My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (20 page)

‘Fainting on the bus like that first thing in the morning,’ she said. ‘And feeling sick. It means you’ve been a bad girl, and now you’re expecting.’

I was shocked; indignant that she could say that. Although stern, she was usually very fair.

‘But it’s not true,’ I protested. ‘It’s not even possible.’

‘Nonsense. I don’t believe you. I know you girls and what you get up to. What else could it be?’

‘I hurt my back . . .’

‘That’s enough of that,’ she interrupted. ‘I won’t have you talking back at me. You’re obviously in no fit state to work. Go off home. Now.’ She pointed at the door. I could see there was nothing else I could say, so I left.

I had to get myself back to the bus stop, somehow, bent over with pain. It was a nightmare journey home, but I was glad when I stumbled in through the front door at last.

When I told my father what this woman had said, he went to Newcastle and stormed into the store.

‘I demand to see the manager,’ he bellowed as all the shoppers turned to see what was up. He made a huge scene and was ordered to leave the building.

‘Get out!’ A security guard was called. ‘And you can tell

Miss Lumsden she’s fired!’ was the manager’s parting shot.

So that was it. The next day a letter arrived to confirm my dismissal on the grounds that I had failed to attend work and therefore my services were no longer required.

‘That’s so unfair,’ I protested.

‘Forget it! That was a rubbish job anyway,’ said my father. ‘I’ll find you a better one.’

I spent all week on painkillers, flat on my back on the floor. At the time, nobody but me seemed concerned by my back problem. Many years later, a consultant diagnosed bilateral fractures of my spine on both sides, caused by an old injury. This was presumably from the time when I was slammed against the wall at the age of about six, or maybe when I was thrown downstairs a few years later. I have since developed serious arthritis all the way down my spine.

The pain gradually abated, and I was left in no doubt that I needed to start another job to keep the money coming in.

‘The amount of tax the government takes out of the working man’s wage – it’s outrageous,’ grumbled Tommy. ‘How do they expect us to make ends meet?’ Then he turned to me. ‘You’re not helping, mind – lounging around here day after day. It’s time you got back to work and earned your keep again.’

My father was now a fitter at MacGregor’s, an engineering company in Whitley Bay. Next door was the Shirt Factory. The following day was a Friday and, without a word to me, Tommy spoke to the manager and came home to make his announcement.

‘I’ve got you a new job as a machinist, making shirts. It’s piecework, so you can make a lot more money than that bloody shop. You’ll start work on Monday.’

For a girl who loved to be active, help people and use my brain, this was a calamity. To sit still all day, conversation impossible against the noise of the machines, no contact with customers, doing this repetitive job sounded like the worst sort of work for me. But I had no choice.

For the first week they trained me to use the industrial sewing machines. After that I worked on the production line, making shirt collars. This was a miserable occupation – mindless and unfulfilling piecework. I was paid according to the number of collars I produced. I tried hard to be positive, to think of the good points of the job, but nothing came to mind. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have made whole shirts, but just doing collars all day was stultifying; teenage drudgery. I hated it to such an extent that I stopped eating and lost a lot of weight. Nobody noticed.

I was very unhappy at the time, of course. My spirit and my hopes for the future had all been completely trampled on. My work was so boring and the constant noise ground me down. I couldn’t even go to the toilet without asking permission and being timed. I just didn’t feel like eating all the time I worked there. I didn’t think of it as any kind of protest, though maybe it could have been, subconsciously. I don’t know how much weight I lost as we didn’t have any scales at home, but my clothes were hanging off me.

As my father worked next door, he insisted I meet him every Friday lunchtime to hand over my pay packet. As in my previous jobs, I was not allowed to open it, so I had no idea what I earned. But the Shirt Factory must have paid more than C&A because he raised my ‘pocket money’ to ten shillings (50p). I worked very hard for this meagre ‘privilege’.

