Читать книгу For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice. - Ann Ming - Страница 10

When Julie was sixteen, just after leaving school, she met a Billingham boy called Andrew at a local youth club. She was the same age as I had been when I met Charlie but somehow she seemed much less mature than I had imagined I was at that age. Maybe we all kid ourselves that we are more grown up than we are when we first start to spread our wings.

Although she was never outgoing in a crowd, Julie was a bit of a rebel in the way she dressed, did her hair and made herself up. She always liked to wear weird clothes, often adopting fashions long before other people she knew would have had the nerve. At that time she was going through her Boy George phase, dressing like him and doing her hair the same way. She would get Angela to tie rags in it and then put a black hat on the top of the whole thing. She would pinch Charlie’s white shirts and cut the collars off and wear black gloves and lots of eyeliner to go out in the evenings. Once she was out on the dance floor all her usual inhibitions seemed to vanish. It’s strange how some people can be shy and introverted in some ways and extroverted in others. I suppose it’s all part of what makes people different and interesting. When she was dancing she seemed to come into herself.

She liked to wear really high heels to try to make herself look taller, fed up about the fact that she was so much smaller than Gary and Angela. As a result she didn’t always choose the most practical shoes for everyday life but that never worried her. I went into Middlesborough with her once when she had these bright orange high heels on.

‘My feet are killing me,’ she grumbled after we’d been walking round the shops for a bit. ‘Will you swap, just for ten minutes, Mam?’

‘Only ten minutes,’ I said firmly.

What is it about being a mother that makes you willing to put yourself through agony rather than see one of your children in pain, even when they have inflicted it on themselves in the first place? A mixture of natural instincts and motherly love, I suppose. I was still wobbling along in these ridiculous bright orange stilettos when we bumped into someone from my work and I had to do some fast explaining.

When she left school, Julie started training as a hairdresser. She had always been interested in messing around with her own hair, dying it shocking pinks and blues long before such colours were generally accepted, so it seemed like a good choice of career for her. Her hair was still incredibly thick, just as it had been when she was a baby, and when she permed it, it became even more spectacular. Big curly perms were all the fashion round our way in the 1980s, and Julie’s was the biggest and curliest. When she came home with blue hair after my mother had had her third stroke, Mam was convinced it was a hat.

‘What a lovely hat,’ she kept saying. ‘What a lovely colour.’

‘It’s not a hat, Mam,’ I told her, ‘it’s her damned hair!’

Julie wanted to practise her hairdressing on everyone and she even persuaded her dad to have a perm in his dead-straight, coal-black Chinese hair. It actually didn’t look too bad once she’d done it, so he kept it.

Charlie and I liked Andrew from the first time Julie brought him home. He was very relaxed about life and good at gently humouring her if she was in one of her moods. He was a couple of years older than her and working as a painter and decorator. Having been married for nearly twenty years to Charlie by then, who was a strong and sometimes controlling character, I could appreciate the attraction of being with a man who was a bit more easy-come, easy-go. Andrew just fitted into our family as if he had always been there.

In 1985, the year Mam died, Julie and Andrew got married and moved into a council house just down the road in Billingham, 27 Grange Avenue. It was only five minutes’ drive away from us. I was very happy for them. I’d been born and brought up in the area myself and knew it well, so it felt as though Julie was staying close to her roots.

It was a lovely wedding and when I watched Julie and Andrew dancing to ‘Ave Maria’ at the reception I felt like the complete proud mum, happy to have brought up such a pretty girl and to be able to see her settling down with a nice man. ‘Ave Maria’ was her favourite song and she looked so beautiful and so joyful as they whirled around the dance floor that at that moment it didn’t seem possible they wouldn’t have a wonderful happy life together.

Even though Julie was now a married woman it often felt as though she hadn’t left home at all. We would see her every day, and there would be phone calls from her all the time. Gary had left home and started work as a bricklayer and, even though Angela was still living with us, she was very independent and had just starting her training as a dental nurse. But our Julie wouldn’t let go of the apron strings.

