My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (16 page)

When I revived only moments later, to find myself lying on the floor, the ladies who taught us were gathered around me. They were so kind to me, and concerned in case I had hurt myself, but I was flushed with embarrassment. I wasn’t used to this kind of attention, especially in front of so many people. Then I looked over towards my mother’s seat. It was empty. Apparently, she had just walked out and gone home. She never mentioned this incident. She didn’t even ask me what had happened and whether I was all right. She just ignored the whole thing, but I knew only too well the look of disdain she would have worn on her way back home.

Some weeks later, after fainting or blacking out several more times in various places, my mother took me to the doctor’s. He gave me a quick check-over.

‘Sorry to waste your time,’ said my mother. ‘She keeps doing it. She’s probably just putting it on.’

‘Well, Mrs Lumsden, I don’t think she is putting it on. It may not be anything to worry about, but I’d like to send her to the Royal Infirmary at Newcastle for some tests, just to rule out any possibility of a brain tumour.’

I’d never heard of a brain tumour, but it sounded serious.

‘So I’ve got to take her all the way into the city? Can’t you tell she’s fine really?’

‘We’d better just make sure,’ insisted the doctor, beaming a smile in my direction. ‘I’m hopeful they will be able to give you the all-clear. If that’s the case, you can just put it down to growing pains – part of a girl’s natural development, though she seems a little on the young side for that.’

My mother gave a loud sigh at the inconvenience and off we went. Fortunately the doctor was right and the brain specialist told us there was nothing amiss.

‘A whole day sitting in the hospital again for nothing,’ she moaned on the bus when we travelled home from the hospital. ‘I’ve been worried sick about all this. It’s making me ill.’

‘Sorry, Mammy.’

I continued to be a regular member of the congregation at the Methodist church. I believed in God, and it helped me during the lonely times. I still spent a lot of time alone in my bedroom, but now I always had someone to talk to, someone to ask for help, someone who understood how I felt – all of those things. He gave me strength. How else would I have survived? I needed something, someone, to support me through all my troubles.

I know some people would say it was my character, my ability to be strong, that helped me through all this, and I think I did have strength, but it was more than that – it was the strength that came with faith. Of course there have been times when I haven’t believed any more, when things have gone wrong, when times have been bad and I have felt abandoned again, but those times have always passed and I have always come back to the realization that He is there for me. It was a good day when that young girl, that Sunbeam for Jesus in search of meaning, found God’s love.

Meanwhile, a strange new tension loomed at home. I sensed there was something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. My parents see-sawed between hushed conversations, tight-lipped arguments and blazing rows. I listened in when I could, and gradually pieced together what the new problem was. My father had sparked off an altercation at work, at the bus garage. The other man was a driver whose wife was a bus conductor – the same female bus-conductor my mother had mentioned the night Tommy threw us both down the stairs and disappeared. In the course of this confrontation, my father had lost his temper, punched the man and slammed his head against a brick wall. The man lost consciousness and was taken to hospital, to intensive care, where he lay in a coma, hovering between life and death.

The police took my father in and interviewed him. They told him that if the man died, they intended to charge him with manslaughter or murder. I was terrified – I felt sure he would go to prison for murder. He and my mother were subdued all the time the man’s condition was so critical. It was a tough few days, but fortunately the driver survived, regained consciousness and recovered with no permanent damage. I believe no charges were made, but I’m not certain. It was never mentioned again.

One day, when I was at home on my own and very bored, I started to look through some family photos I found in the desk in the living room. I wasn’t allowed to open the desk – it was forbidden territory – so I was curious. I only hesitated for a moment, because I felt sure I could return them all in the right order well before either of my parents came home. They would never know.

I got all the photos out and sorted through them with some amusement. In amongst the photos I found lots of birth, marriage and death certificates for grandparents, great-grandparents and some whose names I didn’t even recognize.

