THE TYNESIDE SAGAS: Box set of three dramatic and emotional stories: A Handful of Stars, Chasing the Dream and For Love & Glory

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘These are Gloria’s,’ she whispered, drawing back. ‘I should have guessed.’

  ‘Me mam’s?’ Jo questioned. Pearl nodded, overcome. Jo put out a tentative hand and touched the soft cardigan. It smelt of mothballs. She thought how old-fashioned the clothes seemed compared to Pearl’s jazzy outfits. These staid jumpers and skirts were so dull; the sort of thing Ivy would stop and admire in old ladies’ clothes shops on the high street. Jo felt a stab of disappointment. She could not relate their ordinariness to the wedding-dress princess who lived in her head.

  ‘Why has he kept them?’ she asked, thinking it rather macabre to store her dead mother’s clothes all this time.

  Pearl’s voice trembled. ‘He couldn’t bear to throw them out, I suppose. It’s all that’s left of your mother. He loved her that much, you see…’ She looked away and fumbled for a handkerchief. Jo was shocked to see her crying. She wanted to look further into the trunk, but did not want to upset her aunt any further.

  ‘Don’t be sad, Auntie Pearl,’ she tried to comfort, putting her arm around her shoulder. ‘It doesn’t make me upset.’ Pearl blew her nose and made an effort not to cry. ‘I thought you didn’t care much for me mother?’ Jo said, with a quizzical look.

  Pearl sniffed. ‘Oh, that silly argument with your dad! I never meant it.’ She looked at Jo with her vivid green eyes. ‘I thought the world of your mother when we were growing up,’ she confided. ‘Gloria mothered me after our parents died. Aunt Julia wasn’t very maternal, but Gloria made up for it. She always had me turned out nice, hair brushed, hands clean. When I had nightmares, she’d sing me to sleep again, and she used to tell me stories − wonderful stories that she made up in her own head. You must get your imagination from your mam,’ Pearl smiled wistfully, ‘though you’re headstrong like your dad, as well.’

  Jo held her breath. She had never heard anyone say so much about her dead parent before. ‘Tell me more,’ she urged, stroking the woollen clothes. ‘How did she meet me dad?’

  Pearl gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘Through me, really. I’d sneaked out to a dance during Race Week and Jack walked me home. I was much too young for him, of course, but he got introduced to Gloria and kept calling round when he was back on leave. She loved all those stories of your dad’s about life on the ocean waves! Head over heels, they were.’ Her look was faraway. ‘They didn’t take long to marry. When Aunt Julia died, Gloria took me under her wing again. They moved back into Aunt Julia’s flat because it was bigger than the place they were in. That’s where you were born.’

  Jo looked at her in astonishment. ‘I always thought I was born here, in Jericho Street.’

  Pearl shook her head. ‘No, your dad chose to come here after your mam died. Staying in the old place; well, it was a bit upsetting. And he wanted somewhere for you and Colin to play outside with other bairns. I’d decided by then to go off to sea, so I was just as happy to sell Aunt Julia’s flat.’ She glanced around. ‘This place became my home too. It was always nice coming back to a bit of family life after months at sea; seeing you bairns.’

  Pearl gently pulled down the lid of the trunk. ‘Jack worked so hard at making it a happy home.’ She gave Jo a painful little smile and touched her long coppery hair. ‘We’ll let your dad decide what to do with these, eh?’

  Jo nodded. As she got to her feet, her mind bursting with all this new information about her mother, she noticed something bundled in a pillowcase that Colin had leant against the wall. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, already unwrapping it. It was a heavy mahogany picture frame, with a photograph inside the filthy glass. Jo sneezed. ‘Looks a bit like you, Auntie Pearl.’

  Pearl leaned over and wiped the glass. ‘Eeh, it is! I remember that dress, it was pink and white candy stripes with a silver belt −’ Then she caught her breath.

  ‘Who’s the little lass?’ Jo asked. A young Pearl with permed hair and a sticky-out dress was holding the hand of a round-faced infant with pale hair in a spotted dress and ankle socks. The small child was squinting at the camera, a quizzical smile on her lips.

  Pearl said softly, ‘That was my goddaughter.’ She clutched the frame.

  ‘What’s she called?’ Jo asked, curious.

  Pearl stared hard. After a pause she said, ‘Joy.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned her before. Where’s she now?’ Jo persisted.

