Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

‘First of all, though,’ she said, ‘we’re going on holiday!’

I couldn’t believe it. We were to spend a week at the Middleton Tower Holiday Camp near Morecambe, Lancashire. Dad was to be admitted for surgery soon after we got back but I didn’t worry about his operation in the slightest. All I could think about was our impending break, which was the first proper holiday we’d ever had. The camp was like nothing I had ever seen. Set in sixty acres with nine hundred chalets, its dining rooms and cafeterias could feed three thousand people. The main building, which had a theatre and a dance floor, was modelled on a Cunard cruise ship called the SS Berengaria. We were joined by my mum’s mother Ada – or ‘Nanny’ as I called her, who was a traditional cuddly grandmother from Ellesmere Port. Then there was Aunt Bessie, who brought her daughters, my cousins, Barbara, Linda and Janet. My brother Peter, who was sixteen, brought along a couple of friends.

Even though my father wasn’t very well he still drew people to him and he and my mother were so lovely on that holiday – like newlyweds. They danced together most nights and I can remember watching them on the dance floor and feeling a little jealous. Later, my lovely dad made sure to dance just with me. Best of all, he won a bingo prize of sixty pounds which more than paid for the holiday. He was so happy.

Soon after we came home, Dad was admitted to Chester City Hospital where he was expected to stay for two weeks. We were planning to visit him one night after school but Mum said there had been a complication and that he needed peace and quiet. ‘He’ll be home soon,’ she told us, sensing our disappointment. I couldn’t wait. The house felt so empty without his laughing presence.

The day he was due to be discharged I hurried back from school, excitedly skipping along in front of our row of terraced houses, the gardens of which sloped to the road. As usual, the other mothers were standing by their gates or leaning across their garden fences, chatting to each other as they waited for their children to come home. But on that particular afternoon, something unusual happened. One by one, the women stopped talking, turned, and walked back up their paths without saying hello to me. I remember thinking how strange that was as I danced on by.

Dad wasn’t waiting at our garden gate as I’d hoped he might be. Swallowing my disappointment, I ran inside and found my mother in the kitchen. ‘Is he home?’ I asked breathlessly.

She bent down and took my hands in hers. ‘Yes, Pauline, but he’s in bed. He’s still not very well. Why don’t you go up and see if he recognizes you?’

I ran up the stairs two at a time wondering what Mum meant. Of course Daddy would recognize me – he’d only been away two weeks. But the man lying in my parents’ bed hardly even looked like my father. The shock froze me halfway across the room.

‘Dad?’

His eyes flickered open and he turned to look at me, but didn’t respond. Taking a step forward, I reached for his hand. It lay limply in mine. ‘Daddy? It’s Pauline.’

He closed his eyes again and I stood stock still, uncertain what to do. If only he’d open them and say, ‘Hi, baby.’ He often referred to me as ‘baby’, which I loved.

My mother came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Something happened during the operation,’ she said. Her voice was strange. ‘It’s left Daddy a bit confused.’

He remained ‘confused’ for the rest of the day and by evening Mum was so worried that she summoned a doctor, who called an ambulance. I stood silently on the landing as two men manhandled my father past me on a stretcher.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Dad asked them, his eyes fearful.

‘To a lovely hotel, Ernie,’ one of the ambulance men replied, giving his colleague a conspiratorial wink.

I was furious. How dare they talk to my father as if he were stupid! I wanted to push them down the stairs and out of the house.

Visiting the hospital over the next few days wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it would be. When we got there we had to sit quietly at the side of the bed while Mum gently woke my father. Sometimes he would recognize us but often he didn’t. The doctors said he’d suffered a blood clot on the brain during the operation. Only once did he seem to know who I was. He looked at me, turned to my mum and said, ‘The baby’s too skinny. She’s doing too much dancing.’

He never called me baby again.

