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‘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.
At around the same time as my mother was recovering from her accident, she began dating a local man called Harry Dawson, who was an inspector on the buses. I knew his two daughters Pat and Shirley from my dancing days. Harry was a widower and a lovely man. Although it had been not much more than a year since my father had died, I was happy that she had someone to share her life with, especially during such a difficult time. After all, she was only in her late thirties.
Everyone else around me seemed to have new interests too. Once Peter was discharged from the sanatorium after eighteen months, he was transferred to the Wrenbury Hall Rehabilitation Centre near Nantwich. Under the care of the Red Cross, he gradually gathered his strength although the TB had weakened him terribly and he would spend another thirteen months recovering. He was placed on the Disabled Persons Register until he was twenty-one.
Joyce, my childhood friend, got engaged to her future husband Peter and moved to Ellesmere Port and we lost touch for a while. I became friendlier with her sister Barbara, but then she found herself a regular boyfriend as well. I didn’t realize it at the time but my loneliness and the feeling that life was happening to everyone else but me made me vulnerable.
At least I had my job, which I loved, although most of the girls at work had busy social lives too. The other juniors especially became like a second family to me. From day one, we were ‘the Quaintways Girls’ and I became known to all as ‘Tilly’ Tilston, a nickname which stuck for life.
Quaintways soon became the place to go in Chester and ours was the premier salon. With a food shop, restaurant and nightclub, it felt more like a luxurious social club than a place of work. We even put on little modelling shows after hours for customers with each of us wearing a new outfit chosen from the store. The Quaintways restaurant was very popular, as was the Wall City Jazz Club run by a man called Gordon Vickers, who became a lifelong friend. He booked acts like the clarinettist Monty Sunshine and the Chris Barber Band. When one new group from Liverpool asked if they could play at the club, Gordon told them they could only if they cut their hair. The Beatles refused.
Several of the senior hairdressers who’d been brought into Quaintways from all over the country had famous clients like the singers Alma Cogan, Rosemary Squires, and Dickie Valentine, who’d come to Chester to sing at the Plantation Inn on the Liverpool Road. Through them, the hairdressers were often invited to the Oulton Park race circuit to attend parties with Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn and other famous drivers. There was even glamour among some of my fellow juniors too. One called Trish Fields had a fabulous voice and was a part-time singer at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, taking her turn between bands like the Swinging Blue Jeans and those rebellious kids who wouldn’t cut their hair.
The older women in the salon seemed so grown up and worldly-wise to me. They dated everyone from sporting heroes to servicemen; they drank, smoked and stayed out late. I used to listen to some of their whispered conversations and wonder what on earth they were giggling about. My mother had never spoken to me about being intimate with a boy and there had never been any sex education at school. Because Peter had been in hospital throughout my teenage years I’d not had a big brother to advise me and I’d never even had a boyfriend, apart from one nice lad who lived across the street and who sometimes took me to the church hall dance. I’d had a silly crush on another boy at school who sometimes let me ride on the crossbar of his bicycle but it had never gone beyond holding hands.
One hairdresser in particular often spoke to me about the airmen she dated from the USAF bases nearby at Sealand, Queensferry and Warrington. ‘The Americans are great company,’ she’d tell me during breaks. ‘They love to dance and they really know how to treat a girl. Why don’t I fix you up on a blind date, Tilly?’
I resisted at first, feeling shy and awkward, but the more she spoke about her ‘lovely Americans’ the more I thought back to the party I’d attended that first Christmas after Dad died. The airmen there had been so charming and kind. Where would be the harm? Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask Mum if she thought it would be all right.
‘OK,’ she said as she was getting ready to go out with Harry one night, ‘but make sure you’re back by ten.’
