One of Your Own (6 page)

Despite her poor attendance record, Myra’s school marks were good. Records show her IQ rating as 109, above average, and she sat the 11-plus exam at Levenshulme High. Upon arrival, she was overwhelmed by the prospect of grammar school and stared at the pupils in their immaculate uniforms, trying to fathom how her parents would afford such extravagance. She failed the entrance exam, hinting in her autobiography that she did so deliberately.

Nellie wanted her daughter to attend Ryder Brow Secondary Modern, close to home, but some of Myra’s friends were going on to the Catholic school attached to the monastery and Myra was eager to join them. Bob supported his daughter, but Nellie was vehement: no Catholic school for Myra – that was the deal. Bob tried to sway his wife by inviting an old school friend of his, Father Roderick, to drop by to discuss the matter. The visit was a disaster, as Myra recalled in a letter written while she was on remand; Father Roderick declared that because Bob and Nellie had married in a registry office rather than a church, Myra and Maureen were nothing but bastards. Bob barely managed to restrain his fists as he propelled the priest towards the door. Myra shot off to tell Gran that she was a bastard like her and her mother before her. No amount of pleading, sobbing and shouting on Myra’s part after that could persuade Nellie to send Myra anywhere but Ryder Brow.

Myra began attending the school – a three-quarter-mile walk from Gran’s house – in September 1953. Although she was unhappy at being separated from some of her closest friends, the more affluent backgrounds of a few classmates inspired her with ambition. She recalled, ‘I felt like a fish out of water at first. All of the other kids seemed to have big smart houses and smart clothes, but I still lived in the same house, with a loo down the backyard. This had quite an effect on me at the time and I remember thinking: one day, I’ll have all of that.’
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Myra settled in sooner than she had expected and found a new best friend, Pat Jepson, whom she already knew. Pat lived on Taylor Street, just round the corner from Gran’s house. The two girls spent their evenings and weekends together, playing games on the crofts around Belle Vue. Pat recalls: ‘I don’t remember Myra crying or being a bad sport . . . Myra was a strong character. If we were going anywhere, she picked the place to go . . . She wasn’t a violent person, but if she said something it was taken that it was done.’
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Still taller than average, and skinny, as puberty crept in, Myra developed large hips, and local lads would rile her by shouting ‘Square Arse’ – though few risked saying it within walking distance. ‘Myra wouldn’t let herself be pushed around by any of the boys,’ Pat remembers, ‘She was so tough she frightened some of them off. She was so much a tomboy that I sometimes thought that she wanted to be a boy. On the other hand, she was very intelligent and could hold her own on any subject.’
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Myra was in the A stream throughout her time at Ryder Brow, although she wasn’t an enthusiastic pupil. English remained her favourite subject, and she loved poetry, but otherwise sat listlessly in the classroom. The headmaster, Trevor Lloyd-Jones, tried to engage her by suggesting that she keep an official class diary. She did as he asked, but without any interest. He set her a second task: writing an essay for a classmate to illustrate. Myra had a gift for creative prose – her essays were often read aloud – and she threw herself into the project. The resulting story, ‘Adventure at Four Oaks Farm’, was exceptional. She let her imagination follow where Blyton and Ransom had led, filling an entire exercise book with the tale of a group of intrepid children. Her friend Jean Hicks drew the accompanying pictures. When Myra handed it in, Lloyd-Jones was delighted and said he was going to have it bound and put in the school library. Her sister Maureen – then at primary school – recalled Myra writing two other essays that were highly praised by the teachers, one about a leopard in a jungle, the other about a shipwreck.

