chapter 1

Great-aunt Annie’s Table

Can a table hold secrets? And then give them up? Well, that’s what happened in 1964. I was eighteen and already married. I had inherited the table from Great-aunt Annie. My parents and I sat around the table, drinking tea. Mother touched the varnished tabletop.

‘It’s not in bad condition,’ she said. ‘I think it’ll be all right for you.’

My father passed his hands over the table and partway down the two legs nearest to him. It was as if he was caressing it, massaging it, encouraging it to let out the truth. He stood and walked around it, carefully looking at it.

‘It will open out and make a longer table,’ he said. ‘You just pull out the sides and lift up the middle.’

Mother and I stood up holding our mugs, so he could demonstrate. It fell into place easily, making a table twice its original size.

‘I bet that’s not been opened for a long time,’ said Mother. ‘It’ll be really useful.’

We all sat around the extended table. We smiled at each other. We sat there expectantly. Waiting. And this was when the table began to give up its secrets.

‘Annie was the last of her generation,’ said Father. ‘It was a different world when she was born in 1886. It’s a sad story.’ He looked at Mother.

‘You’d better tell her the full story, Harold,’ said Mother.

‘When we cleared out Annie’s house, we found her birth certificate… and there’s a space where her father’s name should be.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So, what does that mean?’

Father took a deep breath then sighed. ‘Aunt Annie and her brother Albert, my father, your grandfather, were both illegitimate—we don’t know who Annie and Albert’s father was—or even if they had the same father,’ he said.

‘It was a terrible thing in those days,’ said Mother. ‘Annie felt it all her life… the shame of it, then your great-grandmother Elizabeth married John Goulburn, they left Lancaster and came to Bolton, and Annie and Albert changed their surnames to Cox.’

I looked at my parents. What? This made no sense to me.

‘Be thankful they did, Beth, otherwise you would have been Beth Cock,’ said Father.

‘Are you saying their name was Cock, spelt C-O-C-K, and not Cox?’

‘Yes, Annie Cock, born in Lancaster,’ said Father. ‘It’s on her birth certificate.’

‘You’re right, I’m glad they did change it,’ I said with a giggle.

‘Annie never got over being illegitimate. She was ashamed—it’s the family secret, left behind in Lancaster with their old surname when they came to Bolton,’ said Father.

I felt a tug of connection with this woman, Annie’s mother, my great-grandmother, who, it seems, had brought shame on the family. I’d done something similar myself and although times were changing in the early 1960s, there was still a musty odour of Victorian prurience in the air. Mrs. Caldwell, the butcher’s wife, didn’t speak to me when I got pregnant. She couldn’t even look at me as we passed in the street. If you weren’t a 1950s ideal housewife wearing a neat apron over a full-skirted dress, with a short, tidy hairstyle, cooking your husband’s dinner in a modern kitchen, after your white, church wedding, you were not socially acceptable. You should certainly not get pregnant when you’re sixteen and unmarried.

‘Her parents threw her out,’ said Mother.

‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘Poor woman.’

‘That’s how it was in those days,’ said Father.

I was washing up after they left. I remembered that when I was about eight or nine, I stayed with Great-aunt Annie and her husband George one weekend. They lived in an old-fashioned house, which still had gas mantles in the hallway left over from the days before people had electricity in their houses. It was an adventure for me, the first time sleeping away from home. I played draughts with George and he taught me how to spell ‘phlegm’. George and Annie had a front room which was never used. It had a display cabinet in one corner which was full of little china ornaments. I liked to kneel on the floor and peer into it. It was during that visit that I noticed there was an old photograph above the cabinet in an ornate gold frame. It was of a woman who looked like Aunt Lizzy, my father’s sister. She was wearing an old-fashioned dark dress. I asked Great-aunt Annie who it was.

‘It’s my mother,’ she said. ‘She was called Elizabeth, like you.’

‘What was your name before you married Uncle George?’ I said.

‘Goulburn, Annie Goulburn,’ she said.

