Читать книгу For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice. - Ann Ming - Страница 8
ОглавлениеOnce we had found a buyer for our first home in Acklam we moved round the corner to a bigger house, where we stayed while the children grew up, creating a happy stable family base.
Gary was always the mischief-maker amongst the three children and Angela took after me, brimming with confidence and plenty to say for herself on all occasions. Julie was the quietest, shyest one of the bunch. She wasn’t as outgoing as her brother or sister and didn’t make friends quite as easily. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have friends, but they were a small, select group rather than a big crowd. Once someone had become her friend she tended to keep them in her life for a long time.
As she grew up she looked a lot like the few pictures we had of Charlie’s English mam, although her pretty, almond-shaped eyes gave a hint of the oriental blood that flowed in her veins, showing she was definitely a member of the ‘Ming dynasty’.
Charlie worked for Shell as a ‘heavy goods fitter’, which is another way of saying he was a mechanic working on their lorries. He worked hard and was a good provider, but bringing up three children is never going to be cheap. From soon after Julie was born, I worked on Friday and Saturday nights at the cash desk of a local Chinese restaurant in Billingham. The restaurant was owned by one of Charlie’s friends and they used to get quite a few actors and performers coming in from the nearby theatre after the shows finished. (We didn’t call them celebrities then, although I guess they were because they were usually off the telly.) I’d first gone to the restaurant to help them out for a week and ended up staying there for fifteen years, mainly because I enjoyed the buzz of the place.
Once Angela reached the age of five and started at school I found I had a bit of time on my hands so I got myself a job at the local hospital as an auxiliary nurse, to earn us a bit of extra money and to keep myself busy. I was lucky that my mam could look after the kids while I did my shifts – usually twelve till nine – and Charlie took over when he got in. I had never wanted to live a life like Mam’s with no outside interests beyond home and family and I’d always liked the idea of being a nurse, even when I was a little girl. Meeting Charlie and starting a family had only temporarily distracted me from doing something about it.
Once the hospital took me on I was very quickly working inside the operating theatre, doing a bit of everything. Despite having always thought that I wanted to be out on the wards, chatting to the patients, I loved the work and I soon got used to dealing with the temperamental surgeons, men who everyone used to treat as if they were gods. Hospital life was still very formal in those days with a strict hierarchy and no one on first-name terms or anything like that. The surgeons used to do a lot of shouting and none of us ever dared to answer them back; we were too busy running around to do their bidding as quickly as we could.
Julie was never any trouble to us or to her teachers at school when she was a child. She took up gymnastics and soon proved able to fold herself in two and make her body do all sorts of things that seemed impossible to me. She was a good dancer as well, being small and slightly built.
Of all our children she was the one who could always wrap Charlie round her little finger the easiest. If the others wanted anything they would tell her to go and ask him for it, knowing he could never refuse her anything. It was a bit like my relationship had been with my dad, I suppose. She was a proper daddy’s girl and I think maybe he saw a bit of his mam in her.
We led a very normal, contented family life, with all the usual ups and downs, petty rows and reconciliations, family treats and family chores. Every year when the kids were young we used to go down to Devon or Cornwall for our holidays, always taking my mam with us. For seven or eight years in a row we hired a big caravan in Looe. Mam was always good for baby-sitting and for giving Charlie and me little breaks. On our final trip there, with Charlie’s brother and his wife, we had fourteen days of solid rain and decided that next time we would go to Majorca for some guaranteed sun. Julie was eighteen by then and the highlight of the holiday for her was buying herself a white leather suit that she wore almost constantly once we got back. It looked terrific on her.
We used to go out as a family in the summer afternoons too, once Charlie had finished his shifts and the kids were home from school. I would ring Mam up and she would catch a bus over and join us for a run over the moors. All of us would pile into our old blue and white van, Mam sitting in state in the front with Charlie and the rest of us rattling around in the back with no seats. We even used to have the pram in with us when we still needed it. We took Mam everywhere we went because otherwise she would just have been sat at home on her own.