My friend originally set me up with an airman called Joe but he was sent back to the States so I ended up with someone I’ll call ‘Jim’. He’d just turned twenty-one and I was not quite sixteen when we first met. He knew how old I was but what he probably didn’t realize was that I’d never even been kissed. He took me to the Odeon in Chester to see a film called Johnny Dark in which Tony Curtis played an engineer who’d designed a racing car. I don’t remember much about the film because I was too excited by the company I was keeping. At six feet two inches tall with smouldering good looks, Jim was quiet, courteous and kind. Better still, he was a singer of country and western songs and he played in the clubs and bars on the American bases. He sang to me on the way home and had a really lovely voice, a bit like Jim Reeves. I was convinced my music-loving father would have approved.
For the next six months I was in a whirl. My lonely days were at an end. Jim was just like a film star, and he was mine. I thought about him night and day and the feeling appeared to be mutual. When we weren’t together he’d call me up on the telephone and sing to me down the line, which made my knees buckle. He took me to a dance at one of the bases to meet some of his friends. They were all much older and more sophisticated than me but with Jim on my arm I felt invincible. I wasn’t ‘Tilly’ to Jim, I was his ‘Paula’ – the name he always used for me – and I suddenly felt so grown up.
He’d meet me in Chester after work and walk me home. More often than not, my mother would be out working or courting Harry so we’d have the place to ourselves. I’d play house – cooking him a meal and making him tea and imagining what life would be like if this was how it always was. I even presented him with my most precious possession – my bronze medal for tap dancing. He said he was thrilled. When he held me in his arms and told me he wanted to marry me, I believed him completely and gave him all that he asked. In my heart, I was still a little girl and he was my first love. I barely knew what I was doing, although I did know it was naughty and that if my mother ever found out she’d be furious. Nobody had ever told me about taking precautions and Jim never said anything, so I carried on obliviously.
All I could think about was that Jim was going to marry me. Excitedly, I blurted out the news to my mother. She was my best friend in the world and I couldn’t wait for her to share my joy. Her reaction wasn’t at all what I expected. ‘You’re far too young to think about marriage yet!’ she told me, horrified. Although I was disappointed, I was too blind to take any notice.
Then one day she sat me down after work. ‘I think you should know: Jim’s married already,’ she said. I looked up at her in disbelief. ‘Harry’s sister-in-law works at the base. She found out.’
I was shattered. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me, although I knew she’d never lie. A day or two later, my mother summoned Jim to the house to confront him. I had never seen her so angry. All five feet of her stood up to his lanky frame and she dominated the room. I just sat there, crying and trying to take it all in.
His response relieved me enormously. ‘Yes, I have a wife, ma’am,’ he told her, looking genuinely contrite, ‘but I’m getting a divorce.’ He pulled out a photograph of a baby daughter he’d also never mentioned. My head was in a spin. I didn’t know what to think, but then he told my mother, ‘I love Paula, Mrs Tilston, and I want to marry her. I’m going home to arrange the divorce and then I’ll send for her.’
Having veered from shock to despair, I was on cloud nine once more.
Mum wasn’t at all happy but she knew how strongly I felt about Jim so she reluctantly agreed that I could carry on seeing him until he left for America. I pined for the end of each day when I’d be seeing him after work. Although I dreaded him leaving the country, I couldn’t wait to join him and would lie awake at night imagining what our life together would be like across the Atlantic. He told me that we’d be living on a military airbase to begin with and he tried to prepare me for what to expect. He said I’d have to go to a special school to learn about American culture for my citizenship exams. I told the girls in the salon all about it and we chattered excitedly about me moving abroad. Secretly, I was terrified by the idea. I’d never lived anywhere but Chester; I’d not even been to London, and I hadn’t ever flown in an aeroplane. But as long as Jim was waiting for me, I knew I could do it – even if it meant leaving everything and everyone that I’d ever known.
I planned our romantic farewell over and over in my mind. I imagined myself tearfully waving him off at the train station or kissing him goodbye at the gates to the airbase. The fairytale ending I’d dreamed of crumbled to dust when he called me late one night to tell me he’d be flying home early the following morning.