This answer had puzzled me because I knew Aunt Annie was Grandad Cox’s sister, so shouldn’t she have been called Annie Cox? I think I asked her and didn’t get a satisfactory reply because I know I did ask my parents. I was fobbed off by them. They gave each other one of those what-do-we-say-now glances and I knew I had hit on something they didn’t want me to know. But I had a strong sense of this being important, something I must remember. I knew they weren’t going to say any more at that time.

So, I forgot it, although not completely—it was always there in a box somewhere in the further recesses of my mind, which would become full of other boxes over the years. Boxes labelled ‘husband’, ‘children’, ‘work’, ‘friends’, ‘shopping’, ‘cooking’, ‘washing’ and ‘miscellaneous’—until now, 2004, that is. I decided back then that I must ask more about it some time. But it stayed behind that growing number of boxes until it was too late to ask. This is my search for the truth behind this story and the meaning of it for me three generations later.

Chapter 2

Breakdown 2004

It is over forty years since that conversation around Great-aunt Annie’s table. Forty years in which I have not felt ready or able to begin the search for evidence of my ancestors’ lives in Victorian Lancaster. I have always known I would undertake this research and from time to time I have stored away more snippets of conversations and references to my ancestors that held clues and information that I knew would be useful. In 1990 when my youngest daughter Rebecca went to university in London, I asked her if she would be willing to search the archives for Grandad Cox’s birth certificate. She agreed and provided the first concrete evidence that confirmed what I had been told. But I still didn’t undertake any further research. I was too busy. I had three daughters, a husband and a full-time job as a nurse, a nurse tutor and later a psychotherapist. Until the advent of the Internet, documents were archived in London and I had no idea how I might go about the research. I put it on hold, but I wonder now if I was avoiding something, because it was only after experiencing a depressive breakdown that I began to think seriously about undertaking the research.

I’m a therapist so I know about other people’s breakdowns, but when I was having one of my own, I did what I knew others sometimes did; I tried to ignore it and work through it. For the kind of therapy I trained in—psychoanalytic psychotherapy—the trainee is required to undertake therapy themselves and I had, but there remained an area of my psyche that I knew had not been explored. I hadn’t withheld information from my therapist—I had talked about my past—it was more that the focus and priorities at that time were different.

Several events came together which contributed to cause my depression. My marriage had not been easy at times. We grew apart. My husband no longer loved me, and I left him. I had a disastrous love affair. I was alone and the world in which I’d taken pleasure seemed a hostile place. I became exhausted and I no longer wanted to go outside my home. I couldn’t make decisions and I couldn’t concentrate. I took time off work and I rested. But I didn’t improve, I cried all the time. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t sleep. I was getting worse. Life didn’t seem worth living and when I began to think about how I might kill myself, I knew I must see my doctor. Suicidal ideation is the medical term for it. I had it.

A breakdown signals the need for change. I retired from my job and wound down my private practice. I have been looking after people since I was thirteen and I can no longer do that. I am scared. I lost myself and although I have now stopped crying, am sleeping better, and functioning well enough in the world, I know I haven’t completely recovered. I need to discover who I am behind the roles of mother, wife, daughter, nurse, therapist, and rebuild myself, put myself first. As I emerge from the bleak place I had fallen into, propped up by anti-depressants, I find myself thinking more about the family history. I have a strong feeling that there is something in it I need to discover. It’s not a rational academic interest, it’s an emotional, visceral compulsion. In order to find myself today, I need to know where I have come from, who my ancestors were and what that means for me.

There is only one other person left on my father’s side of the family besides me. My cousin Margaret, the daughter of my father’s eldest sister, Aunty Elsie. My father was one of four children. He was born in between Aunty Elsie and Aunty Lizzy. He also had a younger brother, Cyril who was killed in the Second World War. Now, with my father’s generation all gone, and just Margaret and I remaining my compulsion is deepened and strengthened. I am doing this for myself, but this search is overlayered by the need for others to know Elizabeth. This is also for my great-grandmother and for our descendants, otherwise the story will die with me. I asked Cousin Margaret if she knew anything about the family history. I told her a bit of what I knew. It was the first she had heard of this story and I’m not sure she believed me, even though I had evidence.