When Auntie Ivy came up from Southampton with her husband Len and daughter Anne, I knew things were serious. A week later, on 8 July 1953, my father died. We didn’t have a telephone but they somehow sent word from the hospital. He had a type of cancer known as Hodgkin’s disease, the doctors told my mother, although it didn’t really matter that it had a name. His death certificate also cited cerebral haemorrhage as a secondary cause of death.

Dad did come home then, but in a wooden coffin that rested on trestles in the middle of the living room so that friends and family could pay their respects. I was terrified of that open box with the white gauze cloth draped loosely over my father’s frozen expression. I was only fourteen years old; I’d never seen a dead body before. The room had a sweet, sickly smell, which I suppose was to mask the formaldehyde. All I knew was that the cloying scent stuck to the back of my throat.

For three days, people came and went. Whenever I was summoned by my mother to say hello to our guests, I would creep in and cling to the walls, walking around the edge of the room and averting my gaze. My mother finally asked me, ‘Why won’t you look at your father, Pauline?’

I hesitated before whispering, ‘I’m frightened.’

Mum sat me down. ‘He never hurt you when he was alive,’ she told me, ‘and he certainly won’t hurt you now that he’s dead.’

Dad had been a choirboy at St Mary’s in Handbridge, so his funeral was held there. Mum bought me a lovely new skirt and top and everyone kept hugging me and creasing it. The church was filled with flowers and people, including fellow Marines and colleagues from the BICC factory where Dad had worked. The vicar, who’d known my father as a boy, said that he’d been an excellent footballer, a model member of the community and a good family man. My mum was more upset than I had ever seen her and kept dabbing her eyes behind her spectacles with a white lace handkerchief. I didn’t know what to do to stop her crying. Peter was as white as a sheet and didn’t say a word.

Dad was buried in the family plot at Blacon on the other side of Chester. As I watched clods of earth shovelled on to the lid of his coffin, I thought to myself, Well, he was forty. That’s really old.

Going home to an empty house felt stranger still. No more coffin; no more sickly smell. People didn’t come to pay their respects any more and it was just the three of us with no Dad bursting in from work to put on a record, roll back the carpet and pull my mother or me into a laughing waltz. It was peculiar going back to school without even Peter for company. I was the only child who’d lost a father in my class and that made me feel very different – older, I guess, and more lonely.

My mother had one really good black-and-white photograph of my dad, which she cherished. A few weeks after he died, she took me with her to Will R. Rose’s, a famous photographer’s studio in Chester. ‘I’d like this hand-coloured and enlarged, please,’ she told the man behind the counter, handing him the precious photo.

‘Certainly, madam,’ he said, studying the picture of my smiling dad. ‘Tell me, what colour are his eyes?’

My mother faltered. ‘He had the most beautiful blue eyes…’ she said, trying to hold herself together. After that, she couldn’t say another word.

Two (#ulink_e0873522-b1fe-5f15-a62c-6249e5964e4a)

I THINK WHAT SAVED ME DURING THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS AFTER MY FATHER died was my dancing. By practising daily and trying to ignore the pain in my heart, I managed to work my way to the top of my tap class and was all set to try for a silver medal. I already had my bronze, which was my pride and joy. I kept it in a special place in my bedroom, touching it like a talisman whenever I passed it.

Then one day my mother broke some bad news. ‘I’m so sorry, Pauline,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to give up your classes. I can’t afford them any more.’ I knew that money had been tight since Dad had died and that luxuries were out of the question but nothing much else had changed; we still had a lamb roast every Sunday and it hadn’t occurred to me that my dancing might have to stop. I was devastated but, looking at my mother’s expression, I could tell that she had no choice.

Instead of tip-tapping my way through dance classes after school, I turned my feet in the direction of a house in Queen’s Park, just over the suspension bridge in Chester, where Mum now worked as a cleaner. Wandering through the lofty rooms of that beautiful red-brick Georgian house, its silver and brass gleaming from all her polishing, I’d wonder what it would feel like to own such a place. Not that I ever imagined I would. I reckoned I’d probably stay in our little terraced home for the rest of my days, taking care of my mum and helping her pay the bills. I hated that she had to work so hard. As well as cleaning, she had a full-time job at the Ideal Laundry in Boughton Heath, which rented out linens to big hotels and restaurants. She operated the hot iron press and came home smelling of starch.

