There are two sides to every story but I can only give mine. Frank was a drinker and craved what he thought was the high life. He loved his booze more than he loved us and abandoned his children, pure and simple. He may have been young but he left us with nothing – not that we had much to start with. Whatever tales he has since spun, that much is true. Frank moved a hundred miles away to Plymouth and never came to visit. Even though the court allowed him weekend access when Mum divorced him on the grounds of his unreasonable behaviour, he never bothered to come.
One day a few years later, my sister and I were out riding our Tomahawk bikes (the cheap version of Choppers!) when a car stopped in our street and the driver beckoned us over. Mum had always warned us not to talk to strangers but for some reason we didn’t think twice about this one. He was sitting in the driver’s seat smoking a cigarette with a woman at his side. He rolled down his window and smiled.
‘Hello, girls. Do you know who I am?’
We shook our heads.
‘I’m your dad.’
I looked at Frank but felt not a single flicker of emotion. I remember thinking, ‘So? What are you doing here?’
He talked to us for a bit and introduced us to the woman next to him but it was all very one-sided. While he was talking, for some reason Debbie reached in through his open window, took some tissues from the dashboard and started cleaning his windscreen, dropping the dirty tissues on the grass verge as she wiped. I remember being really annoyed – not that she’d dropped the tissues, but that she’d cleaned the windscreen for him in the first place. We didn’t owe him anything! When he eventually drove off, we cycled home and ran into the house to tell my nan who was staying with us. ‘We’ve just seen Frank!’
She stopped and stared at us for a moment and then she said, ‘That’s nice. Did he give you any sweeties?’
I looked at Debbie and Debbie looked at me and we shook our heads. ‘No.’
Nanny turned away knowingly and got on with her ironing while my sister and I stood there, our bubble burst. Maybe seeing Frank wasn’t so newsworthy after all, if we didn’t even get a single sweet out of him . . .
After the divorce, he was rarely mentioned – unless I did something naughty. ‘Oh, you’re so like your father,’ Mum would say. Or, ‘That’s the Holden in you!’ Part of me felt ashamed, but part of me was curious to know more about my ‘bad’ heritage. But to Mum’s credit (and this is a miracle, as she isn’t normally one to hold her tongue) I don’t remember him being bad-mouthed at all, even though after they split he and his family totally abandoned her. The only one who stayed even vaguely in touch with her was my Auntie Joan. But at the time, Frank’s family left Mum absolutely on her own.
Not that Mum let on any of this to us. In fact – on the surface, anyhow – life carried on pretty much as usual after he left. Our neighbourhood was embroiled in gang warfare (see, I told you I was urban) – girls v boys – and it was serious stuff. Us girls had our own den in the fields behind our estate, in a hollowed-out area behind a bush, with everything we needed including rocks for seats and useful items made out of twigs. Everything was neat as a pin. I was like Martha Stewart with OCD – I even swept the bush clean! But I was also a bit of a tomboy and I made my own bows and arrows out of pampas grass and string.
The gang warfare ended with my first marriage (not many people know that I’m technically now on my third). It was to Eric Austin from next door – since he was both available and handy – and took place in our back garden. I wore the frothy, lacy wedding dress that Mum had worn to marry Frank when she was pregnant with me and Debbie was a bridesmaid, in something pink, polyester and very definitely a fire hazard. (My poor sister – she had to go along with it. I was the older sister and very bossy.) It was the stuff of pre-school fairy tales, but the wedding was about so much more than just me and Eric. Our marriage ceremony brought together the two gang leaders and single-handedly ended the neighbourhood’s gang rivalry just like that.
It was around then that I started gymnastics at a local club. I had to wear knickers and a vest to audition – Mum wouldn’t spend the money on a leotard until she was sure I’d got in. I was so embarrassed about it and refused to try out until she encouraged me to! After that, gymnastics became my life for the next ten years.