I have the copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate, that Rebecca managed to find in the archives in London. It shows that Albert Edward Cock, boy, was born on 27th March 1876. His mother’s name was Elizabeth Cock. There was that blank space under the heading ‘Father’ that my own father had alluded to. The address was 10 Britannia Street, Lancaster. I felt sad as I read the words on the copy of the birth certificate in my hand. I imagined Elizabeth all alone in Britannia Street, giving birth. Who would have looked after her? It was Elizabeth who had registered the birth on 15th April. There must have been no one else to do it for her. Another column was labelled Name, Surname and Maiden Surname of Mother. She had written Cock, her maiden name. No married name, no father’s name; there was no hiding in Victorian England. The birth certificate saw to that. I imagined the disapproving looks she might have received when she went to the Registrar’s office. If her family would have nothing to do with her, how on earth did she live?

The later name change to Cox suggests that the surname Cock had the same connotations then as now. No wonder they changed it when they had the chance. And her name was Elizabeth. The same as mine. I have always been called Beth, but my name is Elizabeth. We have the same name. A cold finger from the past touched me. I shivered. I had disturbed something. I put the certificate in a safe place. I did not see Cousin Margaret often, she lived in another part of the country. It was a few years later when I showed her Grandad’s birth certificate. She said again, ‘Are you sure? I’ve never heard any of this.’

What happened in Victorian Lancaster, a long time ago? Something so shameful that it had to be buried and forgotten as if it never happened. But it’s forcing its way out of the box in my mind. I’ve moved the box to the forefront, and I’ve begun to take things out of it. And something strange is happening. I’m developing another obsession alongside the family history. I’m constantly thinking about my teenage years, the four years from twelve to sixteen specifically, which came to define my life. I can’t stop the memories as they flood, remarkably clearly and detailed, into my mind. They’re in a box adjacent to the Lancaster story. As a therapist I know it’s not so strange, I have struggled with my past, I have never really come to terms with it despite my therapy while I was training. In that therapy there were too many other unresolved issues to deal with, not least the fact that I hadn’t grieved for the loss of both my parents, and to some extent my brother John, when I was in my twenties. I cried and talked about them for years in therapy and I have some peace about those issues; as far as anyone can deal with such catastrophic loss, I have done so. Now it’s time for myself, the self that has been buried beneath all my roles in life. I know I need to understand the teenage Beth, what drove her, what motivated her. That teenage Beth is me, a part of me that I’ve tried to live down, to cover up, to deny even. I know at the deepest level of my being that my family history carries meanings that are connected to those four years when my own family disintegrated. Not only am I obsessed with these two time periods, but since retirement I have time and the Internet on my side. Many records are now online. No more excuses. The time has come to face it.

Chapter 3

The End of Childhood 1958

It was not long after my twelfth birthday, in January 1958, that the first of several changes and traumas occurred that made me think the world had suffered a seismic shift. It was as if I went to bed one night and woke up the following day to a world that was turning in the wrong direction. It first showed itself when a move to a new house was decreed by my parents. It was that move that precipitated the changes in our fortunes.

Before the move, I remember an enchanted childhood, when the summers were sunny and I played outside in the wood behind our houses with my friend Joy, who lived next door; when we took picnics into the nearby park and saw kingfishers flash iridescent turquoise over streams. Father had a successful business as a furniture manufacturer. Mother was busy cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing. She helped at my father’s business when they were busy. They’d met when they were both apprentices at Waring & Gillow’s, a highly regarded Manchester and Lancaster furniture business. When they married in 1935, they set up their own business making furniture and soft furnishings, in Bolton, where my father came from. My brother John was born in 1937 and I followed nine years later in 1945, after the War. We both went to Bolton School, a Direct Grant Grammar School, with the boys’ and girls’ divisions strictly separate. We had friends and relatives close by. Our home was a semi-detached house in a leafy green suburb. It was a 1950s dream, although not a dream usually associated with a town in Lancashire, whose fortunes were declining as the cotton trade was dying. But we didn’t all wear flat caps and clogs. There were many pleasant areas in Bolton as well as the old mills, terraced houses and cobbles.

