Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

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He didn’t even flinch. ‘We could make an outing of it,’ he replied. ‘There’s some pretty countryside round Matlock.’ He’d never once asked me about Paul’s father or what had happened between us. He just said he knew all that he needed to know. Part of me would have dearly liked him to have bombarded me with questions. My time with Jim, the lonely pregnancy, being at St Bridget’s, Paul’s birth and everything that had happened afterwards had been virtually erased from my life. John’s family certainly never brought it up. My mother rarely spoke of it and if I raised the subject, it only gave her an opportunity to tell me what I should do next. The girls at work no longer asked after Paul or what my plans for him were.

And so my innocent young son remained the elephant in the room that nobody dared discuss. Yet he was always on my mind and everywhere I looked there seemed to be reminders. John and I would often spend days off at Chester Zoo, and I’d see a mother and son wandering along holding hands and wonder why that couldn’t be Paul and me. I’d flick through racks of clothes in the children’s department of Brown’s and wish I could afford to buy some of them for him. I marked each anniversary privately in my heart: the day I first met Jim; the day I found out I was pregnant; Paul’s birthday on 2 January; the date I had to take him to Matlock and then leave.

There were times when I wanted to scream Paul’s name from the bottom of my lungs and tell everyone who’d listen how much I loved and missed him and thought about him night and day. ‘He’s my son and I want to keep him!’ I longed to shriek but instead I confined the screaming to inside my head.

Going to see Paul with John would be quite different from going with my mother. Ours was a new relationship and I knew I couldn’t blub all the way there and back as I normally did. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do: hold myself together when I walked into the nursery and realized that Paul didn’t know who I was any more. At two years old, he was wearing clothes I hadn’t chosen for him and was playing with friends I’d never met. He was clearly very attached to one particular nursery nurse, and was calling her ‘Mummy’. That broke my heart anew.

John must have picked up on how I was feeling because he was marvellous with Paul. He picked him up and cuddled him and cheerily suggested that we take him out for a walk. He bought Paul a lollipop from a sweetshop and didn’t flinch when my happy-go-lucky, gorgeous little boy tried to force it into his mouth. He brought his camera and took lots of photographs, which are among my most cherished possessions: images of me and Paul, of John kissing Paul, and a few of Paul on his own, gurgling and laughing happily at these two kind strangers who had come to make a fuss of him for a few hours.

Travelling home on the train, I pressed my head against the cold glass of the window and fought back the tears. John sat next to me saying nothing. I was growing increasingly fond of this kind young man who seemed to accept me for who I was, regardless. I couldn’t believe how gentle he’d been with my son. We were a long way off making a commitment to each other; we were both still young, John was away travelling much of the time, and I wasn’t in a hurry to rush into anything again the way I had with Jim.

But could I – dare I – even dream that there might be a brighter future for Paul and me after all? That he and John and I might end up together as a family in the sort of happy home I’d grown up in, the kind I’d always dreamed of providing for my son? Turning and resting my head on John’s shoulder, I squeezed his hand and let out a sigh.

Not long after that journey to Matlock, Mr Guifreda called me into his office and asked me to sit down. ‘Dors’ Jones had left Quaintways by then, to be replaced by Val Pyeman, who was just as nice and who sat in on the meeting too.

‘Our managing director has heard of your problems…er, you know, with Paul,’ Mr Guifreda told me hesitantly. ‘He’d like to help.’

Like Mr Guifreda, the managing director of Lewis’s was a real gentleman who cared for his staff and always took an interest in their welfare. I wondered what he could possibly do to help. A pay rise perhaps? A word with social services to get them to move Paul closer to Chester? I hardly dared hope.

‘He’d like to adopt Paul,’ Mr Guifreda said, as my heart skipped a beat.

‘No!’ I gave my knee-jerk reaction.

Mr Guifreda pressed on. ‘He has three daughters and would love a son. He knows you want what’s best for your boy, and he wants you to know that he and his wife would give Paul a marvellous life in the bosom of a loving and wealthy family.’

I shook my head. I didn’t know what else to say. My mind was in turmoil. I’d resisted adoption for so long, why would I relent now? And why had the managing director waited all this time to ask? Had John’s parents orchestrated this to get my Paul out of the way? After all, Nick Guifreda was a close friend of John’s father. Then I had to remind myself that the managing director was a good man. For a moment, I allowed myself to speculate that if he did adopt Paul, he might let me stay in touch. I might even get to see more of him, being that much closer. Realizing that would be impractical and feeling like a rabbit caught in the headlights, I told Mr Guifreda that the answer was still no.

