We Weren't Called Single Parent Families Back Then

My Mum divorced my dad and eventually got us a house in a little village in the countryside. She had to keep our address secret to protect us.

Sometimes girls at school would ask about my dad but I just used to go red as a beetroot and say 'my Mum's divorced.' Some kids said 'what's divorced?' and then I'd feel extra mortified. One history lesson I asked our teacher to explain something to me and he brushed me off with 'ask your dad'. Immediately a wisecracking little squirt of a boy at the desk behind me called out 'she can't, he's kicked the bucket'. I didn't know of anyone else at my school that had divorced parents. I didn't know what kicked the bucket meant for that matter either but the expression stuck itself in my mind like a big sore as these things do. Questions like who's your dad, where's your dad, what would your dad say, and what does your father do for a living used to fill me with dread. Maybe the little squirt's assumption of my Mum being a widow is a gauge of how unusual it was for ordinary people to be divorced back then, at least in worzel-gummage-land.

With my Mum and us four girls (Mum refused to have a boyfriend or to get married again after the nightmare that was my dad) it was a very free five female household. Our clothes line always had a very long row of pegged out knickers on it. When there was a frost they'd go all crisp and crunchy and Mum used to say they might knock out the milkman.

It was only when I went into other girls' houses that I realised how relaxed it was round ours. Christine started coming over quite a lot for tea and sleepovers but it was ages before I got an invite there. I felt offended thinking she thought I wasn't good enough to meet her parents or something, when all along she was just plain embarrassed by her grumpy old dad. First time I went there Christine made sure he was out. Her house was posher and more organised than ours. It was nearly always tidy, had fitted carpets, strict meal times and a subdued atmosphere. A few times her dad did pop home when I was there and Christine would whisk me away quick from the miserable mood he always dragged over the threshold with him. Another girl called Rosemary, who I'd known since junior school, wouldn't even let me in the house if her dad was there. Things would suddenly change the minute he came through the door as if some visiting dignitary had arrived. Everyone would go all tense and her and her Mum would be on tenterhooks and she'd quickly conjure an excuse to magic me off to the shops or wherever.

Now I have to say we did have other examples of men in our lives, though you could say the grumpy dad one was the usual. There was my Uncle Lionel who was married to my Mums sister Aunt Kit. They in lived in a brown wooden bungalow in a copse up on the hill overlooking our village. It took about ten minutes maximum to walk there from ours. Aunt Kit was the reason we'd upped sticks to that village in the first place - well it's a bit more complicated than that but I'll explain later.

Uncle Lionel wasn't grumpy at all, and if he was it just made us laugh. Him and Aunt Kit were totally equal. It was their adored Jack Russellish mongrel Tina who ruled their roost. Both worked full time, Aunt Kit as a housekeeper and Li as a chauffeur gardener handyman. They got along really well. He found Aunt Kit's strange turn of phrase funny and used to giggle at things she said. There were no secrets between them, everything seemed open and above board. Aunt Kit always told us the test of a good man was to see if he'd buy the sanitary towels for you. This was in the days when chemists would wrap them up shame faced in a plain brown paper bag. Once when Aunt kit saw a pair of the latest fashion bikini knickers on our line she said: 'They fit where they touch, don't they!' Uncle Li, as we called him, used the swear word 'bloody' when he was annoyed but he never looked or spoke to us girls in a bad way or said anything sleazy about the way we dressed. There was no brewing violence under the surface as there seemed to be with some of the friends' dads or sideways lingering peeps at our blossoming bodies. He never said anything remotely sexual to my single mother either. Sometimes Mum asked him to help with jobs round the house when she was really stumped but he was always too busy and would lend us the tools instead and tell us how to use them.

He taught us how to pluck turkeys, clean paint brushes with turps,(we were trying to do it with water) how to paint walls without leaving brush marks, how to drill and plug the walls for hanging pictures, how to dig the garden and plant potatoes and carrots and all the rest.

We used to bring in the coal, light the fire, unblock the sink, do the gardening. These were jobs dads mostly seemed to do in other households.It was thanks to this that in later years some bloke told me I'd make someone a great husband

Mrs Barratt, my Mums best friend, was an exception. Not for her to wait for the man of the house to get round to putting up a shelf or whatever. She could do everything. She had a Yorkshire accent and would come out with some strange Northern expressions like ekkythump. Whereas my Mum was in the ATS handing out guns at the stores during the war, Mrs B was in the Land Army. She got to drive trucks and fix engines there and was always standing on a chair painting ceilings or driving a nail in with a hammer.. At least fifteen useful tips a day tripped of her tongue relating to cooking, removing stains, keeping chickens or growing spuds.

Her husband Jack was a good bloke too. Again, unlike with the grumpy dads, no-one ever got tense around him. He adored Mrs Barratt and they never seemed to do anything worse than bicker jokingly with each other. When he said what's for dinner she used to say 'pull it and grit' whereas other women would come over all worried looking and rush off to the kitchen. Whenever a woman left our house saying: 'I'd better be off to cook his (husband's) tea' my Mums back would straighten and she'd say scathingly: 'You'll never catch me chasing after some man.'

Mrs Barratt was quite a looker and her banter with Jack was sexy. Jack used to flirt with my Mum too but in the nicest way and it never made Mrs Barratt uneasy. She'd joke away his flirting with an: 'Oy, Watch it Our Jack or I'll be after you'. It put a twinkle in my mother's eye, and everyone was happy.

The shoe debacle was so serious I was wondering what I would do if we didn't make up. Christine and I had become exclusive; too exclusive for our own good because when either of us was off sick we no longer had other mates to hang around with.