Finally, I came across my parents’ marriage certificate. I unfolded it and read what it said. No, surely not. I read it again and again, just to make sure I’d got it right. The date on the certificate was 31 March 1951. I was stunned. Even at twelve I recognized what this meant. I was born a year before they were married. Exactly one year. It was a terrible thing in those days. I was illegitimate. I could hardly say the word. My hands shook and my breathing quickened.

My first thought, once I’d taken it all in, was that obviously I wasn’t planned or wanted. This was an important piece in the jigsaw – it explained a lot. It was my fault that they were unhappy. If it hadn’t been for me, life would have been wonderful. They were always telling me it was my fault, whatever ‘it’ was, and here was the proof. That’s why my father was the way he was. If I hadn’t been born . . . I had always felt guilty, though I rarely knew why. Now I understood.

Suddenly I realized what the time was. I’d spent so long looking at everything that I’d forgotten that my mother would be home soon. I put all the papers and photos away as quickly as possible. I couldn’t be caught looking at them, and I could never ask her about it because I couldn’t admit I’d disobeyed her. Even when I was grown-up I never dared ask. This was a secret I carried in my heart for fifty years.

The marriage certificate in my mother’s desk was proof that my mother resented me. It was a fact and I could finally accept it. I had always felt I shouldn’t be there, that I was in the way. She acted, every day, as if I owed her something just for being my mother.

It seems pitiful to me now, knowing what other people’s childhoods were like, that from the age of about nine I had never come home from school to a hot meal, to any meal, only to a cold and empty house. Except for one single day when I was twelve. It stands out in my memory. I got back from school to find my mother already home. Perhaps she had been off work and was bored. The fire was lit and glowed with warmth, the table was laid, and in the middle stood a big bowl of steaming soup. It was tinned soup, of course, but it was hot, and it was for me. I had never experienced this before – and I could hardly believe it. In fact I was so shocked, I burst into tears.

My mother didn’t say anything. She just turned round and walked back into the kitchen. It never happened again.

CHAPTER 13

Jenny

Swimming Along

The winter after my dad died, my mam had to drive me, every Saturday, nearly sixty miles each way to Stockton-on-Tees for Northumberland Swimming Club coaching. The swimming helped me to have something else to focus on, and I believe it helped her too, as it was something she and Dad had both been keen to support me in.

Mam was very dedicated and never complained at the early mornings and late evenings, no matter how hard she worked to pay for all this on top of my school fees. She was amazing. She just worked and worked, often from eight in the morning till ten at night. She always made sure I was able to enjoy these opportunities to shine.

But Mam’s long hours after Dad died meant I was alone a great deal of the time when I was at home. She was consumed by work and hardly stopped to eat. I was so worried about her that I used to come home from school in the middle of the day to make her some lunch. Whenever she did have time to cook a meal for us, she used to set three places at the table. When she brought in the food and realized, she would burst into tears. After a while I learned to remove the extra place before she noticed.

Left alone at home so much, I was a very lonely child, living a solitary life. I felt like a single sapling on a vast plain, all alone as I grieved for my dad. On those solitary evenings I wished again and again that I had a sister or brother to share the grief with, to banter with, to tease me, to help lift me out of the void.

Every Sunday I was taken to the communion service at church in preparation for my confirmation. I didn’t want to be there and felt uncomfortable with the situation, but I had no choice. My school was quite high-church, and it was expected of us, so it was just something I had to do. I often wonder whether that discomfort and lack of belief caused what happened the first time I went. A short way into the service, I keeled over and passed out onto the cold stone floor. My classmates gawped as they craned their necks to try and see what the drama was, while several of the staff and congregation gathered round to revive me.

Unfortunately it happened again the next time, and the next. I now dreaded the embarrassment of fainting every week. It became such a regular event, always at the same part of the service, that the lady who lived across the road from the church would put her kettle on when she saw me go into the church. Sure enough, twenty minutes later I would be carried out and across to her house for a reviving cup of tea.