‘Think it over. Talk to your mother. Remember,’ he added with a smile, ‘everyone just wants what’s best for Tilly’s baby.’

‘Me too,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. The trouble was that – confused, isolated, and pressured from all sides – I didn’t really know what the best for Paul might be.

I can’t now remember how the Derbyshire hospital got in touch with me. I think I must have blanked that particular memory from my mind. But the news they gave me left an indelible mark. Paul was seriously ill. It was meningitis, they believed. I should go to him straight away.

John, who’d taken a job in a butcher’s shop between voyages, kindly offered to take the day off and go with me to Matlock. I don’t think I can have said a word the whole way there. I sat looking blinkingly out of the train window at the beautiful Peak District countryside thinking how ironic it would be if anything should happen to Paul now, just as I’d found the man I might end up sharing the rest of my life with.

Not that John didn’t have his faults. I already knew that any relationship with him would have its highs and lows. He was extremely clever, a man of passion whose fervour for the unions and championing of the underdog I admired, having come from a strong working-class background myself. But with that passion went an inner insecurity and dark moods that I wasn’t sure I could spend the rest of my life dealing with.

It was his sulks I dreaded the most: those awful long silences he’d retreat into when he was upset, usually about something quite trivial. Once he was in that mood, he wouldn’t listen to a word I had to say. Then I had to remind myself that he always came round in the end, apologizing with flowers and surprises. And I was no longer a silly little girl with a crush. I’d matured a lot. I was more cautious and quite capable of my own moods, too. One night, when I’d made a special dinner for him at my mother’s house, he came home so late from a strike march in Liverpool that the meal was ruined.

Pinned to my mother’s front door John found a note which read: Darling/Dear (both scrubbed out), then: John, so glad you’re back from your march and you could make it. Well, I’ve just gone on a march so you can bloody wait for me. I signed it, Love, Pauline, but scribbled out the word Love at the last minute. John still has it.

Another time, when he came in late I asked him what he wanted to eat. He replied, ‘Just put a couple of eggs on the boil.’ I filled a pan with cold water, turned on the heat, waited a few seconds and dropped the eggs in. ‘You don’t boil eggs like that!’ John cried. ‘You mustn’t put them in until the water’s boiled.’

I protested that my mother, who’d been a maid, had always told me that if I boiled them the way he said the eggs would burst. Shaking his head, John said, ‘Well, you don’t even know how boil an egg!’ Within minutes two raw ones were cracked on his head, the yolks dribbling down his face.

Those silly spats all seemed meaningless as I headed towards Paul ill in a hospital bed. Meningitis. What was that exactly? It sounded so serious. What if he didn’t recover? The closer we got to the hospital the more my head whirled with all sorts of wild notions.

By the time we reached the children’s ward and were directed to the little bed where Paul lay, I was all but convinced that we’d be too late. It was such a relief to see him, even if he didn’t seem as delighted to see me. He was sitting up in bed in his little hospital gown and we were even allowed to take him outside in the sunshine for some fresh air. John had brought his camera along again and took some photos of me holding Paul in my arms.

When we brought him back to the ward, a doctor told us the results of his tests. ‘It’s not meningitis after all. He has a slight fever and we’ll keep him in a couple of days for observation, but don’t worry, he’ll be fine.’ I could have kissed him.

The hardest thing was leaving Paul alone in hospital that night. It was late and John and I both needed to be back in Chester for work the following morning. We had to leave straight away and catch the last train, though we’d still not be home until the early hours. I sat alongside my sleepy toddler and stroked his hair. I kissed his face with my tears as he looked silently up at me with those big blue eyes.

‘Come on now,’ John said, taking me by the elbow. ‘You’ll not do Paul any good wearing yourself out.’

Getting to my feet and gathering my things together, I took one last lingering look at my poorly little boy and blew him a kiss. ‘Night, night, darling,’ I said. ‘Mummy will be back soon. I promise.’

Little did I know that it was a promise I would never keep.

Thankfully Paul recovered quite quickly. It was some sort of mild virus, the doctors thought, and would have no lasting effects. I planned to visit him once he was back at the nursery as soon as I could arrange time off work.

Then Mrs Cotter came to call. ‘Paul can’t go back to the Ernest Bailey Nursery, I’m afraid, Pauline,’ she told me. ‘They don’t keep children for more than two years and he’s already been there longer than anyone else. It would be in Paul’s best interests if he was placed in foster care now.’

‘But I never agreed to that!’ I cried.