But with Frank gone, Mum now had to juggle two or three jobs to make ends meet. I hated her leaving for work – I’d run after her to the back gate and scream for her to come back. The babysitter, Beryl, used to walk me back in and practise disco dancing with me to take my mind off it. Poor Mum, she must have felt wretched – and guilty. Even then, I could tell she was deeply unhappy. Debbie and I would go to bed at seven, just before Coronation Street (that theme tune still reminds me of bedtime) and then Mum would go to bed too. I could hear her crying through the bedroom wall and I’d get this sinking feeling in my heart, like I’d just gone down in a lift too fast. The weird thing is, I didn’t go in and comfort her or ask her what was wrong. I think I knew she’d be devastated that I knew. Instead, I hid under the covers so I couldn’t hear her any more. In the morning, I’d shower her with love and cuddles to try and make her unhappiness go away.
From the moment he left Frank did little or nothing to help us and his departure left us even worse off than before – at one stage, money was so tight that we almost lost our home. My mum received a letter from the building society to say the mortgage hadn’t been paid for three months (Frank was supposed to pay), they were brilliant and let her pay those months off gradually and, eventually, the Navy deducted a certain amount of money from Frank’s salary each month
I was always determined to make Mum smile whenever I could. Every time I ran an errand for her I’d buy her a cheap gift with the change. She always said how sweet I was to think of her but she told me years later she was gutted, because she needed the cash much more than some present from the corner shop. (I once stole a fruit salad from the penny chews from the same shop and proudly showed my mum. She was furious and marched me back to confess, even though I could barely see the lady over the cash register – but I apologised anyway!)
But something had to give, even for a woman as strong as my mum. One day I went to the shop on the way home from school, like I always did, and the woman I vaguely knew behind the counter told me, ‘You’ll be coming home with me after school today, Amanda.’ I had no idea why, but I was a good girl, so I did as I was told until my mum’s parents, my nan and grandad, arrived to pick me up. They told me my mother had fainted in the shop and been taken to hospital. (It was only years later that I came to understand that it was actually a very different and heartbreaking story. Things had finally got too much for her. She hadn’t fainted at all. It was a huge cry for help that we have never talked about since. She must have been at her wits’ end to do that – she loved us so utterly.)
Of course, Frank leaving must have affected both Debbie and me too, but I think it resonated with my sister a lot more profoundly than it did with me. Debbie and I are very different – Mum always says that at the first sign of trouble I will run into it and handle it, whereas Debbie will run away from it. I can remember Mum having to come and pick Debbie up from school because she was being bullied. And as a child, Debbie had nightmares about livers and kidneys – apparently this can mean you are suppressing feelings of anger – and would sleepwalk. She has since confessed that, even though we later had a great stepfather in my dad Les, when Frank left she felt this great loss and a huge hole in her life. I couldn’t comprehend what she meant – we never really knew him and were three and four when he left, so how could she miss him?
Years later I now get it – but it took meeting someone that I love and having children myself. There IS a weird black hole that no amount of love can fill, and I realise I have searched to fill mine subsequently in relationships, as has Debbie (at the time of writing this, she still hasn’t been lucky). I then poured everything I had into my dreams and ambitions. I turned it into a positive, whereas Debbie ha
s always seemed a little more lost.
Back then, though, I guess hiding in the wardrobe in the darkness was somewhere I could be myself. Out in the real world, where I didn’t want to add to my mum’s problems, I felt like I had to plaster a smile on to my face so as not to upset her, that I should ignore my feelings and just get on with it.
Little did I know that it would all prove to be a good grounding for the future. Or that a part of me would always feel that way . . .