Beneath the perfect surface of our lives lay a reality that was different. My father was often ill; he was delicate, sensitive. He could also be harsh—violent even—and I felt his hand slapping my legs whenever he and I were in conflict. There were regular clashes between Father and John. Father would criticise John’s table manners, his voice harsh and loud. There was one disturbing occasion when I saw Father throw a book he’d taken from John on to the fire. John stood by watching. I screamed at Father.

‘Why are you burning a book? You love books.’

‘It’s rubbish,’ he said.

I ran into the kitchen where Mother was and told her. I cried as she put her arm around me and told me to leave them alone. Mother did not show her feelings much. There were arguments when Father threatened to leave, or threatened to break plates and dishes. He never did, but the threat was terrifying, because he could also be loving, kind and playful. He made up funny stories about the neighbours and our relatives. One featured the rather snobby lady next door getting her big toe caught in the washing wringers. I laughed and laughed at that one. I have fond and happy memories of Sunday afternoon walks with him, just the two of us walking through Moss Bank Park, through the village of Barrow Bridge with its stream and pretty cottages, and up the sixty-three steps, which had to be counted every single time. At the top lay a bluebell wood which sloped down to a stream. There was a boating lake at Barrow Bridge, and a shop selling candyfloss and ice cream. A small child’s version of heaven.

One day in February 1958, I was helping Mother to make tea.

‘Beth,’ said Mother as she buttered bread. ‘Will you set the table please when you’ve finished making the custard—your father will be here soon.’

‘The custard’s ready,’ I said. I laid out the cutlery.

‘Your father hates driving backwards and forwards to Accrington, so we’re thinking of moving to… be closer to his work.’

‘Move,’ I said. I was shocked by this idea. ‘We can’t move, I like it here.’ This was wrong: this house was our home, our lives were here in this house, in this place. My father had sold his furniture business a year or two before. He’d suffered from ‘nerves’ so he sold it and bought another business in Accrington. This business was a wholesale stationers. In time this business was to prove equally stressful.

‘I know, but your father can’t carry on, it’s nearly thirty miles, sixty miles a day.’ Mother put the plate of bread and butter on the kitchen table. ‘It takes at least an hour each way and it affects his nerves.’

‘But where would we go?’

‘Probably Holcombe Brook, so you can still travel to school…’

‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s near Ramsbottom.’

I’d been to Accrington a few times with Father and, as we drove through the Rossendale Valley, he’d talked about the towns and villages we passed through. He told me that the Pennine Hills were the millstone grit backbone of England, where the soft waters of the streams and rivers, and the damp air, gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. Some old mills with their tall chimneys were still working in the towns. They were surrounded by terraced, stone houses where the workers lived. There was Ramsbottom, which we thought was funny, although he didn’t tell me the locals called it Tupp’s Arse, which was even funnier. Haslingden, Rawtenstall and Oswaldtwistle were our favourites. We repeated the words. We rolled them round our tongues, and we laughed. But I didn’t remember Holcombe Brook.

‘You’ll like it. We’re going to look at houses there this weekend. You’ll have to get used to the idea, Beth, I don’t want your father to be ill again.’

We went to view houses; a bungalow on Holcombe Hill was too small and too remote. A Victorian semi on Bolton Road was too big and on the main road. Then they came across plans for a row of terraced houses that were being built. Mother had grown up in the back streets of industrial Salford, the fifth in a family of seven children. A battle with dirt was fought every day by the women of her family. She had always wanted a brand-new house with no Victorian mouldings for dust to settle and where she could have a fitted kitchen. They found what she wanted in the end house of this terrace. It was a redbrick square box on the corner of a road of semis which led down towards fields and on to Bury. It would be ready in August.

‘We’re not taking any rubbish with us,’ said Mother. ‘We’ll have to get rid of stuff.’

That meant my old toys that I no longer played with. I wished I could take them with me, but the new house was smaller, and my bedroom was the smallest room of all. Mother said I could have a grown-up dressing table to compensate and she couldn’t see why I wanted to hang on to things I no longer played with. I looked longingly at my doll’s house with its little electric light bulbs, my wind-up musical box that played ‘What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?’and my doll’s cot with its crocheted blanket; all these had to go. There were piles of Sunny Stories and The Children’s Newspaper, which went in the dustbin. Two dolls and a small teddy which lived on the windowsill were given away. My bigger teddy I hung on to. He sat on a child-size, antique rocking chair that Father had picked up from one of his customers. I still have this chair and teddy bear today. I could keep my books and the wooden bookcase Father had made.