‘This is what everybody thinks would be best for Paul. We’ve found a lovely couple in Wolverhampton who couldn’t have children of their own. They’re in their mid-forties. He’s a deputy headmaster and she’s a school nurse. What Paul needs now is the sort of one-to-one care only they can offer.’

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘Until his next review,’ she said. ‘In a year.’

My stomach lurched. A year was such a long time in a child’s life. He was already growing so fast. Would he even know me after all that time? ‘Will I be able to see him?’ I asked, afraid of the answer.

She hesitated. ‘That wouldn’t be advisable. He’d find it too unsettling, especially after his recent illness.’

Both Mrs Cotter and my mother were immovable. They had made the decision for me, it seemed. There was no viable alternative that I could offer Paul. In a year’s time, maybe there would be. John had already been so kind. He knew how I felt about keeping Paul and if things developed between us as I hoped they would, then it went unspoken that the boy would end up living with us one day.

OK then, I reasoned, trying desperately to put a brave face on a helpless situation, this buys me a little more time. After all, a lot can happen in a year…

Six (#ulink_53d6d75c-b774-5919-84e3-98c401e52ede)

THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS WERE PIVOTAL, NOT LEAST BECAUSE JOHN AND I were growing increasingly fond of each other. Ours hadn’t been love at first sight as it had for my parents, but over time we came to care deeply for each other and it seemed more and more likely that we’d end up together.

John was still working on the ships, travelling back and forth to New York, mostly on the MV Britannic. He also went to Canada, the Middle East and South America on exotically named vessels like the Franconia, the Amazon, the Corinthia, the Mauretania and the Saxonia. He visited places I’d never even heard of like Auckland, Panama, Barcelona and Larnaca. Using a cine camera he’d bought in the United States he took footage of himself and his mates on the ships and on days off leaping among the giant stones of the Parthenon, on pleasure boats in Istanbul or walking European streets. More handsome than ever with his longer hair and fashionable sideburns, and wearing drainpipe jeans and winkle-picker shoes, he was quite the cosmopolitan man of the world. In New York, he became hooked on jazz and began to bring records back from around the world. I had already been switched on to jazz by my brother, so we now had something new in common. Whenever he returned from a trip, he’d rush home bearing gifts for everyone he knew and loved. He even brought an American washing machine back for his mother once, wheeling it all the way down Fifth Avenue to the ship, and having it rewired for her back in Britain.

Always so thoughtful, he’d arrange all sorts of surprises for me, not all of them entirely within the rules. He and his fellow stewards used to take turns to do ‘firewatch’ on the Britannic, which meant guarding the ship when she was in dock to make sure she came to no harm. A quick bribe to whomever was on duty meant that John could smuggle me on board to spend the evening with him in one of the ship’s finest state rooms. It was highly irregular but, my-oh-my; we had a high old time in those luxury cabins.

He surprised me another time by announcing that he was taking me to London for the weekend. We’d see all the sights, he said, and he’d booked us a nice double room at the Strand Palace Hotel. I’d never been to London before and was very excited. I wanted to see Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace where, who knows, I might even spot the Queen. When John told my mother what he was planning, though, she imposed one condition. ‘I want to see the hotel receipt,’ she said. ‘Two separate rooms, John. That’s how it will be.’ Poor John did as she’d asked which made the whole trip doubly expensive. Not that we ever used the second room. Exactly the same thing happened when he took me to the Isle of Man.

All seemed to be going well for us but not long after my nineteenth birthday I went down with a bad dose of the flu and was confined to bed. To my surprise, John turned up at my mother’s house to see me. I decided I must be delirious. Wasn’t he supposed to be in New York?

‘I’m not here by choice, Paul,’ he said. He’d always called me ‘Paul’, and I loved the endearment.

I dragged myself up on my pillows and stared at him.

‘I’ve been sacked.’

‘Why?’ I mumbled, my head full of cold.

He grimaced. ‘The air conditioning broke down and it was like a furnace below decks. I went to the captain to complain but he called me a troublemaker.’

I knew John had been pushing to get better trade union representation at sea and I knew that his political passions weren’t popular with his employers, but beyond that, I didn’t really understand. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ I said, relieved his unexpected return wasn’t because of anything more serious. ‘I’m sure you’ll find another passage soon. Anyway, I’ve still got my job.’

