My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (6 page)

I yelped with pain.

‘Now, perhaps that will help you to remember what you were told. You will
not
leave that chair without permission for two weeks.’ He pushed his red, sweating face up close and his bulging eyes stared into mine. ‘
D’you hear me?
’ he shouted.

‘Yes,’ I whispered again.

He banned me from walking for two weeks, forcing me to remain in the chair and sit still all day every day. I wasn’t allowed to move for a fortnight – fourteen endless days. That’s a long time for a small child, left alone with no television and nothing to do.

At least it was peaceful in the daytime. From the second he came through the front door, every moment became unpredictable and every word or movement a risk. But the beating Tommy gave me for breaking my plaster was slight compared with what was to come.

CHAPTER 5

Jenny

Barefoot Summers

As we drove away from our house in Jesmond to go to our bungalow, I would often look back at Newcastle, a grey city cowering under dark clouds and heavy rain, and then find, forty miles later when we got to Embleton, that the evening sunlight was spilling its golden glow across the dunes. In my memories, it was always sunny there. The fresh sea air infused us with energy and melted our stresses away as we crossed the links to reach our sanctuary. You could taste the salt on the air and smell the ozone. It was fantastic. ‘There’s more ozone in the air at Embleton, mind, than anywhere else in the British Isles,’ my mother used to say. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what she always said.

As soon as we arrived at the bungalow, it was off with the town clothes and on with our T-shirts and shorts, but no shoes. It was just grass and sand, so we were in bare feet all the time. The sea was close enough to our house that as I lay in bed at night I could listen to it breathing in and out. I imagined there were mermaids on the rocks, sea-gods on the sand and white horses prancing. Most nights I fell asleep to the ssshhh-shhhh of the waves running up and down the beach in the darkness.

I have a distinct memory of being woken one morning by sunbeams streaming through my window. I had learned to know from the sound of the sea on the sand whether the tide was in or out, so I knew it was a low tide that morning. I lay completely still, listening to the seals barking on the rocks below, a weird, eerie bark – ‘oww-oww-oww’ – echoing across the bay. The flat stones on the beach below our bungalow, where the seals basked, stretched to the water’s edge. They gathered on the higher stones at the back, with gulls, terns and eider ducks nesting amongst them. Terns and kittiwakes skimmed over the dunes and swooped down to land on the stones. I could hear the rhythmic knock-knocking of the sea birds hammering snails on the stones, breaking their shells to extricate breakfast.

The whole bay was a playground, for the wildlife and for us. Some days we went looking for birds’ eggs in the gorse, where thrushes and skylarks nested. We didn’t touch them if we found some, just walked away to a safe distance where we could look through our heavy field glasses and watch the mother birds coming to and fro to feed their chicks. We watched frogs in ponds as they laid their spawn, and loved seeing the eggs hatch and the tadpoles stretch their legs as they darted about beneath the surface and gradually grew into frogs themselves. Nearby there was a nature reserve visited by cormorants and swans, and we often lie down in the gorse with our field glasses to watch them come and go.

Our bungalow was in the perfect spot for some daily golf practice as I got a bit older. As the light faded, I chipped balls from the long dune-grass onto the mowed lawn of the nearby green. The third was a difficult hole, a long green with two bunkers, one on either side, so from the bungalow I had to hit over a massive bunker to get onto the narrow part of the green. It was just a chip-shot – half a wedge; something like that. If I made it I knew it must have been a very good shot. Sometimes I practised till as late as eleven o’clock. I was still young, around six, but a perfectionist even then, and keen to improve.

All the children played golf. There were three holes on the top of the hill towards the sea, and we kids used to go out in our bare feet at night-time, carrying a few clubs in the darkness, and play these three holes round and round.

When I was old enough, maybe eight or nine, my dad started to take me round the course with him to be his caddy and carry his bag, which was great, because I enjoyed his company so much – I was happy to be anywhere with him. His joviality rubbed off on everyone, especially me. We used to talk about his golf as we were going round. He wasn’t a fantastic player, but he loved the game and did well in our club competitions. It wasn’t just golf he loved – he had so much enthusiasm for life. It bubbled out of him. It has stayed with me and inspired me in everything I’ve done.

