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.