  For a long moment her aunt said nothing. Then, in a hushed voice, ‘Oh, I don’t see her now.’ Pearl put the photo down. When she saw Jo’s puzzled face, she tried to explain it away. ‘I was good friends with Joy’s father, a navy friend. We lost touch. Best not to mention it to your dad.’ She wrapped the picture up again quickly.

  ‘Why not?’ Jo was surprised.

  ‘Well, he didn’t approve − not of my friend. He’d be upset. It was all a long time ago,’ Pearl said, quite flustered.

  ‘What’s it doing in our wash-house, then?’ Jo asked, none of it making much sense to her.

  Pearl hesitated a fraction, then shrugged. ‘I must have put it there years ago with some of my stuff − to be out of the way. I’ll take it round to my flat now.’

  Nothing more was said about the photograph, and when her father came home there was a heated dispute about what to do with the trunk.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to keep your mam’s clothes?’ he asked Jo. ‘They might come in use…’

  ‘Dad!’ Jo protested. ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead−’ Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, realising what she had said. She saw the pain in his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said quickly, ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  But Jack shook his head. ‘No, you’re right,’ he answered in a heavy voice. ‘We’ll give them to a jumble.’

  ‘They’re better than jumble,’ Jo insisted. ‘I’ve an idea. Would you let me give them to the Players? They’re always on the lookout for costumes. Then they’d still be sort of in the family.’

  Jack agreed, and so Gloria’s dated clothing was given to the wardrobe mistress at the dowdy Dees Theatre, which the Players shared with a local scout group and a spiritualist church.

  In the last week of the summer holidays, the Elliots moved to the caretaker’s flat and Jack settled into his new job. The following week, Jo and Marilyn moved up to the grammar school. A month later, Jo went with Colin to watch the final part of Jericho Street being knocked down. Sitting on a wall beyond the cordoned-off street, Jo watched in awe the relentless pounding of the giant weight against the old brick walls and the speed at which her old home collapsed in a cloud of dust and was gone. She felt strange inside, as if she had just witnessed the end of her childhood as well as her home.

  ‘I’ll treat you to a bag of sweets from Dodds’,’ Colin offered, as if he knew how empty she was feeling. Jo just nodded and they made their way silently to their favourite corner shop.

  After that, her father would detour around the area rather than walk past where they had once lived, but Jo soon got used to passing by the waste ground that had once been Jericho Street and its surrounding lanes. Before long, a modern airy library of concrete and glass had grown up in its place, and by the following year, Jo often stopped to do her homework there after school. The flat was cosy but cramped, and she always seemed to be in Colin’s way. They argued over trivial things, accusing each other of using or losing the other’s pen. Besides, it was more fun going with Marilyn and the other girls to the library, and joining in their whispered comments about the boys who strutted past the large windows swinging their haversacks full of school books.

  ‘Look, there’s Gordon Duggan,’ Marilyn would laugh, and nudge Jo.

  ‘So!’ Jo replied, pretending not to care, but colouring all the same.

  ‘Looks a bit like Paul McCartney with those big eyes, if you ask me,’ said Brenda, a new friend from the flats. She wore a long maroon maxi-coat and midi-skirts and was generally listened to when it came to opinions on fashion or lads.

  ‘He doesn’t look anything like Paul McCartney. Anyway, I’ve gone off P
aul,’ Jo declared, pushing her lengthening red hair behind her ears, ‘ever since he married that Linda. And now the Beatles have split up…’

  That spring, they had talked about the break-up at length, and Jo had felt that yet another strand of her childhood had finally snapped. Now they were supposed to be writing arguments for a school debate on the coming General Election. To her father’s annoyance, Jo had been chosen to represent the Tories. ‘They’ll not get back in,’ Jack muttered, ‘you haven’t a chance.’ He was half right. In June of 1970, Jo was roundly defeated in the class elections, but Ted Heath led the Conservatives to a surprise victory. Undaunted by her failure, Jo got involved in school productions as well as plays at the Dees Theatre, and another year sped by.

  The Christmas of ’71, Pearl was home and took Jo on a shopping spree, buying her a long sheepskin waistcoat which she wore with her wide jeans, while her aunt chose for herself a garish long poncho with slits for the arms which clashed with her orange crimplene trousers. Pearl persuaded Jo to go to Trotter’s hairdresser’s on Station Road and have her hair trimmed for the first time in two years, but Jo resisted the perm to which Pearl treated herself.