On one particular occasion, I remember that I was sitting on an old oak chair with struts of wood underneath. At the beginning of the service, I must have tucked my legs under the chair, and entwined my feet around these wooden stretchers, so that when the inevitable happened and I passed out, my body fell forward and took the whole chair with it. It took four men to free me from my seat and carry me out, oblivious of all the trouble I’d caused.

My confirmation day loomed. The Bishop of Newcastle, who was the chairman of Church High School, would be leading the service. It was planned with great care, so that we all knew where to stand and what we were meant to do. Of course, when it came to my turn to kneel down in front him and he put his hands on my head, I fainted right there in front of him, flat onto a marble memorial plaque. Without hesitation, he moved across to the next person and carried on, while I was revived sufficiently by the churchwardens to have another try at the end, and finally I was confirmed. My abiding memory of that day is one of total embarrassment – I couldn’t get out of that church quickly enough.

It wasn’t just at church that this happened, though. I began to feel there must be something awful wrong with me, because I kept on fainting and having blackouts, feeling woozy for a while afterwards each time. I couldn’t understand it and became quite anxious when I was with other people that I might collapse or something. Then one day I fainted in front of my mam at home and she got the doctor round.

‘I don’t want you to worry, Mrs Smith,’ he said in a grave voice. ‘But I think we ought to investigate whether Jennifer could possibly have a heart condition.’

Of course that worried my mother greatly. ‘What sort of heart condition?’ she asked in a quavering voice. ‘How will they find out? What could it mean?’

‘Now, now, Mrs. Smith. It may be nothing, but I just want to make sure, so I’ll send her for some tests.’

I was sent to the Newcastle Royal Infirmary for some investigations, but fortunately it was a false alarm and there was nothing wrong with me.

‘It’s probably just a phase,’ said the kindly consultant to my mother. ‘Although it’s unusual, fainting fits can be a symptom of growing up.’

I think I was even more relieved than my mother that I wasn’t going to die. Soon after that the fainting stopped completely.

The swimming training continued. I went to a swimming class every Thursday evening with Jeff Knowles, who was a selector for the England rugby team, and I had another class on Friday nights. The Friday coach used to scare the breath out of me. He had a voice like a foghorn, and as I was quite a shy child – I didn’t speak a lot in those days – his shouting made me cower. One occasion I remember was when there were five of us swimming in a line, with the fastest at the front to set the pace. For some reason I was swimming at the back that day, behind the others, and kept bumping into the next one’s feet and continually having to slow down.

‘Jennifer – get to the bloody front!’ he shouted, his voice echoing around the pool.

I had to swim past the others, trembling to be picked out like that and sworn at in front of everyone. Fortunately I swam to the front of the line quite easily, because I swam so fast.

Although I had great opportunities in both my favourite sports, I preferred swimming to golf in my early teens because I enjoyed the competitive side of it. As well as the outside classes and coaching sessions, I joined the school swimming team. When our sports teacher became pregnant and had to take maternity leave, she asked my mother to take over coaching us mainly, I think, because Mam was always so encouraging and so involved with all my swimming activities. Perhaps she was the only one willing to take it on. And she had a stopwatch of her own, so that sealed it!

Mam took on this new role as our school swimming coach with her usual energy and determination. She was always a competitive woman, and it rubbed off on me in the years to come, driving me on to scale surprising heights. Thanks to her training, our school team won the Inter-Schools Championship in the Newcastle district for the first time ever.

Friday nights continued to be swimming club nights, when we trained for matches with other clubs. One of our trainers was the man who coached Brian Phelps, the Olympic medalist.

Every year we competed in a match against Hawick and Galashiels in the Borders. This was a major event for us. One year we would travel there to swim, and the next they would come down to us. On one occasion when we travelled north to Hawick, we had a very smartly turned-out swimming coach with us on our rickety old bus. When the bus broke down about ten miles short of our destination, our coach, Verna Watson, in her impeccable navy blazer and white skirt, walked to a nearby house and asked to use the phone.