My lack of a sense of direction was legendary and a source of amazement and amusement to Christine. Thanks to the shoe incident I had to find my own way to double maths that afternoon. I wandered about uselessly and even sat for five minutes in the wrong room waiting for the others to turn up. I eventually found the class I should have been in and shuffling to my desk ten minutes late I could see Christine looking at me. I returned my haughtiest disapproving stare but she was just collapsing into stifled giggles knowing full well I was late because I'd got lost. This broke the ice and solidarity between us reigned. It was as close as we ever got to a real bust up.

Needless to say when I got home that night I looked through the Catalogue my Mum had ordered the shoes from. There it was in black and white. Brown Leatherette! Christine had been right and I just felt downright inferior.


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We were thirteen and increasingly rebellious. I was definitely the rebel leader with Christine falling in line too eagerly with my points of view. It was a delinquent era but it seemed we were the only ones in our year who were openly tapping into this spirit. The other girls were rebelling in a more predictable way. Once a group of girls from our year were in the library talking about sex. They were admitting to each other 'how far they had gone'. One girl said she'd had 'the finger' at which Christine and I moved away in disgust. There were the make up rebels too, some girls kept wearing pan-stick foundation, rouge, peach nail varnish and fancy ear studs even if it meant a detention. We even heard about a girl going off to hospital because she'd got herself pregnant but we didn't probe to see if it was true, we hated gossip.

Our defining moment for rebellion came when we saw Julie Driscoll in a play on telly. She had very short hair and was hitching rides in lorries. We both cut our own hair short after this and started bunking off school. We'd hitch hike a few miles up the road to some gravel pits and spend the days sunning and swimming.. Our method was pretty fool proof and as we had been 'good girls' up until then we got away with it for virtually a whole summer term. We'd arrive at school on the school bus. Go to our house form for morning registration, then leave and come back in time for the school bus home.

I say pretty fool proof, the weakness in our plan that we were still in our uniforms. Coming back from the gravel pits two days away from the summer break we were spotted by two teachers with a van full of our class mates out on a geography field trip.

I Digress

Before long Christine and I were doing everything together. We volunteered to be school librarians to stay indoors lunch times stamping books. We had smart green gold edged LIBRARIAN badges. I was happy enough with this bit of status and even happier not to get my hair messed up in a cold wind. There were two other Plymouth Brethren Librarians from our year. Ruth and Rebbecca had overall freckles, long coarse gingery single plaits down to their waists, and a very Old Testament way about them. They smelt of scorched lambswool. As law abiding Brethren they regarded us as sinners. They never said as much but we weren't that stupid. Ruth and Rebecca weren't in it for the books either. They'd volunteered so as to get away from the Heathens. After one Christmas holiday I remember us asking them what presents they'd got. "None," they said, "The Brethren don't believe in that sort of Christmas." Any attempt at real conversation between us pretty much stopped after this. We weren't giving up Christmas for anyone. Mine was pretty lean compared to Christine's but way up there in the lap of luxury compared to the celebrations of the dirgey Brethren girls

I was in the library with my horrible new brown shoes one day and moaned that the leather was rubbing me. Christine, ever the snob, said "they're not leather, they're plastic." I insisted they were leather, took one off to show her the lining but she insisted they were not. When she mocked me with the word 'leatherette' I was furious, and after a rising scale of 'no they are not, yes they are, no they're not' got so mad I tapped her on the head with the offending footwear and limped stompily off one shoe off and the other one on like Diddle Dumpling.

The Day My Best Friend Found A Man

We'd done everything together. I was thirteen when she literally courted me to be her friend. I was sitting on a bench at school, a few metres away from the swimming pool with my friend Wendy who wanted to be an actress. Her aunty had been on the stage and she was the inspiration for this ambition. Wendy was already very interested in boys even though we were only twelve. She used to talk endlessly about her older brother and fancied his friends. Her brother loved John Mayall who I'd never heard of up till then. I used to try to keep up by boasting about my brother in law who was the only man in my family life..apart from my Uncle Lionel and he didn't count. I went along with the fancying boys business but really the interest wasn't there.

My brother in law loved Johnny Cash, drove a big lorry and he'd travelled the world with the Merchant Navy. He said the best sunsets he'd ever seen were in South Africa. He could also draw battle scenes like the great Italian painters and play guitar and piano. Not only that but the first Christmas he went out with my eldest sister he bought me and my two other sisters a massive box of Black Magic chocolates each. My mum got a 200 pack of Rothmans cigarettes and a compliment on her nice legs.

Wendy and I were sitting there on our bench, as usual, pretending to be old women..we said things in a strange elderly accent like, "I know, isn't it terrible, it shouldn't be allowed." Christine came along and stood in front of us. She was slim, with braces to control her sticky-out teeth, and had short dark straight hair. She literally hung around us but it was me she was after, not Wendy. I hadn't even noticed her before but I guess she'd been around all along. There was a point where I felt quite guilty about Wendy because gradually I was hanging around with Christine more. Christine was persistent. She'd marked me out to be her friend and wasn't taking no for an answer.

Christine was very class conscious. We used to go into the same loo cubicle together at school..I was standing against the door while she was having a pee and she said: "I can't stand people who go to Bingo, it's common." As my mum went to Bingo once a week with her best friend Mrs Barratt (who'd introduced her to the the excitement of the Jackpot) I went red. Very red. Extreme blushing was the bane of my life. My cheeks would go crimson like a painted doll and it meant that all my discomfort was displayed on my face for the world to see. Anyway, regarding the Bingo, from that time on I used to beg my mother never to say she was going to Bingo in front of my friends. I was always nervous it would slip out or that one of my sisters would mention it.