The high points in my week were the evenings when I was allowed to go out. I took the bus back to Whitley Bay and met up with my old friends, and for a few short hours could be a normal teenager again. We met at the fairground in winter, or on the beach in summer. Sometimes we went to one of the three teenage clubs in town, where we danced to live music on Saturday and Sunday nights. Our favourite was The 45 Club. It was non-alcoholic, just for teenagers. There was a soft-drinks bar and the whole place was run like a battleship by a middle-aged matron called Betty. There was never any trouble when Betty was there – we were all terrified of her!

The 45 Club had a dance floor and a stage at the front. The lower half of the walls was painted black and the top part was like a sheet of music, with notes on all the lines. During the week it was a disco, with the DJ and his record decks up on the stage. The regular DJ was a boy called Simon. He was older than me; good-looking, with dark hair, a Manfred Mann beard and a warm smile, always smartly dressed in a sharp suit with a shirt and tie. Simon played all the groovy pop music of the sixties, such as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Small Faces, Long John Baldry and the Who.

At the weekends we danced to some fab live groups, including the Junco Partners (still performing today), the Brethren, who later changed their name to Lindisfarne, the Silver Dollars, and many other great groups. Sometimes, if he wasn’t DJ-ing somewhere else, Simon came to join us too. We were all local kids and we all knew each other. It was a unique atmosphere, and so packed that it was sometimes impossible to find a space on the dance floor, even to stand still. On those evenings, people just stood outside on the street and listened to the music, dancing the Shake or the Locomotive on the pavement.

I knew all the boys in the bands in those innocent, crazy days before fame came calling. They were great times and it was always good to catch up with my old school friends. But I was in a dead-end factory job that I hated. They went to college, studied new subjects, went out on field-trips, lived the student life and planned their future careers. We lived in different worlds.

The highlight in my life at this time was my growing friendship with Simon. Soon we were going out together and we really clicked. As well as The 45 Club, he was heavily involved in the hospital radio service and had his own programme. He took me several times, to his studio in the basement of the hospital, which was always dark and spooky, but he dispelled the gloom with his hugs. Once inside the studio it was fine. He had stuck a variety of old egg boxes all over the studio walls to insulate the sound.

‘I know it looks wacky,’ said Simon. ‘But it really works.’

He was dedicated to his work for the hospital service. Once or twice I sat with him as he broadcast his programme, full of pride at how good he was. The patients loved him.

As an apprentice motor mechanic, Simon was very keen on cars. He had a tiny maroon Ford Popular van of a certain vintage. Of course it didn’t have a built-in radio, so he decided to mount a full-size transistor radio inside the roof, between the driver and passenger seats. This was hilarious. As we drove along, Radio Caroline faded in and out so much that we could only catch short clips of each song!

At weekends, to boost the household finances, my father was a part-time bus-driver. He drove the ten o’clock bus back from Whitley Bay to Seghill in the evening, which gave him yet more control over me. I had to be on that bus. On the rare occasion that I lost track of time and failed to be at the bus stop in time, he would park the bus outside and storm into The 45 Club, where he would humiliate me in front of my friends. I would be sitting at a table or dancing to the music when he charged through the door in his bus-driver’s uniform and came straight for me.

‘C’mon home
now
.’ He would grab me roughly by the arm and drag me through the club as my friends, their faces aghast, parted to let us through. When he first did it, everyone was shocked, their mouths hanging open and their eyes wide. I had the feeling they had never seen anything like this happening before. But they never said anything, never tried to stop him. They were probably as frightened as I was.

Once we were outside he didn’t say a word. In a way this was more alarming than if he’d berated me. He kept his vice-like grip on my upper arm all the way to the bus, pushing me along in front of him, thumping me in the middle of my back as we went. I was pushed up the steps of the bus and had to sit in silence all the way home, re-enacting in my mind the humiliating scene and trying to quell the embarrassment and indignation that welled up inside me.

He withheld my pocket money that week, so I couldn’t go out at all the following weekend.

My mother, at this stage, had a job in a cardboard box factory, so both my parents worked full-time now. Their earnings plus Dad’s overtime and my wages on top meant there was a lot of money coming into the household, but where it went I have no idea. I never saw any of it and there were no luxuries. It was a mystery to me. Were they saving it up? Was there something I didn’t know about?