Chapter 2
The Golden Years
Mum worked so much that she had no choice but to leave us with her parents and we spent a lot of the school holidays with my grandparents at their house in Gloucester. They played a huge part in my upbringing, and some of my most treasured childhood memories are of things that happened with them. And some less treasured, too – like their stinky old cat, for example. There are many things you might like to think your parents named you after, but a mangy old maggot-ridden moggy with matted fur is probably not one of them. However, my mum did just that and chose to call me Amanda, the same name as Mandy, my nan’s ancient old cat. She says it was after a character in her favourite sitcom at the time, Not in Front of the Children, but I’m not so sure. (My sister, however, was named after the much more glamorous Debbie Reynolds!) The origins of my middle name, Louise, are slightly more salubrious – there’s supposed to be some French royalty (wishful thinking!), the Thomases, on my mother’s side dating back to one of the Louis kings. My nan says we have Gaelic blood and that both her father and grandfather were called Louis because of it. But whenever anyone calls me Mandy (Chris does it to be annoying and it has stuck) I think of that stinky cat.
My nan and grandpa – known to us as ‘Papa’ – were lovely, honest, people, the kind who, if they made you a promise, kept it. They lived in a modest new house built not long after the war, a comfortable three-bedroom terrace house in the outskirts of Gloucester. I still think of it as my childhood home. It is immaculately kept by Nan, who is now in her nineties. The ornaments are still the same, as is the smell – a mix of polish and cooking. Their orange swirly carpet that I learned to crawl on was only changed recently. Upstairs the two little single beds Debbie and I used to sleep in have been replaced with just one, and a wardrobe – not big enough to hide in, but containing precious gifts we both made for my grandparents, which include handpainted plaster casts of Miss Piggy and Kermit and a knitting needle case! (Lexi loves to run upstairs to hold them and see what I did when I was her age – she enjoys nostalgia.) I used to love hiding in what seemed like huge conifers at the bottom of the garden, but now I realise they weren’t as big as I thought.
Nan and Papa so obviously loved each other. I’d watch them dancing cheek-to-cheek or kissing as if they were never going to see each other again, even if one of them was just nipping down the shops.
Papa was a Welshman, a director of a builder’s merchant and proud to be from working class – there were no fancy French connections for my Papa! He was very spoilt emotionally and grew up well-mannered but serious and a little bit self-important (his elder sister Lavinia had died at eighteen months so his mother became an overprotective worrier). He was tall with thin grey hair, which went thin from the age of twenty. He was handsome, with grey/blue eyes (and a ‘drinker’s nose’, which was odd as he was teetotal!). Like many men of his generation he always wore a tie and aftershave. He had some sort of nervous disorder before the war which left him blind in one eye and meant he couldn’t go to the front so he served in the pay corps instead. They gave him a medal but he handed it back because he didn’t think he deserved it.
It was during the war that he met my nan. He walked into a café, saw her and told his friend, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry!’ When she left he ran down two flights of stairs to chase after her and ask her out. From that moment on, Nan was my Papa’s life – he adored her. It was all about my nan – he never even really wanted kids. He had his electric razor faithfully plugged into the wall of their bathroom, got up at the same time every morning and shaved in the bathroom – even after he retired – before splashing on his Old Spice. I’d wake up to the comforting buzz of his electric razor and the smell of his aftershave and know that life was alright.
Papa was a huge influence on me and, without doubt, the person who nurtured my love of music – he was fanatical about it. He played record after record, although we were never allowed near his prized player. Like all Welshmen, he thought he had the best voice in the world (no one dared tell him he was a bloody terrible singer!). It was him who introduced me to opera, musicals, orchestral pieces and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (which really wasn’t me – the clue’s in the title. I was too polite to say no . . .). He’d tape the tunes I liked the most on his reel-to-reel tape recorder, which was the height of technology then, and give me copies to take home. He’d also conduct Radio 4-style interviews with me in his thick Welsh accent that went something like:
‘So, Amanda, this is Jim Harrison from Gloucester on 5 April 1978. Are you happy to be at Nanny and Papa’s?’
‘I sure am, Papa!’
‘So, do you have a song for us today?’
‘Yes, Papa. Here it is.’ (Cue music and me singing . . .)