When the kids were in their teens, Charlie and I took the opportunity to travel to China with a couple of friends, leaving the kids with my mam. We spent a month in Hong Kong and then a week in Canton, where Charlie’s dad had originally come from all those years before. In Hong Kong we stayed with Charlie’s aunt in a village in the New Territories called Fan Ling, where I was the only European face to be seen in any direction and no one spoke any English. The streets bristled with life as people went about their daily business on bicycles and carts, and mah jong was being played on every corner.
Then we travelled to a village called Sha Tau Kok on the border with China, where a friend of ours lived. We had to get police permission in Hong Kong to get that close to the border. I stood out even more there and I got used to feeling like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, followed by a trail of curious kids wherever I went, everyone wanting to touch my blonde hair because they’d never seen anything like it before. When we walked into one busy, crowded restaurant every single person stopped eating and talking, turning as one to stare. It was a shock to see huge crowds of Chinese faces everywhere we went because I’d spent my whole life in Europe, never even thinking about what colour I was.
‘Keep hold of me,’ I warned Charlie when we first arrived, ‘or I might lose you and end up going home with the wrong one.’
Obviously Chinese people don’t ‘all look the same’ once you get to know them, any more than Europeans do, but when you are confronted by crowds of strangers it’s very confusing. Charlie always says it’s the same in reverse for him in Middlesborough.
My mother was living in a council bungalow in Billingham at that time and the rent kept going up every year, leaving her very short of cash.
‘Why don’t we buy the house as an investment?’ Charlie suggested. ‘Then your mam can live there rent free.’
At first the council refused to sell to us because they said the bungalow was supposed to be for old people, but I’d known the area a long time and knew that wasn’t true, so I wrote to the Secretary of State in London and got the council overruled. I’ve never been willing to just accept what people tell me simply because they’re in a position of authority, although at that stage I had no idea how far this stubborn streak in my nature would one day be tested.
We eventually bought the bungalow off the council in the April of 1980 but Mam had a stroke a couple of months later, which turned all our carefully laid plans upside down. She was still able to shuffle about on her feet once she’d recovered, but her brain never really worked properly after that and it was obvious she was going to be going steadily downhill over the coming years. We realized there was no way she was going to be able to look after herself much longer so we sold our house in Acklam, had Mam’s bungalow extended and moved the whole family in there together. It was an easier option than trying to uproot her from her own house after so many years now that she was becoming frail.
Although I was worried about Mam and didn’t know whether we would be able to look after her properly, I liked the idea of going back to Billingham, back to where all my roots lay. When you look back at the decisions you make in life you can’t help but wonder how things would have gone if you had just followed a different path. How different it might all have been if we had moved Mam in to live with us in Acklam rather than the other way round. I can’t help thinking that if we hadn’t made that move our Julie would still be alive today.
If I had known how difficult looking after Mam was going to be I don’t know if I would have had the courage to take on the job for those last few years. By the end she was incontinent and away with the fairies most of the time. The kids were always good at helping out with her; we couldn’t have done it without their support. Angela was particularly good, willing to clean her up when she soiled herself and everything. Our Julie was a bit more squeamish; she would be willing to keep Mam company, feed her, curl her hair and generally entertain her for hours on end, but she didn’t like the other stuff. We developed a routine of caring. I had Mam during the week and went to work at the hospital at weekends, when Charlie and the girls would take over. Charlie never complained. In fact it was him who insisted that she stay with us and not be put in a home. She had done too much for both of us and for the children over the years for us to think of abandoning her to the mercies of strangers. So we soldiered on.
Mam continued to live with us until she died five years later in 1985. It was sad to lose her, obviously, but it was a relief too because she hadn’t really been with us mentally for several years by that time yet she had needed looking after twenty-four hours a day. With Mam gone and the children growing up, Charlie and I thought that perhaps now life would get a bit easier for us. Shell decided to close the depot he worked for so he took early retirement. We had some money in the bank and a chance to stand back and think about what we wanted to do with the next part of our lives together. Charlie decided to invest some of his money in buying a catering trailer, serving drinks and snacks to passing motorists, which he set up in a lay-by on the A66 to Darlington.
We worked hard and we were proud of how we had brought up the kids. Now we felt we could relax a bit and enjoy ourselves. How wrong could we have been? It’s just as well none of us could see into the future because if we had had any idea what was coming a few years down the line I don’t know how we would have faced it.