‘Are you in, our Mam?’ she would ring and ask at least once a day. ‘I’ll pop round then.’

She was nearly always round for her tea, because we usually had the sort of Chinese food the children had been brought up eating. Charlie had taught me how to cook it at the beginning of our marriage and we all thought of it as our staple diet. As a family we used chopsticks all the time without even thinking about it.

Sometimes she would come round for one of her daily visits, then go home and ring half an hour later, even though she didn’t have anything new to say. She just liked to chat about nothing or about anything that had come into her head in the previous few minutes. Although I would get exasperated with her sometimes if I was trying to get on with doing something else, I wouldn’t have had it any other way; I loved having her around. Even when I was at work she would be ringing all the time; the others in the operating theatre used to tease me about it every time another call came through.

‘You’ve got to stop ringing me so much at the hospital,’ I’d tell her every so often. ‘You’re going to get me into trouble.’

‘Oh, aye,’ she would reply, good-naturedly. ‘I will.’

But she never did. The moment she thought of something to tell me or ask me she would be dialling again without a second thought.

My colleagues at the hospital were used to her ways, having known her since she was little. Because I worked weekends the kids often used to come in to see us when they were little, if we weren’t busy. All the other staff knew them and they weren’t nervous about the theatre or even the god-like surgeons.

Julie came into the hospital to see me one day when she was about seven months pregnant, the year after she and Andrew were married. There were just three of us on duty that day and nothing much was happening so we were able to pay her some attention.

‘Get up on the table,’ one of the other nurses told her. ‘We’ll get the stethoscope and see if we can hear the baby’s heart beating.’

She was up on the table with her belly exposed while we tried to find the baby’s heart when one of the surgeons, Mr Clark, suddenly burst into the room.

‘What the bloody hell is going on in here?’ he wanted to know.

‘Our Julie’s pregnant and we’re trying to find the heartbeat,’ I explained nervously.

‘Oh, get out of the way,’ he barked. ‘I’ll find it.’

Julie went bright red as he took over and found the heartbeat almost immediately. This same surgeon had been very generous when Julie was married, passing on a load of furniture that he and his wife didn’t want to go in her new home. Everyone around the hospital was good to us like that, treating us like family.

When she was close to her due date both she and Andrew came to live with us for two weeks because she wanted to be at the heart of the family at such an important time. I guess maybe she still didn’t feel ready to leave the nest even though she was a married woman and soon to be a mother. Andrew never seemed bothered about anything like that, always fitting in easily wherever he was, happy to go along with whatever Julie wanted.

The birth all went smoothly and Julie instantly took to motherhood. A few weeks after little Kevin had arrived she and I popped out to the off-licence to buy some chocolate, leaving the baby with Andrew and Charlie.

‘I feel really strange,’ she said once we were away from the house. ‘This is the first time I’ve come out without Kevin since I had him.’

‘I feel like that with you,’ I told her, ‘even though you’re married now. I don’t think a mother ever feels complete without her children around her.’

‘Ah, Mam,’ she teased, ‘but I’m a woman now.’

‘Yeah, I know, but I still feel the same about you.’

When the time came to take Kevin to the mother and toddler group Julie wanted me to go too.

‘Ah, come on, our Mam,’ she wheedled when I said I didn’t think any of the other girls would be taking their mothers. ‘I don’t want to go on my own.’

She never liked to do things on her own and I never complained about being included because she was always a laugh to be with and I enjoyed her company. It was great to be invited to be such a big part of my grandson’s early life.