She was clever and could have excelled at school but was too idle and had no one to properly motivate her. Practical work was never her strong point: she couldn’t draw and her attempts at needlework were wretched. Myra’s friend Pauline Clapton explains that Myra’s talents lay elsewhere: ‘Myra could run very fast and she would have a go at any game. She was always the best in the gym class. She was in the school rounders team and I remember she made up a song that started, “How would you like to be/in the Ryder rounders team with me?”’
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Anne Murdoch was also in the school rounders team: ‘I didn’t like Myra one bit. She hung around with a gang of girls and was dead cocky. We got off to a bad start: during an early rounders match, I hit the ball and pelted down the field and could hear her screaming at me, “Run faster, go on, faster than that, bloody RUN!” I was fuming and faced up to her, “If I’d run any faster I’d have ended up on my head.” She didn’t like being challenged. “Don’t you
dare
speak to me like that,” she said. “I’ll hit you with my bat if you’re not careful.” I walked off. After a while we got on all right, but we were never friends. She was still a terror during rounders, though – if Myra stumped you out, you didn’t dare argue. She’d fix you with that glare of hers.’
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Naturally gifted at field events such as javelin and discus, Myra was a strong defence in netball because she was so quick and lithe. Her nimble climbing won her another nickname: Monkey. Boys admired her sporting abilities, but she wasn’t pretty enough to grab their attention otherwise. She was more popular with girls, entertaining them by playing the mouth organ and making up little ditties. Linda Maguire, then head girl at Ryder Brow, remembers Myra as ‘funny and always singing, with long, lanky hair’.
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Her attendance record didn’t improve, however. Myra begged her mother and Gran to write notes justifying her absences, and when they refused she wrote them herself. On one occasion, she and Pat Jepson skived school and sneaked round to Gran’s house, expecting it to be empty. When they heard footsteps at the door, they fled. In a fit of remorse, Myra decided to confess to Nana Hindley that she and Pat had played truant. Bob’s mother reacted with unusual calmness and proposed that Myra and Pat should spend the rest of the day cleaning Gran’s house on Beasley Street and Nellie’s on Eaton Street. Gran agreed to the idea when she heard, although she knew exactly what Bob’s mother was insinuating – that she and Nellie didn’t keep their homes in order. But she let it pass and set Myra and Pat to work.

The teachers at Ryder Brow admitted defeat over Myra’s truancy; one morning Trevor Lloyd-Jones asked the class to give Myra a round of applause: she had successfully attended school for five days in a row. Myra shrugged it off with a grin.

Although she disliked school, Myra wasn’t unsociable. Her unwillingness to become involved in classroom discussions was due to boredom, not hostility. As a teenager, she got on well with most of her peers and the younger children. She was always happy to spend time with her sister Maureen, who was small, dark-haired and dainty. Maureen copied everything Myra said and did, and the two of them were as close as siblings could be. Maureen was also a nippy little fighter when she needed to be, but was occasionally bullied. In a 1977 letter, Myra reminisced to a friend that she often ‘leathered’ kids who picked on her sister and recalled an instance where one girl had been tormenting Maureen for weeks without anyone else realising; when Myra found out, she chased the girl across a field: ‘She glimpsed me pelting across and started running like the clappers, but I grabbed her before she had time to lock herself in her backyard and pasted hell out of her. Her big brother, who was in my class, came out and, scared though I was of him, for he was the bigger bully, I went for him before he came for me. To my amazement – to say nothing of relief – he threw his sister and himself into the backyard and bolted the door . . . Returning home, filthy and scruffy, I got yelled at by Gran and clouted by Mam, who, when Maureen explained, was full of contrition, but, bristling with indignation, I stole without compunction two of my mother’s Park Drives and decided to run away from home – until about 10, when I returned because I was starving hungry.’
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As a teenager, Myra was a keen babysitter, and she and Pat Jepson spent many hours looking after neighbours’ children. Mrs Joan Phillips was a regular customer. ‘They were a grand pair of lasses,’ she recalled. ‘They were often round the house, drinking tea and talking about clothes and boys. They never used to take a penny for babysitting – they wouldn’t hear of it – but I used to take the two of them to the pictures now and again as a treat . . . My husband used to say he liked Myra to babysit because we could go out in peace, knowing everything would be all right if she was there. My boys loved her because she would spoil them. She used to bring them chocolate and let them stay up late, and when it was light in the evenings, she used to play football with them on the bit of wasteland near our house. In her last year at school, she and Pat Jepson used to play wag and come round to our house to hide. Myra was wonderful with our Denis. He was only a year old. She used to turn a kitchen chair on its side and put him in-between the legs to teach him to stand up and then to walk. She used to take Gordon, who was about six or seven, to see the cowboys at the children’s matinee on a Saturday at the Cosmo or the Essoldo. Often I would come in and find she’d have Gordon all scrubbed clean and in his pyjamas ready for bed – I think it was the only time he liked being washed, because she made such a game of it. She was like that, Myra, always full of fun, and if she wasn’t chattering on about boys or records, she would be singing the latest tune. You never saw her depressed.’
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Myra was only miserable when she was forced to spend time at home with her rowing parents. Once she repeated something she had picked up at school, telling her father he only had one bad habit. When he asked what it was, she replied flatly, ‘Breathing.’ The comment wounded Bob; he got up from his chair and left the house in silence. Nellie, for once, said nothing either.