  On New Year’s Eve, Pearl galvanised them all into going ‘first-footing’. It annoyed Jo that Colin was allowed to go where he pleased now that he was nearly sixteen, but her father was still so protective of her. Her brother was getting ready to go and hear Gordon’s rock band play, but Jack would not allow Jo to go too. So Pearl had intervened before another argument sparked between them all.

  ‘I shouldn’t really leave the building.’ Jack was hesitant.

  ‘For one night in the year you can,’ Pearl insisted, worried that he was becoming too reclusive. He had taken to the caretaking job far better than anyone had imagined, but seemed reluctant to venture out of his self-contained domain. ‘We’ll call round to a few of the old neighbours.’

  ‘As long as it’s not the Duggans,’ Jack had decreed. Her father had not spoken to Matty since the terrible rift over his treatment of Norma and Mark. Too many cruel things had been said for either of them to patch up their quarrel.

  They started with the Leishmans, who lived now in one of the low blocks of flats behind the Forum. The girls soon got bored drinking sherry and advocaat with Marilyn’s parents, and Marilyn was disappointed that Colin had not come, so when the adults were all merry, Jo suggested they went on ahead to Ivy’s. Pearl allayed Jack’s fears. ‘They’re teenagers now, and it’s only five minutes’ walk. Let them go, Jack. We’ll follow on in a bit.’

  ‘As long as you go straight there,’ Mary Leishman said, with a warning wag of her finger.

  They escaped before anyone changed their mind, clattering out into the frosty night. Jo had not been to see Ivy since the autumn half-term, for her time had been taken up with school and the Christmas pantomime, Cinderella. At fourteen she was tall, with gangly legs and hair that drooped in her eyes, and she had been given the part of the Prince’s equerry, who went around flourishing the slipper on a cushion. Mark had not come to see her perform this year and she was secretly hoping he might be at Ivy’s, although she thought it unlikely. He was bound to be out with Kevin McManners’s skinhead gang. The last time Jo had seen Ivy, she had been struck by how old and fretful Mark’s grandmother had become. She worried about the new decimal currency that she could not fathom even when Jo tried to teach her. But most of all she worried over Mark, who was increasingly beyond her control.

  ‘It’s the bad company he keeps,’ she had clucked in disapproval. ‘Is it any wonder that he’s always getting into trouble? I’ve had the police knocking on me door all summer, and the truancy officer; the school was that glad to see the back of him when he left. I don’t know what he’s going to do, mind. All he thinks about is drinking and fighting and playing loud music. He’s getting too much for me to manage…’ Ivy had fought back tears and Jo had tried to comfort her.

  ‘It’ll be a phase, Nana Ivy,’ she had said, making her a soothing cup of tea.

  ‘I wish you were right,’ Ivy sniffed in distress. ‘I love that lad.’ Then she lost the struggle not to weep. ‘Oh, it’s all my fault…!’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Jo had hugged her in concern. ‘You’re the only one of his family that’s tret him right. Don’t you go blaming yourself.’

  Emerging from the Leishmans’, Jo wished she had found time to visit Mark’s grandmother more often, but somehow the weeks had sped by. It had begun to snow while they were indoors, and Jo whooped in excitement, scraping the wet layer of snow off a stationary car and hurling it at Marilyn. She screamed and threw snow back, skidding down the lane towards the high street. Crossing it, they heard the thud of bass music coming from a pub. They stopped and listened.

  Marilyn giggled. ‘Sounds like Gordon’s band.’

  Jo was seized by an impulse. ‘Should we gan in? Just for a minute. I bet Colin’s in there.’

  Marilyn was shocked. ‘They’d never let us in! Even dressed like this we don’t look anything like eighteen. Mam would go light! And your dad ...’

  ‘All right, yella-belly,’ Jo teased. ‘I was just joking.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past you,’ Marilyn replied, with a suspicious look. ‘What you doing now?’

  Jo was fumbling in her long sheepskin waistcoat. ‘I’ve pinched a couple of Pearl’s fags. Thought we could smoke them on the way to Ivy’s,’ she grinned.

  ‘I hate them,’ Marilyn said quickly.