The day we left, I wandered around the house as the removal men staggered about carrying furniture. I had a last look at my bedroom. The murky cream wallpaper was full of scuffs and marks, and there were cut-out pandas stuck on at eye level. I climbed onto the windowsill and looked down into next door’s garden. If my friend Joy was there, I would shout down to her. She was often there laughing and having fun with her brothers and sisters. I looked at the tall trees of the wood beyond the garden where Joy and I played, climbing trees and making dens among the rhododendrons and elderflower bushes. I would miss Joy. Tears welled up and rolled down my cheeks. I was leaving so much behind.

‘The car’s loaded up,’ called Father.

‘Coming,’ I sniffed.

‘You’ll have to have the cat basket on your knee,’ said Father as I came down the stairs.

I walked down the path with Mother, and we stood at the gate looking back at the old house. I lingered, loath to leave.

‘Come on,’ said Mother. ‘Don’t forget Jinxy.’

The cat basket containing Jinx our Siamese cat was on the wall next to the gate. As I picked it up, I blinked away more tears.

‘I would never forget Jinxy.’ I sniffed and got in the car.

Jinx wailed all the way to Holcombe Brook, as if we were murdering her.

Chapter 4

Changes 1958

By the time I started school in September we had settled into our new house. I now had a long walk to the first bus stop, then I had to catch another bus from Bolton town centre to school. I missed walking home with my school friend Janet, and the long chats we used to have. My new bedroom was a tiny, stark white box-room. We couldn’t put wallpaper on the walls until the house had dried out, Father said, and that could take up to a year. My room was freezing cold as it had two outside walls, and no heating apart from a two-bar electric fire for winter mornings. My brother John had a bigger room even though he was hardly ever at home. But Mother was happy with her new fitted kitchen, which was clean and modern, and Father seemed pleased that he didn’t have to spend so much time travelling.

It was raining as I walked home from the bus that first day back. I’d forgotten my umbrella and my thin gabardine mac was soaked. My satchel was heavy with the books I needed for homework. It seemed to take forever to reach the corner of our road. I was relieved to see our house. I had a key, so I let myself in. The plain-walled house felt empty and cold. I shivered as I took off my coat and went into the kitchen which housed the Aga. Jinx was lying on her piece of old blanket behind the hot plates. That was her favourite place. My father filled up the Aga with anthracite every morning and evening, and Jinx had to be lifted off for this and when Mother was cooking, but she jumped back up again whenever she had the chance. Now she stretched and yawned when she saw me, letting out a little meow. There was a good smell of something cooking; Mother must have put a stew in the oven.

‘Where is she, Jinxy?’ I said.

Jinx rolled over and I stroked her tummy. She purred. I wandered into the dining room where a fire was laid. Kneeling, I struck a match, lit the scrunched-up newspaper and watched the orange flames flicker into life. Jinx followed me and we sat together on the rug enjoying the small excitement as the wood caught and the coal started to glow. I fed it from time to time with strategically placed pieces of coal. When the fire seemed to be going well, I wandered back into the kitchen to wash my hands. The sky was dark grey now, the day was closing down, and Mother was late. As I dried my hands, I heard the key in the lock. I went into the cold hall to meet her.

‘It’s horrible out there,’ she said.

‘I wondered where you were.’

‘Go and put the kettle on, I’ll be there in a minute.’

I made a pot of tea and we both sat at the Formica table next to the Aga. She put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands as we waited for the tea to brew. I looked at her greying head of hair. Mother was small and dark. Dumpy, Aunty Elsie had called her. Petite, Father said. I poured the milk into the cups.

‘I’ve been to the doctors,’ she said and took a sip of her tea. ‘And, well… the thing is I’ve got to go into hospital, for an operation. Well, it’s not really an operation, it’s… a procedure. It’s nothing really; I mean… having a little lump removed is nothing. I’ve got a lump here.’ She touched her left breast. ‘It’s a cyst but it’s better out.’