Charlie and I were always very happy with Andrew as a son-in-law and to start with the marriage appeared to go well, especially once they had Kevin to look after. They were both so proud of him and so anxious to do the right things. But becoming a mother seemed to bring Julie a bit more out of her shell and after a couple of years things began to go wrong between them. I think it was mostly down to them both being so young and immature – she was just eighteen and he was only twenty when they married. Julie couldn’t cook at all; the first time she put a chicken in the oven she left the plastic bag of giblets inside it. It’s hard to sustain a marriage when neither of you know anything about life. I think they both thought it was all going to be a bed of roses, which it never is once you’ve got a small child. I was young too when I married and started having babies (and I couldn’t cook either), but life was different then, people didn’t have the same expectations, and at least Charlie was older and more experienced.

Andrew liked to go out playing football and snooker, like any young lad. That would make our Julie get all possessive and grumpy and they would end up arguing about stupid things. They were each just as bad as the other. There was one time when Andrew was obsessed with getting his car mended. Julie and I had been out shopping at Asda and when we got back we found he’d swapped their microwave for a particular engine part that he needed. She was furious, but she could be just as daft herself sometimes. She’d bought a lemon and grey striped pushchair for Kevin and one time she said she wasn’t able to come out with me because his matching lemon suit wasn’t dry from the wash and his others wouldn’t have matched the pushchair’s upholstery! They were both still just a couple of kids themselves really.

Andrew had been doing some work at a pizza place in Station Road in Billingham. Bizarrely, the shop, called ‘Mr Macaroni’, was owned by an Iranian family. Some time around 1987, Julie started working there as well, driving a pizza delivery van in the evenings to earn some extra money. Looking back, I suppose she and Andrew had less time together then and they started drifting apart.

Things must have been worse between them than Charlie and I realized because in 1989, when he got the chance of a job down in London with his uncle, Andrew decided to take it. They both seemed to see it as the first step in a separation. Charlie and I were very sad about it, but at least we were close by to help her with Kevin and we never felt that Andrew was to blame any more than she was for the fact that they were drifting apart. It was just one of those things that happen in families and you have to adjust and move on.

It looked as if Julie was going to be able to cope quite well on her own, with us in the background to help her. On the nights she was working late she would leave Kevin to sleep over with us. It was a good arrangement for all of us because Charlie and I liked having a child around the house and we liked feeling we were helping her. Julie would often work from about five in the afternoon until midnight. She enjoyed working with the Iranians, but I was told she never let them push her around. One friend told me she was in the queue in ‘Mr Macaroni’ one day when one of the owners was trying to boss Julie about.

‘She just picked up the dough and dumped it on his head,’ my friend told me.

They must have valued her as an employee because they didn’t sack her, even then. I could just imagine her doing that and I liked the idea that she would stick up for herself.

Charlie and I had been thinking about what we should do now that the children were growing up. Once Gary and Julie had both moved out, and Angela was getting close to leaving, we decided we didn’t need a house as big as Mam’s old bungalow any more and we put it up for sale. It went really fast, selling before we’d had time to find anything else to buy, so we moved into a rented property while we sorted ourselves out and worked out where we would like to go next.

As the autumn of 1989 arrived I fancied a break. I’ve always liked going to Blackpool for holidays but Charlie doesn’t much like the place, so I asked Julie if she would like to come with me for a few days away. We always had a laugh when we were together. Andrew said he would mind Kevin (he hadn’t left for London by then) and we set off for some mother and daughter time. We hadn’t even booked anything – you didn’t have to at that time of year; we just turned up and found ourselves a bed and breakfast before setting out to enjoy the sights. Julie had always liked the fairgrounds, riding on the big dippers and all the rest, and I was happy to watch her, just as I had when they were all small children.

‘I think I’ll have me fortune told,’ she said as we walked past a gypsy’s stall in a shopping arcade. ‘Do you want to come?’

‘Oh, I’m not wasting my money,’ I said. ‘You go ahead.’

I wandered off, leaving her to it. She reappeared a few minutes later.

‘That cost me five pounds,’ she complained. ‘She said I have a son who’s going to be musical, but we all know Kevin’s tone deaf, and after that she said she couldn’t tell me anything else. It was like I didn’t have any future.’

That Blackpool clairvoyant will never know how right she was with her predictions that day.