  ‘Bet you’ve never tried one, Miss Goody-Goody,’ Jo mocked as she lit up. ‘Here, you have this one.’ She lit the second from the first and passed it to her friend.

  Marilyn took it gingerly. ‘Let’s get off the main street in case anyone sees us,’ she hissed. They dived down a back lane, puffing and coughing and shrieking with laughter. Behind them, Jo was vaguely aware of the back door of the pub banging open and raised voices spilling into the dark.

  Then suddenly the girls stopped as the sound of arguing grew more strident. There was cursing and shouting and threats of retaliation. Marilyn gripped Jo’s arm in fear. ‘Sounds like a fight,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s get going.’

  Jo was about to turn and escape when she heard her brother’s voice being called. Someone was taunting him about the school he went to. She recognised Kevin McManners’s menacing voice, and peering up the lane she saw a ring of skinheads milling around the back steps of the pub. Her heart began to hammer at the shadowed figures with their shaven heads. It was a new sight around the town; lads of Colin’s age strutting in heavy lace-up boots, braces and jeans, their once shaggy hair now shorn down to the scalp. In a group, Jo found them frightening and could not understand why Mark should want to hang around with the likes of Kevin, who had tattoos across his knuckles.

  Jo edged nearer and glimpsed her brother being pushed around on the steps. Skippy was with him, mouthing off at McManners. Colin was trying to calm him and pull him back into the pub, but someone was blocking his way. As Jo crept to the end of the lane, her pulse pounding, she saw that it was Mark, and her heart thumped in shock. Her mouth went dry with fear as the gang jostled around their victims, egging them on to fight. She knew it would be no equal contest, for her brother and Skippy were well outnumbered. Kevin jabbed out with a steel-capped boot and caught Colin on the shin. Her brother shoved back, but someone else hit him from the side.

  Jo saw Colin lose his footing and stumble. Skippy began to lash out aimlessly in fear. The gang crowded around, all except Mark, who hung back indecisively in the shadow of the doorway. Then the kicking started, heavy boots flying as if passing a ball between them. Behind her Jo could hear Marilyn begging her to run for help, but instinct told her it would be too late. Colin had disappeared from view.

  Feeling sick with terror, she ran out from the dark lane, screaming her head off for them to stop. ‘Leave them alone! Stop! Stop, you bastards! You’re just a bunch of cowards, bullies! Someone help!’ She ranted on hysterically, the noise echoing around the snow-lined
street.

  Kevin and a couple of the others looked round in surprise. They looked amused and then irritated when the din did not stop.

  ‘Look who’s come to the rescue; little Wiggy Elliot!’ Kevin cried in scorn. Jo felt her legs lose all their strength at the sight of his aggressive, contorted face. ‘Do you think this lass can save you, eh, Elliot? You’re just a tart anyway, with your little Boys’ Brigade trumpet!’

  Jo was almost hoarse with her screeching, but they had stopped the attack momentarily. She was shaking from head to foot as Kevin turned his attention on her.

  ‘What’s a bairn like you doing out at this time of night? Hanging round pubs an’ all,’ he leered.

  ‘I’m not a bairn,’ Jo rasped. He stepped towards her, laughing harshly.

  ‘No, you’re not, are you?’ he jeered. ‘What are you looking for then?’ He lunged out and grabbed her arm. Jo froze, looking round wildly for help. Marilyn was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly she fixed on Mark, who had stepped forward. He looked so different with his dark hair gone, his scalp gleaming in the street light. His cheekbones were accentuated and his dark eyes looked huge in his stark face. There was a raw handsomeness about his brutal looks, but he seemed a stranger. How could he allow an attack on his old friends? Somewhere in all her fear she managed to feel angry, and gave him a furious look. As Kevin’s grip dug into her arm and he began to make lewd suggestions about what he might do to her, she saw Mark move.

  In one swift movement he was over to them. ‘Leave her alone,’ he ordered. ‘She’s still a kid.’ Kevin just laughed; he was having fun. ‘Haway, man!’ Mark said angrily. When Kevin still did not leave go, he pulled him off roughly. ‘I said leave off!’

  It had all happened in seconds, but it was long enough to allow Colin and Skippy to scramble to their feet, their faces bloodied. Kevin turned on Mark, thumping him instead. ‘Don’t tell me what to do, darkie bastard!’