Allan Grafton, who lived on Casson Street and was two years younger than Myra but got to know her during football sessions at Ryder Brow, remembers Bob Hindley in a different light: ‘I played football on a Sunday for the Steelworks Tavern and Bob Hindley was our sponsor. He was really a super guy, and what happened to his daughter later killed him. When we came back from playing football, he’d be sitting in the vault, first seat behind the door, and he used to buy all the lads a drink. Every Sunday the monks from St Francis’ Monastery would come round selling their wine – St Francis wine. The monks would get up early, tread the grapes for the wine, do the service and then three of them got on pushbikes and rode up to the Steelworks Tavern in their cassocks to sell their wine and have a few beers. Bob Hindley never let them buy their own drinks – he paid for all the monks’ booze. We’d be just getting in from football as the monks were ready for going and the landlord used to shout for us to nip out of the pub on Gorton Lane to watch these three drunken monks, cassocks flying, wobbling on their bikes back to church. Bob was smashing with them, and with us. Obviously, I only knew him as a person outside the house, but I never once saw him in a fight. He was a kind, generous man. Myra’s mother on the other hand – she was a bawler and a shouter. You’d hear her yelling every day, “Mau-reeeeen! Come in for yer tea!” She was tall and slim, and always used to walk about with her arms folded. Myra did the same, and Maureen.’
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Allan remembers Myra as ‘one of the lads. We used to practise football on Ryder Brow field and she’d hang out with us. Afterwards we’d pile into a pub just off Ryder Brow called The Haxby for pints of shandy. We were underage, but the landlord never bothered because we didn’t cause any trouble. Myra always came in with us. Because she was such a tomboy the lads never took much interest in her. She could look after herself anyway; she was good company, but she said what she thought and didn’t hold anything back.’
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When she wasn’t with her friends or sister, Myra was content to be at home with Gran. All the neighbours knew Ellen Maybury well, and liked her. One of the most frequent visitors was Hettie Rafferty. She was a similar age to Gran and had a ready laugh, though their conversation was often morbid; they liked to speculate on which of them might die first and discussed their acquaintances’ various ailments. When a penniless friend died, Gran cashed in part of her own funeral insurance to buy the man a coffin. She then ‘laid out’ his body and kept the coffin in her front room prior to burial.

Myra arrived home to find the house reeking of embalming fluid and Gran and Hettie Rafferty sitting with the coffin. Sensing her alarm, Gran suggested that Myra see for herself how peaceful the old man looked. Myra edged forward and peered in the coffin, where the old man appeared to be asleep. She reached out to touch his hand, then withdrew quickly from the feel of his cold skin. The following day the coffin had gone.

There were other reminders of mortality that winter, 1954. One afternoon Gran had a visitor whom she hadn’t seen for many years: her daughter Louie’s widower, Jim. Gran welcomed him in with a smile and invited him to stay for tea, but after he’d gone she broke down, vividly remembering the daughter who had died at such a young age. Her depression lingered, but she tried to deflect Myra’s concern by telling her she was worried about her eyesight. Myra insisted that she visit a doctor, and when Gran took her advice, she discovered that she had cataracts and needed an operation.

Myra was distraught when Gran was admitted to hospital. She was supposed to stay with her parents, but after dark she slipped out and ran back home to Gran’s, where she spent a fitful and forlorn night in the front room, wearing Gran’s old coat for comfort. Nellie told Myra that children weren’t allowed on the ward, but Myra begged her mother to sneak her in somehow. To placate her, Nellie styled Myra’s hair and put a bit of make-up on her; she passed the scrutiny of the nurses and hurried to the ward but burst into tears when she saw Gran sitting up in bed with her head swathed in bandages. Gran told her that the operation had been a success. When visiting hours were over, Myra decided to do something constructive and pressed her mother and Aunt Annie into decorating the front room. She and Gran had recently moved again, and their new home had electricity, a copper boiler in an outhouse for heating water and a bedroom that Gran could finally call her own. It was their third house in the same street, but the address was different because the street had been renamed; Myra and Gran now lived at 7 Bannock Street.
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Myra’s relief when her grandmother arrived home was palpable. Gran’s vision was better than it had been in years and her face lit up when she saw the vibrant red wallpaper in the sitting-room and the special meal Myra and Nellie had prepared.