CHAPTER 17

Jenny

Home on the Range

At fifteen I was selected to swim freestyle for the county. I felt both surprised and honoured. My mother wasn’t surprised at all, but she beamed with pride when I told her. She had spent a fortune, as well as so much of her own time, taking me everywhere in all weathers, often late at night or before anyone else was up in the morning. She felt we’d both earned this accolade.

But once the county coach had picked the final team of swimmers, he realized we had a problem. Five swimmers with the same name – Smith!

‘Four of you will have to change your names, mind.’

‘What can we change them to?’ asked one girl.

‘Have you got any other names? A nickname, maybe, or another family name?’

We all tried to think of alternatives.

‘What about you, Jenny?’ He looked at me. ‘What’s your middle name?’

‘I’m Jennifer Constance Lee Smith.’

‘Ee, that’s easy. You can be Jenny Lee Smith. How’s that?’

‘Fine.’ I nodded. And that was how I came to be known throughout my competitive career. Even now, after all these years with my married surname, Jenny Lee Smith is what I’m still known as in the sports world.

By now I was training in the mornings before school, at lunchtimes and in the evenings after school. Swimming was my life and there wasn’t much room for anything else.

But we continued to go to Embleton for weekends whenever there was a gap in the schedules. In fact, it was about the time I was selected to swim for the county, aged fifteen, that I won my first golf competition. Once again it was at my home golf course, Dunstanburgh Golf Club, and as before it was against people much older than me. My mother had beaten me the previous year, but now it was my turn – my first golfing victory. My mother didn’t mind that I had beaten her, and I felt elated. I think it’s brilliant when you win an adult competition that young. It’s such an incentive. I told myself, ‘If you can win this, you can win other things.’ It opened the door for me.

There was a big dinner-dance that evening – all adults except for me. I had to go up on stage, where they presented the women’s trophy to me. Here was I, a teenager, winning the annual prize. Mind you, I could only keep the trophy for a year, but my name is on it and I believe it’s still being awarded now.

Whilst it felt great to do so well at golf, I didn’t see it as anything special, as the swimming continued to be my priority for another year or so, but once you get to around sixteen, you’re often finished as a swimmer, and I gradually turned back to the golf over that year, though I didn’t see it as any kind of a career opportunity until quite a bit later. It was just a pleasure to go around the course and talk to people as I went from one hole to the next. It was a sociable activity, outdoors in the freshest air I knew, by the sea at Embleton, which I loved.

Without noticing any great difference myself, others began to see an improvement in my game. The more I enjoyed it, the more I played, and the more I played, the more skilful a golfer I became, so the quality of my game increased without any great effort on my part, just lots of carefree practice. I smiled to myself when I thought about what Dad would say if he knew what those little cut-down clubs he’d made for me when I was three had started. It seemed I was getting better and better.

When I was selected to represent Northumberland in their junior golf team, it was a great surprise to me, but of course I was very pleased.

One day my mother looked up from reading the local newspaper and said, ‘Haaway pet, listen to this: “The famous golfer, John Jacobs, has opened a golf centre at Gosforth”,’ she read out to me. ‘He’s going to give lessons – they say he’s the best teacher. They call him Dr Golf. Would you like to go and have a lesson?’

Well, of course I said, ‘Yes, please.’ I’d heard of John Jacobs. Everyone who played the game had heard of Dr Golf. ‘But won’t it be very expensive?’

‘Let’s go. You can have one lesson and we’ll see how you get on.’ Mam smiled. ‘You know, it’s important that you take your opportunities when they come, so don’t worry about the cost, mind. I’ll open the salon for longer hours, now that you’re not swimming any more. That will help.’

I knew how lucky I was to have my mother’s support.

‘Pass the paper, Mam,’ I said. ‘I want to go through the job vacancies.’

I had left school after O levels. I was never very academic, and anyway I wanted to help my mother support us both. Turning to the jobs page, I saw the perfect opportunity for me.