Dad loved me coming around with him, caddying. We often used to practise shots together, and he was with me the first time I played round the whole course. Looking back now, I’m sure he was proud of me, especially the fact that I often chose to go round with him rather than play with my friends, though occasionally I would say, ‘Oh no, Dad, I can’t today. I said I’d go out in the canoe.’ I’m sure he must have been disappointed on those occasions, though he never showed it. We were such wonderful companions. I don’t suppose he could have realized at that stage that I would make a good golfer.

Sometimes a haar would come in across the bay and over the links. You get them a lot in that area, a kind of sea fog that blots out everything. We couldn’t see our own hands held out in front of us one time when we were all coming across from the car park one night over the dunes. We managed to find our way up to the golf-course, then lost our bearings.

‘Come on, pet, follow me,’ said my mother as we inched along in single file. ‘I know the waaaaaaaay.’

She disappeared. She’d missed her footing and had slid down the damp sand all the way to the bottom of a bunker about six feet below. I was alarmed until I realized, as she climbed out, that she was fine – covered in sand but unscathed.

‘Oh yes, Mam.’ I smiled. ‘You know the way?’ and we laughed together.

The contrast between Embleton and our home in West Jesmond was striking in almost every way. Where we used to live in West Jesmond is now a student area, by the Metro line that runs into Newcastle, but when I lived there as a child, in Ashleigh Grove, West Jesmond was a real community where everyone helped each other, and there were all sorts of shops just round the corner including a general dealer across the road from our house. The wife was Dutch, a lovely woman. I can still picture her cutting the bacon and shaping the butter with her ridged wooden paddles. (All the customers wanted to be served by her, as her husband drooled a little.) There was a dairy next to the dealer’s, then the Co-op, where shoppers collected ‘dividends’, a bit like today’s loyalty cards. My mother used to send me across for things she needed.

‘Go for a loaf at the Co-op, Jen. What is the divi number?’

‘65239.’

‘OK, go quickly now, flower, and look each way before you cross the road. Don’t forget to count the change, then come straight home.’

The old train station, next to the coal yard, was only a couple of streets away, and heavy steam trains rumbled through at regular intervals, blowing their whistles and blackening the buildings. I remember how much my mother had to clean. There was always a layer of coal dust lining our window sills that she could never get rid of, and it thickened the air and clogged our lungs so that we were always coughing. I had chronic bronchitis most winters, and was often sent to stand outside the classroom because I was coughing too much. One winter I fell so seriously ill with a more acute form of bronchitis that I missed a great deal of schooling and ended up having to stay down a year to catch up.

We lived in the house my mother had bought before she married, the last house in our street. When I was small, we lived downstairs and let out the upstairs flat. Everyone knew each other. It was ‘Hello, Mrs Smith’ – always Mrs so-and-so, never first names, even though they’d known each other twenty years.

I was six when my grandmother died and Grandpa Bill came to live with us. He was my dad’s father, medium height and quite stocky, and still quite fit when he took up residence in our front bedroom. He always wore a felt beret edged with leather when he went out. He loved the football and went with Sid to watch Newcastle play nearly every weekend through the season. Because he wasn’t very tall, he made himself a little wooden step that he took with him to stand on to get a better view.

I can still recall the aromatic smell of his pipe tobacco – sweet and fragrant. He used to go to bed every afternoon and take a nap. Although my mother didn’t like him smoking in bed, he took no notice.

‘Come on, Pa,’ she would say. ‘No smoking in bed.’

Grandpa would look suitably contrite until she’d left the room, then he’d turn and give me a wink.

Sometimes he fell asleep with the pipe in his mouth, and occasionally it fell out and the tobacco burnt a hole in the bedding. I won’t ever forget the smell of singeing sheets.

‘Sorry, Con,’ he would say to my mother as she rushed in and poured a pan of water onto the smoking patch.