Mother’s mouth looked wobbly, as if she might cry. I’d never seen her cry. I didn’t know what to say or do and I felt as if I might cry myself, but I didn’t want to because that might set her off. I looked down at Jinx who was sitting next to us on the floor, and blinked away tears. I stared at the grey and yellow linoleum floor tiles Father had put down; there were a few remnants of the sticky, black stuff that he had stuck them down with still left on their edges. Mother had complained about it getting everywhere. Jinx jumped up onto Mother’s knee.

‘I’ll have to go into hospital next week, it has to be done soon.’ She stroked Jinx, pulling the cat’s ears down with each stroke. ‘I should have gone… anyway, it needs to be done.’

Jinx jumped down; she didn’t like having her ears flattened. Mother stood up.

‘I’d better put some potatoes on; your father will be here soon. Go and watch the television if you want, I’ll call you when tea’s ready.’

I did as I was told because I didn’t know what else to do. I turned the television on and off. I didn’t want to watch the news. I started to do my trigonometry homework. Cold boiled ham, I said to myself, cosine equals base over hypotenuse. But I couldn’t concentrate so I just sat there with my books open. Mother had never been ill before. I knew she had had an operation when I was born. It was called a caesarean and it had taken her a long time to recover. This procedure wasn’t a proper operation like that; it was only a small thing. But I sensed that something was wrong and that she was trying to pretend everything was all right. I heard the back door slam shut—my father arriving home—and I heard the low hum of their voices through the closed kitchen door. I packed away my maths books and went into the dining room.

I stroked Jinx, who was stretched out in front of the blazing fire. I picked her up; she was limp and sozzled with heat. She allowed herself to be draped around my shoulders and neck, all warm and soft. We sat like that for a few minutes and I watched the fire. I knew Mother was telling Father what she had told me. It was very quiet. I could only catch the occasional murmur. Then the serving hatch from the kitchen opened and Mother popped her head through.

‘Tea’s ready,’ she said. Her voice was pretend cheerful and the false bright look on her face poking through the serving hatch seemed both sad and hilarious. She had had this serving hatch specially made and she was very proud of it. I could feel a hysterical giggle bubbling up inside me. I was frantic to stop it, so I bent over and fussed about removing Jinx from my neck. Father came into the dining room.

‘How was school?’ he said as he sat at the table. He touched me on the shoulder as he passed me.

‘Okay, except the gooseberry crumble was so vile I said I’d be sick if I ate it, the smell of it made me feel ill.’

‘I thought it might be better in the senior dining room,’ said Mother as she passed the plates of food through the hatch to me.

The three of us started on our beef stew and mashed potatoes. After a few mouthfuls, Father paused.

‘What homework have you got tonight?’ said Father.

‘I’ve got to learn some French verbs,’ I said.

‘I’ll test you if you like after tea.’

‘I’ve opened a tin of mandarin oranges for afters,’ said Mother as she cleared away our plates.

When we’d finished eating, Mother went into the kitchen to wash up. I asked Father if he would test me. He put down his book and smiled at me; he often gave me very loving smiles which I used to enjoy but which more recently I was beginning to feel embarrassed by. I noticed that he had his hand on his side. This was nothing unusual. For as long as I can remember Father had had a pain in his side. He’d had it investigated—barium meals and an investigative operation. All revealed nothing physically wrong with him. It was his nerves, the doctor said. This was the reason he had sold his business in Bolton. But as I think more about this and write about it from my adult view, I wonder why he then bought another business, which he knew nothing about, and which would soon bring him as much stress as the previous business had. As a child I accepted the grown-ups’ decisions on this and never even questioned it until now. But surely it wasn’t a sensible way forward?

‘Beth,’ he said. ‘Before I test you… I know Mummy has told you that she’s going to have a little minor operation done next week—I’m going to get in touch with Aunty Lizzy tomorrow to see if you can go and stay with her while Mummy is in hospital. Would you like that?’

‘Can’t I stay here? I want to be near Mummy.’

‘We think it’s best if you go to Aunty Lizzy’s. It should only be for a week or so. Jinx can go with you, Lizzy likes Jinx.’