‘My leave’s been cancelled,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no time to say goodbye.’ He gave me the forwarding address of his new base and promised to write soon.
I placed the telephone back in its cradle and burst into shuddering tears. At least he had my tap-dancing medal as his talisman but it was all so sudden. I could hardly believe that in a few hours’ time my Jim, the love of my life, would be flying away from me.
Three (#ulink_a8e1a2a1-778a-55ee-82f1-49d195fbf3ad)
I’D HAD SUCH AN EMOTIONAL FEW MONTHS THAT I FELT PHYSICALLY AND mentally drained. It seemed that everything that could have happened to me in my life had happened in that very short space of time. Well, almost everything.
When my period was late that month, I honestly didn’t think anything about it. I’d not been eating well and I’d hardly been sleeping. I told myself the distress I’d been suffering was bound to have an effect on my body. But as the days passed and nothing happened, I began to grow more fearful, terrified of what this might really mean.
Four months after my sixteenth birthday in February 1955, I finally summoned up the courage to blurt out the news to my mother. The look on her face will remain with me for ever. ‘But, Pauline!’ she cried. ‘What are you telling me? My God, you’re just a child yourself. Your body isn’t even fully developed yet!’
I sat at the kitchen table, my arms wrapped around me as she scolded me, her voice rising with shock and anger. By the end of that night she was too upset for me and too angry at Jim to fight any more and we were both too exhausted to try. The following morning, she hugged me and took me to the doctor’s surgery where I’m certain she hoped he’d tell her I was mistaken. When he confirmed her worst fears, I’m sure she secretly hoped he’d tell me how to get rid of the baby I was carrying, but doctors didn’t do that sort of thing back then.
The thought of an abortion never even crossed my mind. This was my baby. I loved its father with all my teenage heart. He was going to marry me and we’d live happily ever after in America. Of course I was going to keep it. I was so shocked when, on the way home from the surgery, Mum turned to me on the bus and said, ‘You won’t be able to bring the baby home, you know. I’m working. You’re working. Peter’s in hospital. There’s no one to look after it. How can we possibly give this baby the home it deserves?’
I knew she was upset and decided that she just needed time to get used to the idea. As far as I was concerned I had little reason to worry. The minute Jim found out I was pregnant, I was certain he’d hurry through his divorce, send for me, and we’d be wed before the baby was born. Even if there was a delay, it wasn’t unheard of for women to become pregnant out of wedlock in Chester. There had been a couple of examples very close to home. A girl across the road from where we lived had a baby by a local boy when she was young and had married the father so they could raise the child together. My next-door neighbour became pregnant in her early twenties by an American long before I’d even met Jim. She didn’t marry her airman or move to the States, but she kept her daughter nonetheless.
I wrote to Jim straight away at the address he’d given me, telling him my momentous news. I’m going to have our baby, I wrote, choosing my words carefully. I hope you’re as happy as I am. Every morning in the days and weeks that followed, I watched and waited for the postman to bring me a blue airmail envelope, a postcard, anything…but nothing came. The daily disappointment made me feel even sicker to my stomach.
After a while, my mother decided to take matters into her own hands. Taking Harry along for moral support, she made an appointment with one of the senior officers at the airbase where Jim had taken me to the dance and demanded to know his whereabouts.
‘We have no airman here by that name,’ the officer told her blankly. ‘We never have had.’ Even my indomitable little mother could do nothing against the immovable might of the United States Air Force.
I refused to lose heart and continued to believe that Jim would write any day or, better still, turn up on my mother’s doorstep, his cap pushed to the back of his head the way it always was, with that huge grin on his face. There must have been a problem with his wife, I convinced myself. Maybe she was making things difficult? Maybe the USAF was? After all, they’d pretended he didn’t even exist.
I’d lie on my bed in my room, playing the number one hit ‘Unchained Melody’ by Jimmy Young over and over on my little gramophone, hoping that somewhere across the Atlantic Jim might be listening to it too. Time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. Are you still mine? The words seemed to have been written specially for us.