Peter, at sixteen, was now the head of our household. Still just a boy but trying to be a man, he took his responsibilities very seriously. My father had always teased him that he was ‘the brainy one’ and would never end up getting his hands dirty. Once Dad died though, Peter left school and went to work at the same factory, albeit behind a desk as a trainee in the sales department. The personnel welfare officer who’d offered him the job had been one of those who’d come to the house to pay his respects when Dad died.

Within just a few months of starting his first job, though, Peter started to lose weight and became quite poorly. He went to the doctor on several occasions but, as with Dad, no one seemed able to help. By the time he finally went to see a specialist, it was discovered that he had pleurisy and his lungs were filling with fluid. He was rushed to hospital and ended up in the same ward Dad had been in. My poor mother must have feared the worst. Peter’s pleurisy then developed into tuberculosis and the doctors warned my mother that he’d ‘outgrown his strength’.

Peter was sent away to the three-hundred-bed Cheshire Joint Sanatorium at Loggerheads in Staffordshire, where he remained on a ‘fresh air and rest’ cure for the next eighteen months. Every Sunday, Mum and I would take the bus all the way out to beyond Market Drayton to take him magazines, fruit and a fresh pair of pyjamas. He was very poorly, and so pale. TB was a killer in those days and was treated very seriously. The nurses gave Peter enormous pills to swallow, as big as an old penny. Only one visitor was allowed into his room at a time, so Mum and I would take turns. Later, the nurses would wheel his bed out into the fresh air to help improve his breathing. All wrapped up in blankets over his striped pyjamas and dressing gown, he virtually had to sleep in the grounds overnight, so convinced were they of the benefits of oxygen. Mum and I would stay for an hour or so before making the long journey home to a house that felt emptier still.

I knew the day was looming when I’d have to leave school too and decide how to earn my keep. Because I was good with my hands I often made my own clothes. Dad had bought me a sewing machine a year or so before, although when he tried to mend his overalls on it once he’d broken it. Maybe I could become a dressmaker or work in a ladies’ wear shop? My interest in fashion probably came from all the classic films I’d watched as a child. My parents had both been dapper and I loved dressing up in Mum’s clothes, especially her hats.

There was a wonderful hat shop in Chester run by a lady called Mary Jordan. It was in the Rows, a sort of medieval shopping mall that I used to skip down as a child. The Hollywood actress Margaret Lockwood, star of The Wicked Lady, used to go there to have hats specially made for her. That really impressed me: a big star like her coming to our town. I dreamed of working in Mary Jordan’s, making hats for film stars like Joan Collins, Audrey Hepburn or Jean Simmons. When I learned that the shop was offering an apprenticeship I wanted it with all my heart but another girl from my school was offered it so my chance was lost.

Disappointed, I heard from a school friend called Norma Hignett that a big new development was about to open in Chester as part of the Lewis group, which owned the famous Bon Marché department store in Liverpool. There’d be a shop, a restaurant, a jazz club, a bar, dance floor and a hairdressing salon, all under the name Quaintways.

‘They’ve got vacancies for trainee hairdressers,’ Norma told me. ‘You don’t need any experience; I’ve been taken on already. The salon opens in a week. If you like, I’ll see if I can get you in.’

Hairdressing, I concluded bravely, was fashion too. After all, film stars had to have good hair as well as fancy clothes. With Norma’s help, I applied for a job at Quaintways and was signed up for a three-year apprenticeship with a starting salary of three pounds a week. I’d begin as a trainee learning how to wash hair and give manicures before moving up to the position of ‘improver’. By the end of five years, I’d be a fully qualified hairdresser and manicurist with my own clients and the chance to make up my income with tips. Aged fifteen, I left school on the Friday afternoon and started work when Quaintways opened the following Monday morning. I could tell my mother was relieved. Although our house was like a new pin and she always kept a good table, she was undoubtedly struggling without my father’s weekly pay packet and mine, though small, would make a difference.