‘Can I take my bicycle?’

‘Of course.’

‘I could ride to school with Janet like I used to before.’

He smiled a half smile tinged with sadness. I felt sad too. I had never been separated from my mother, apart from the odd night or two when I’d stayed with my aunts, and I wanted to stay at home where I imagined I wouldn’t miss her quite so much. But it was just for a few nights and Jinx could go with me.

Father took me to Aunty Lizzy’s at the weekend. Aunt Lizzy lived not far from our old house. John called her ‘the maiden aunt’ because she had never married, and had looked after Grandad until he died the previous year. Grandad had been a bit mad before he died, getting things muddled up and farting when he walked. He didn’t do much, just sat in his armchair and read his newspaper while Aunty Lizzy waited on him hand and foot. He never took any notice of me, although for a few months before he died, he came regularly to our house to be looked after by my mother while Aunty Lizzy went to work. They shared him out between the relatives because he kept wandering off and getting lost when he was left alone. He pointed to a pair of my navy-blue, school knickers on the washing line and said, ‘That’s the boss’s top hat.’ I told my friend Janet and we laughed at this, pointing to each other’s navy-blue knickers as we got changed for gym, repeating the phrase to each other—‘That’s the boss’s top hat’. That’s the only thing I can remember him saying to me.

I slept in his old bedroom during my stay with Aunty Lizzy. It had been decorated since he’d died, and the wallpaper had big pink roses all over it. It was much bigger than my box room and I liked the wallpaper. I noticed there was a photograph hanging above the little fireplace. The gold frame looked familiar. I stared at the old photograph—I knew I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t think where. It looked so old-fashioned with its faded sepia tones and the ornate frame. The woman wore a dark-coloured dress and a brooch at the high neck with a tiny safety chain attached to it. She had a little smile on her face. There was a definite resemblance to Aunt Lizzy. I studied the photograph, taking in the details and trying to remember where I’d seen it previously.

I couldn’t sleep when I went to bed. Where had I seen the photograph before? When was Mother’s procedure? Was it the next day? Would she be all right? When would I know? I must ask Aunty Lizzy… I woke up early with the photograph in my mind and I knew where I had seen it before: hanging above the china cabinet in Great-aunt Annie’s house.

As I ate my boiled egg, I asked Aunty Lizzy about the photograph.

‘I think I saw it at Great-aunt Annie’s house,’ I said.

‘Yes, it’s her mother,’ she said. I opened my mouth to ask a question but shut it when Aunty Lizzy said, ‘Now, hurry up with your breakfast or you’ll be late for school.’

From Aunty Lizzy’s, I wobbled along the cobbles every morning on my bike to Janet’s house. Together we rode along a narrow street between tall, dark cotton mills on our way to school, and thankfully the road surface was smooth. Large wicker baskets full of bales of cotton were always being loaded and unloaded, pulled up and down on pulleys as we swooshed past down the hill, our navy-blue uniform pinafores and maroon blazers flying out behind us, our berets pulled down on our heads so they wouldn’t fly off. Whenever the great mill doors opened, we were enveloped in a draught of warm air with fluffy clumps of cotton flying around in it. The rhythmic sound of the massive machines, working looms weaving cotton, shuttles flying, was almost deafening. Women workers who came out of those doors had their hair tied up in scarves with a knot in front on top of their heads. The strands of their hair that escaped had wisps of cotton clinging to them. In the weaving shed they had to learn to lip read as the noise of the machines was so loud, they couldn’t hear each other speak. We used to mimic these women mouthing things to each other in an exaggerated way and pointing down between our legs mouthing, ‘She’s had it all taken away, our Ethel, down below.’ We knew we were lucky; we wouldn’t be working in a cotton mill. For one thing the cotton trade in Lancashire was dying—these last few working mills had not many years before they were either abandoned and left empty to fall into decay or redeveloped as retail outlets, which were not very successful on the whole. What could you do with these massive buildings? Later still they were marketed as ‘loft apartments’ which were more popular. In any case, we knew we were destined for better things; we were at the Grammar School, and we had the chance of an education to take us away from that working class existence, to better ourselves.