The hardest part was going to work at the salon each day, my baby growing secretly inside me. The girls stopped asking if I’d heard from Jim. They could tell from my puffy eyes that I hadn’t. They were kind and supportive but they left me alone. There was no more happy chatter about my new life in America or what sort of wedding dress might best suit my beanpole frame. I told no one about the baby and fortunately didn’t really suffer from morning sickness so no one suspected. I covered myself up well, despite the fact that I was suddenly not quite so skinny any more.
Then one day, when I was about five months’ pregnant and still holding myself in, Doreen ‘Dors’ Jones, my manageress, told me that the boss of Quaintways, Mr Guifreda, wanted to see me in his office. I’d never been summoned to see him before and I couldn’t imagine what he might want. A Sicilian in charge of the restaurant, salon and just about every aspect of the enterprise, he was a kind and friendly man so I wasn’t afraid, but I was a little nervous. When Miss Jones came into the office with me, closed the door and stood behind me, I felt my knees begin to tremble.
Mr Guifreda told me to take a seat. ‘So, Tilly,’ he began. ‘Have you anything to tell me?’ He gave me a gentle smile.
I looked at him.
I looked up at Miss Jones.
Then I looked down at my hands.
‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
His statement wasn’t really a question and I began to cry.
Miss Jones placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder and passed me a handkerchief. Mr Guifreda looked almost as upset as I was. ‘Now, now, don’t cry,’ he soothed, patting my hand. ‘We’ll take care of you. Everyone will.’
He was true to his word. From that day on, they all did. Within the hour, everyone knew about ‘Tilly’s baby’ or ‘the Quaintways’ baby’ as it was sometimes known. Bowls of nourishing soup were sent to me with the compliments of the chefs in the restaurant. Clearly, they thought I needed fattening up. The other girls in the salon made sure I didn’t do too much or strain myself lifting anything. Most of the regular customers soon suspected and started to give me extra tips to buy ‘something nice for the baby’. Everyone was so kind and took such special care of me. I couldn’t have been in better hands.
Back home, the atmosphere was far more strained. My mother, who was a very proud woman and worried about the prying eyes of the neighbours, had been summoned to Quaintways by Mr Guifreda, who reassured her that my job would remain open for me. She thanked him but told me not to tell anyone else. Insisting that she was doing what was best for the baby, she contacted social services and the Church of England Children’s Society. Between them, they arranged that when I was seven months’ pregnant I would go to St Bridget’s House of Mercy in Lache Park, beyond Handbridge.
I adored my mother but I pleaded with her to allow me to stay at home. ‘Can’t I have it here?’ I begged. ‘Then we can just look after it ourselves.’
‘How?’ she’d cry, shaking her head. ‘Who’ll look after it when we’re both out at work all day? There’s nobody but us here now and neither of us can afford to give up our jobs. You have to be sensible, Pauline. It would be cruel to the baby to do anything but this and they’ll take better care of your baby than we could.’
There were no crèches in those days and, even if there had been, we couldn’t have afforded one. I earned just over three pounds a week with tips and, although my mother earned a little more, every penny was spoken for. We had few relatives nearby and those we had were working too. Peter knew nothing of my pregnancy and was still at the rehabilitation centre. Nobody could help us.
I was assigned a social worker, a middle-aged Dutch lady called Mrs Cotter, who visited me regularly as the pregnancy progressed. ‘You’ll stay in the mother and baby home for three months after the birth and then the baby will be put up for adoption,’ she told me. ‘If suitable parents can’t be found, it will be placed in a state nursery until they can.’
I watched the words fall from her mouth but I never really thought they would apply to me. Jim would be back by then, I kept telling myself, or, if for some terrible reason he wasn’t, my mother would change her mind at the last minute and let me keep the baby. I was certain of it.