Grandpa had a little penknife with an ivory handle. One minute he was peeling a Cox’s apple with it and the next he’d be clearing out his pipe. Sometimes he peeled apples for me, but I had to pick the bits of tobacco off them. When I got home from school, he read me stories sitting on his bed. We were very close and I loved him dearly. When he first came to stay and was well enough, he liked to meet me from school and walk me home with him.

I have lovely memories of Grandpa playing with me. He was always happy to join in my games. ‘Ee, what’s it to be today, Jen?’

One day when I came home from school, I devised a rather boisterous version of cowboys and Indians. He was lying down on his bed having a nap, so I ran in and jumped on him. It was meant to be part of the game and he, with his usual good humour, joined in. But when he got up he had a nosebleed.

‘Oh dear me, Pa!’ exclaimed my mother, raising her hand to her mouth. ‘Look at your nose! It’s bent.’

At some stage of the game I must have broken his nose. I felt awful about it, but nobody told me off. When my father got home, he had to take Grandpa to hospital to have it fixed.

After Miss Brewis’s nursery school, I had moved on to the first class of Newcastle upon Tyne Church High School for Girls – Church High as it was known locally. Or ‘The Green-Knicker Brigade’, after the thick green knickers we had to wear. The teachers used to do a regular knicker-check, just to make sure we always wore them.

Church High was an all-through school for ages five to eighteen, and there I made friends with another girl called Jennifer. She was my only other close friend in Newcastle, besides my cousins and Joy McGill, who lived near me and walked to school with me.

One morning, as Joy and I were hurrying to school worrying about being late, a man in a long raincoat stepped out across the pavement in our way. As we approached, he opened his raincoat and flashed us. Joy, who was a little older than me, grabbed my hand and half-dragged me along for the last part of our journey. ‘Don’t look back,’ she said.

On arrival at school, we reported this and then went to our lessons. Halfway through the day we were both called out of our classrooms to talk to the police and look through some photos to see if we could recognize the flasher. I don’t remember whether we did or not, but this caused great excitement amongst our classmates and we were both very popular that day! Fortunately, it never happened again.

My main friends were the children I played with at Embleton, boys and girls of different ages. We all got on so well, but in my mind I was always an only child. Much loved, but very much the only child. I minded not having any sisters or brothers, but I didn’t dwell on it much in my younger years. If Mam was working long hours, Dad and Grandpa were always there to play with and we had a lot of fun together, but there were moments when I missed a sibling’s companionship.

One day, I spotted a dog tied up to the wrought-iron railings outside our school. When I bent down to stroke him, he turned round and bit me, which shocked me so badly that, for a long time after that, I was terrified of dogs. My father sensed my fear and spoke to my mother about it.

‘I think we should have a dog. It would be good for Jennifer.’

‘We are not having a dog in this house.’

‘But a dog would be good company for her, pet.’

‘I do not want a dog in this house. I have enough to do as it is, without dog hairs and worse to clean up. We are definitely not going to have a dog. That’s my final word on the matter.’

She was so adamant about it that Dad didn’t raise the subject again. But one day – I must have been about seven – he came home from work with a tiny bundle tucked under his jacket. It was a black and white cocker spaniel puppy he’d been given by one of his work colleagues.

‘Oh, Sid. Not a puppy!’ exclaimed my mother.

Dad put the puppy down gently on the floor and she scampered around, exploring her new home. As she watched, Mum’s anguished scowl turned to an involuntary smile and she began to waver.

‘Can we keep her, Mam?’ I implored.

‘We-e-ell . . .’

‘Please, Mam.
Please!
’

‘All right,’ she surrendered. ‘As long as you can train her properly. I don’t want messes all over the house, mind.’

This dog took over the role of the sister I never had. I named her Janie and I talked to her all the time as we played together. She listened and sympathized if I had troubles at school, and was a loyal companion, always there for me – such a great friend.

‘That dog is your shadow, Jen,’ my dad used to say as she followed me about.

Much as I loved Janie, there were still times when I longed for a proper brother or sister. I got on very well with my cousins, some of whom were also only children, and with Barbara in particular, who was the same age as me, but she had sisters of her own, so for me it wasn’t like having someone always there to play with and talk to, especially when difficult things happened. Sharing my feelings and worries with someone of my age would have helped so much.