Janet’s mother invited me to stay at the weekend. She asked me how Mother was and all I could say was, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t heard.’ My unspoken feelings about Mother came to the surface and I began to sniffle. Janet’s mother put her arms round me. She smelled of perfume and cigarettes.

‘I’m sure she’s fine, Beth,’ she said patting my back as I snivelled and sniffed. ‘I expect your father’s been busy with visiting her and going to work. I’m sure she’s fine.’

  Aunty Lizzy didn’t have a telephone in her house, but the corner shop had one and would take a message if it was important. There hadn’t been any messages that I knew of. Aunty Lizzy hadn’t said a word about Mother. I worried that something dreadful had happened, that the ‘procedure’ had not proceeded as it should, or that my mother had died, and they thought I would be better off not knowing. Surely, they’d have to tell me some time. I didn’t really believe this had happened, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I was too worried and frightened. If I didn’t ask, I could hope that everything was well. I realise through writing about this how undeveloped my language for feelings was. No one ever asked me how I felt, and I don’t remember anyone talking about how they felt; my parents and their families certainly didn’t. Much later in life when I was a nurse tutor, and when the NHS would still pay for such things, I did a two year part-time experiential training course for use with student nurses, and at a personal level I think that was where I began to learn to talk about my feelings—that and at Rochdale Marriage Guidance Council (now Relate), where I started my part-time training as a marriage guidance counsellor around the same time.

Later that week I was staying with Aunty Lizzy, she answered the doorbell one evening and I could hear her talking to someone. She shouted through to me: ‘Beth, I’m going to the shop to make a phone call, I won’t be long.’

I had finished my homework and was sitting next to the fire with Jinx on my knee. I stroked her and thought about the phone call. Did this mean bad news? Was Mother all right? Or not? I buried my face in the cat’s soft fur. My insides clenched and knotted. I felt sick.

‘Jinxy-pooh,’ I said. ‘Do you want to go home?’

Jinx purred extra loud, a rolling lushness of a purr to let me know she knew how I was feeling. I picked up the Radio Times to see if there was anything on the television, but it was Armand and Michaela Denis on safari in Africa. I used to watch it with John when he was home, and we laughed about Armand’s strong French accent, which we loved to mimic. Now, John was living in London and training to be a bank manager, so I didn’t see him often. I didn’t feel like watching Armand and Michaela without John to laugh with, so I sat next to the little bookshelf and took down one of Aunty Lizzy’s books about the Royal Family. Aunty Lizzy was proud of having the same name as the Queen. This book had pictures of the Queen when she was Princess Elizabeth, and there was a picture of her all dressed in black with a veil over her face when she was at her father’s funeral. Just then Aunty Lizzy came back.

‘That was your father on the phone. He says to tell you that your mother has had her operation.’

‘An operation?’ So, she was alive.

‘Yes, they’ve had to take a bit more away, the lump had spread a bit,’ she said. Aunty Lizzy made a sort of circling motion with her hand round her left breast.

‘Oh no,’ I said, wondering what all this meant. ‘So, is she… is she, all right?’

‘Yes, she will be, it was just a bigger thing than they thought,’ said Aunty Lizzy. ‘Anyway, your father’s coming on Saturday to take you to see her.’

‘Oh good,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see her. Where is she? Is she still in hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘When will she go home?’

‘What a lot of questions,’ said Aunty Lizzy and went into the kitchen.

Father came on Saturday afternoon. I was all ready to go, wearing my blue jacket and grey skirt. I knew Mother liked me in this outfit. As we drove along, Father said, ‘Aunty Lizzy told you, didn’t she, about Mummy?’

‘About the procedure becoming an operation?’

‘Yes, what they do is… they take out a piece of the lump and send it to the laboratory and then, if necessary, they take away some more, and that’s what they had to do for your mother, they took away more of the surrounding tissue.’ He sighed. ‘And, well… they… they actually… removed her breast, Beth. It’s called a mastectomy.’

‘A mastectomy?’ I repeated trying to take it in. His voice had become so quiet that I could hardly hear what he said. I shuddered. Removing a breast sounded very serious and painful.