‘Um, well, that’s another thing,’ he told me, looking awkward. ‘While you’ve been here sick in bed, I’m afraid Quaintways has burned down. There was a fire overnight and the place was gutted.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The temptation to slide back down the bed and hide under the sheets was enormous. Fortunately, Mr Guifreda and the managing director decided to keep all of the staff on, transferring us instead to the Lewis’s salon in Liverpool for the six months that it would take to rebuild Quaintways. As soon as I was back on my feet I began commuting to Liverpool each morning with the rest of the staff, taking the eight o’clock train for the forty-five minute journey from Chester to Lime Street Station.

John, never a shirker, went back to the butcher’s where he was always welcome between voyages. He also did a paper round. Each morning at ten past eight, when he knew my train would be pulling out of Chester, he’d stop on his round and wait in an alleyway between the rows of terraced houses that backed on to the railway line. I, in turn, would sit in the window on that side and wait for a glimpse of the man I knew I’d almost certainly marry. As the rest of the girls giggled and teased, I’d sit on the edge of my seat until the moment I saw him and then we’d wave madly and blow kisses to each other in the few seconds before each disappeared from view. It was such a romantic thing for him to do and made me think of my parents waving to each other across the rooftops.

After work, I’d walk from the station to the street where John worked and sit in a little café opposite sipping coffee. Watching and waiting, I’d stare and stare at the butcher’s window until I saw John’s hands reach down into the display, pick up a string of sausages and swing it madly from side to side. That was my cue to ask for my bill and it made me laugh every time. He’d be ten more minutes wiping up and putting the meat away before he’d take off his stripy apron and we’d go back to my mother’s for tea.

Mum adored John from the moment she met him. Why wouldn’t she? He was a hard worker from a good local family who was young and handsome with great style and a wicked sense of humour. Best of all, he wasn’t married and never had been. I couldn’t help but notice how differently she behaved around him to the way she’d been with Jim. She loved everything about John, from his tidy steward’s manners to the meat he brought her, wrapped up in paper and tied with string. Amazing as it seemed to her, this was a man who could not only cook but who loved to entertain, often hosting Australian-style barbecues in his mother’s garden with the finest steaks from the butcher’s larder or a cruise ship’s cold stores. There’d always be music – Sinatra, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington – and dancing. John was a very good dancer and we loved to show off our moves.

Whenever John did manage to get steward’s work again and went off on the ships, he’d bombard me with love letters from abroad. Besotted, I kept every one. He became my uniformed hero who travelled to faraway places and telephoned long distance, or sent romantic billetsdoux within hours of arriving in a port. Believe it or not, my John cut his own romantic recordings of tunes like ‘Blue Moon’ or our special song ‘How Deep Is the Ocean?’ in special booths in New York and sent them to me on 45 r.p.m. discs.

‘Darling, I love you,’ the packaging would say. Or he’d write out the words to ‘our’ song and fold them inside.

How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?

How many times a day do I think of you?

I thought that was so wonderful.

John was less popular at sea, where he argued with any passengers who whistled or snapped their fingers to attract his attention, in between rallying fellow crew members to complain about conditions. His various captains, who continued to object to his union activities, sacked him repeatedly, often labelling him as ‘Not Wanted on Voyage’. Back on land, he had to find work wherever he could. Through Mr Guifreda, he was offered a job in the Quaintways kitchens for a while, which was fun for us both. Then he went back to a place he’d worked in as a commis chef once before, a hotel and restaurant in Warrington called the Patten Arms. I’m surprised they had him back, frankly. He’d been suspended a few years earlier for being too disruptive when he persuaded the rest of the staff to strike over pay. His boss there used to joke that commis chef meant a Communist who cooks.

One night in the summer of 1959, John told me that he was taking me to the Patten Arms for a ‘special dinner’. I knew he was going to ask me to marry him; I’d been expecting it for a while. We’d already chosen a lovely antique engagement ring at Walton’s jewellers in Chester. It had fifteen diamonds in a marquise cluster and he’d asked them to put it to one side. We’d discussed buying a house and worked out that we should have saved enough for some sort of deposit in two years’ time.

The question was where, when and exactly how would my dashing steward pop the question? Would he hide the ring in my dessert? Would he go down on one knee in the restaurant in front of all the other diners and his colleagues? (Unlikely, I thought.) Maybe he’d booked us a room and would ask me in private? I couldn’t wait to find out.

I put on my best outfit: a black pencil skirt and a houndstooth jacket with a crisp white collar. I styled my hair, cut short still and not dissimilar to Audrey Hepburn’s. I was excited and looking forward to what would probably be one of the most important nights of my life. Looking in the mirror before I left to meet John, I smiled back at my reflection.