‘Well, that was a lovely song and a lovely tune. Thank you. This is Papa signing off.’
If he ever made a mistake he’d say, ‘Ignore that bit. It’ll be OBLITERATED.’
Mostly though, he was the quiet one and my nan was the sociable one. Any friends they had were her friends. My nan is very tactile and often saucy – always pinching your bum as you go up the stairs in front of her! She’s the life and soul of the party and at the centre of everything, dancing on tables. She was a strong, loving but strict mother to my mum and my Aunt Vivienne. I don’t mind saying, though, that Nan is also a pain in the arse and stubborn to the point of unreasonable. She’s from that generation who don’t want to be a burden or to make a fuss. She’s also opinionated and searingly – and often unnecessarily! – honest. She’ll say, ‘I’m sorry, I have to tell you . . .’ and you know it’s going to be something you don’t want to hear. I always think, ‘Why do you have to tell me, Nanny? I don’t need to know – I know it’s going to hurt my feelings!’
We call Nan Mrs Bouquet, because she is so proper and a bit of a snob. She has always laid out all the breakfast things the night before – the place settings, vitamins, her pills and Papa’s pills – and she’d always tell me that you should make sure your husband saw you in lipstick first thing in the morning! Back in the day she would perch on the edge of Papa’s special seat at 11 o’clock, which was always milky coffee (‘Half milk, half water, dear!’) and have a cigarette. She never inhaled it, though – it was just to keep him company. Although she lived on a Gloucester housing estate, she was like the Queen and kept all her cereal in labelled Tupperware boxes. She always bought Robertson’s marmalade (which I love) but she kept the jar in a special silver pot so you couldn’t see the label, with a proper marmalade spoon. If you ever went into the marmalade with a knife not the spoon, she’d go nuts!
We’d have to help her with the chores – making beds, tidying up – but once we’d finished she’d come to play with us, and it was FUN. Every day would be a trip out – boating, rowing, to the swimming baths (where we challenged her to jump off the high board – and she bloody did it!), to South Cerney pools or Bourton-on-the-Water for a picnic. We sat on scratchy Paisley towels, eating warm sandwiches with sand in and home-made fruit cake and drinking tea that tasted of the flask. That taste of tea from a Thermos will always remind me of my grandparents. No matter how posh the flask, there is a weird taste – it is the best taste in the world and takes me right back to my childhood. Papa used to make the sandwiches – they were so good, but only because he put such a lot of salt and vinegar in. They’d literally be wet with vinegar (our poor arteries!).
Nan is a massive Tom and Jerry fan and for years my sister and I would buy her Tom and Jerry presents every Chri
stmas and birthday. In fact only a few years ago she found a soap we’d bought her when we were little – it was all mouldy, flaky and cracked but she hadn’t wanted to throw it away and had ended up keeping it for thirty years!
Nanny would buy us clothes and things we needed for the summer and when we got home we’d stage a fashion show that poor Papa would have to sit through as we tried it all on for him. Their shed was used as our beloved Daisy Chain Cottage. This was a ‘hotel’ that regularly served mud pies and water tea. Later it was promoted to a cruise ship. The menus – which are still safely stored in my Nan’s house – offered gammon with pineapple rings pretend curry. (Hilarious – when would I have had a curry at that age?) Nanny would be receptionist with a birdbath for her desk. We’d make up Papa’s workbench like a bed. I sometimes wonder at my children playing in the garden and cannot believe I was a child there once too, using the same lion statues as guards for my dollies.
At my nan’s house I also used to write plays. I did shows at home, too, but in my nan’s back garden I only ever used to do the ‘professional’ things, like Annie, or plays specially written for Gloucester, which were more ‘polished’, for ‘a bigger audience’. I would obviously have the starring role as the beautiful princess and Debbie would be the witch. I’d get all the kids in the street into the back garden so that I could sing my head off for them. (Of course, now I’d give anything to be the witch – it’s a much better part!)
No Holding Back Page 2