On my first day at work I wore a skirt I’d made myself from a favourite Vogue pattern. Conscious of being so thin, I’d added layers of petticoats underneath to make it a dirndl skirt, which I hoped would make me look shapelier than I really was. To hide my overly long neck, I wore a high-necked polo sweater. The whole look was finished off with a little waspie belt and flat shoes. Oh, and a matching umbrella cover: I made one for all my outfits and they became my trademark.

I arrived at the salon on opening day with the ten other juniors who’d been taken on. We were all given pink overalls to wear and I slipped mine on. Because my skirt stuck out so much, the overall rode up and didn’t cover anything. Miss Jones, the manageress of the salon, laughed. ‘You’ll never get near the wash basin,’ she told me. ‘You’ll have to take off your skirt.’ I was horrified. I knew that wearing the skimpy overall on its own would make me look thinner still but I had no choice. The next day I made sure to wear a less bulky outfit.

Try as I might, I couldn’t gain weight. The film stars I most admired had curves in all the right places, none of which I possessed, although I did at least have a bust. Mum had already taken me to see the doctor about it. After examining me, he asked how much I ate. ‘Like a horse,’ my mother replied, which was true.

‘Please, doctor,’ I asked him, ‘how can I get bigger?’

‘Take more exercise,’ was his reply. Mum and I looked at each other in disbelief I had never stopped dancing and even after I’d had to give up my classes I kept practising at home. When my mother told the doctor this, he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Being skinny must be in her genes,’ was all he could suggest. It was just as I feared; I was a hopeless case.

Not long after I joined Quaintways, something happened that completely took my mind off gaining weight. I was told I had a telephone call at the salon, which shocked me. We’d never had a telephone at home and I’d hardly ever used one. Taking the unfamiliar receiver I listened as a woman from the Ideal Laundry told me that my mother had been taken to hospital after an accident at work. I threw off my overall and hurried across town to the same Chester City Hospital where my father had died and where Peter had first been admitted for pleurisy.

My mother’s left hand was heavily bandaged and she was in a great deal of pain. She’d been working on the double press, smoothing down the sheets and tablecloths while another woman stood by operating the floor pedal which brought the hot iron thumping down. On this particular day, her colleague wasn’t paying attention and she accidentally hit the pedal while Mum’s hand was still smoothing under the iron. When they managed to extricate her hand from the machinery, her wedding and engagement rings were so flattened and embedded into her flesh that they had to be cut off. Her fingers were horribly disfigured and burned down to the bone. She was told that she’d have to endure a series of grafting operations, using skin taken from her thigh.

My great-aunt Mabel and my cousin Rita, who lived next door, helped look after me while Mum underwent her operations. Rita took me shopping or to the pictures, but I still remember feeling terribly lonely. My father was dead; Peter and my mother were both in and out of hospital. I couldn’t help but feel abandoned.

Mum had trouble with her left hand for the rest of her life and was never able to do manual labour again. She eventually received compensation from the company after a drawn-out legal process. They didn’t award her a huge amount, considering how disfigured her hand was, but it certainly seemed enormous to us. She took me into Liverpool on the train and bought me a beautiful fuchsia-coloured coat with a fur collar, which I kept for years. She bought herself and Peter something special too, and then put the rest of the money away. As soon as her hand was mended, she took a job behind the counter in Woolworths in Chester where she was brilliant at dealing with people. From there she went to work in a shop that sold raincoats and umbrellas. The manager couldn’t believe she’d ever been a manual labourer because she was such a stylish little lady who could speak to anybody. My mother wasn’t a snob, though. She’d take any work as long as it paid.