We took the train to Warrington but a few miles out of the station John became increasingly nervous. He’d never been very confident in public in spite of what he did for a living. Secretly, he is full of self-doubt and rather shy. He can’t walk into a room on his own; he always makes me go in first, and then he only joins me if I have found him a seat facing the wall. Not far from our destination that night he suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Listen, Paul, when we get to the restaurant everyone’s going to be watching and waiting for the moment I pull out the ring. It’ll be embarrassing.’

I waited, wondering what on earth he was going to suggest instead. Maybe this was a trick to whisk me off somewhere else.

‘Here,’ he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me to my feet, ‘come with me.’

Before I knew it, my oh-so-romantic husband-to-be had bundled me down the corridor and pushed me into the cramped train toilet. Pressing me up against the basin to slide the door shut behind us, he kissed me hard on the lips and blurted, ‘Marry me?’

I had no time to answer before he whisked out the ring we’d chosen and shoved it unceremoniously on my finger. I was twenty years old. He was twenty-one. I looked at him, glanced down at the ring and burst out laughing.

‘John Prescott!’ I cried indignantly. ‘I see the art of romance isn’t dead, then?’ He looked crestfallen, so, kissing him back, I grinned. ‘Of course I will, you idiot.’

We went on to have a lovely relaxed dinner at the Patten Arms, chiefly because John didn’t have to propose in front of anyone. On the way home on the train, he made up for his unromantic proposal by snuggling up to me in our empty carriage.

‘John, don’t,’ I giggled, pushing him away. ‘People can see in!’

Jumping up, he unscrewed the light bulb in the ceiling, plunging us into darkness. ‘Now they can’t,’ he said, silencing my laugh with a kiss.

My mother couldn’t have been more delighted. After all she and I had been through together, she wanted nothing more than to see me happily married. Rather naughtily, John decided to test his own mother’s true feelings for me by telling her that we’d broken up.

‘Oh, John, I’m so pleased!’ she cried.

‘No, Mother. I was just seeing how you’d react,’ he told her. ‘Now I know how you really feel about Paul.’ He never quite forgave her.

Despite her disapproval, his mother put on a good show and kindly offered to host our engagement party in her large garden, usually used for Labour fundraisers. John filmed the whole thing on a state-of-the-art 8-mm cine camera he’d brought back from the States. No one had ever seen such a thing before. All the Quaintways Girls were there, of course, many of whom had also recently got engaged so we were excited about each other’s forthcoming weddings. Some of John’s ‘Brit boys’ from the Britannic came, as well as friends and colleagues from hotels and the other places he’d worked. It was a lovely do, and his mother even offered to make our bridesmaids’ dresses and my going-away outfit, which was very sweet of her. She was a fabulous dressmaker and I was lucky to have her.

Throughout our long engagement John continued to be very active in the National Union of Seamen, which pretty much began to take over his life. Furious at what he called the ‘cosy’ relationship between the ship owners and the union bosses, which he claimed led to poor pay and conditions, he regularly attended marches and strikes or spoke at rallies addressed by leading union officials. He put so much effort and research into his speeches and would practise them over and over until he – and I – knew them off by heart.

I wasn’t that interested in politics, even though my family were always strong Labour people. For John, I was more of a sounding board. Mostly, I made endless mugs of tea and coffee when his union friends came round. I have to admit that sometimes I fell asleep waiting for them to finish their heated late-night debates. What I did come to appreciate, though, was that John had made enemies at the top of the NUS by becoming an unofficial shop steward. I didn’t realize how serious that might be at the time; I just loved the maverick side of him that fought so passionately for what he believed in regardless of the consequences.

Knowing that politics was a side of his life that I didn’t really understand, despite how much it meant to him, I decided to go to a rally to hear him speak. This particular one was held at the Roodee racecourse in Chester. A huge crowd had gathered, some sitting in the tiered stands, the rest forming a large circle. People stepped up and spoke into a microphone in the middle of the circle if they felt like it or until they were booed off. John, who was far younger than most of the men around him, had to push his way through a huge crowd of hecklers to take his turn. I held my breath as he began falteringly. I knew how nervous he was. After a few minutes, though, he got into his stride and became more and more impassioned, delivering each sentence with conviction and flair. I was so proud of him, I could have burst.

I only wished my father could have been there to see him. Each week, without fail, Dad had paid his union dues out of his hard-earned wages to ensure that his rights and those of his fellow workers were respected by his employers. Now here was the son-in-law-to-be that he could never meet representing all that he believed in and more. The man I was going to marry was someone of principle with strong working-class beliefs. Watching him bringing his speech to a climax at that microphone, I had never been more certain that I was doing the right thing.