The Girl in the Spotty Dress--Memories From the 1950s and the Photo That Changed My Life

by Pat Stewart

  As I sat by his side, willing him to get better, I noticed lots of things. I felt his care wasn’t quite what I thought it should be. After he’d regained consciousness, the staff seemed to be sedating Johnny, rather than encouraging him to get up and move about. I felt as though everyone had given up on him – everyone apart from me and my children. Eventually, I became so frustrated that he was being neglected that I spoke to a doctor. I recognised this particular medic because he’d once transferred my husband to a wonderful respite hospital, specially equipped for people living with dementia.

  ‘Oh, I’m so pleased to see you again,’ I began, trying to stop the tears from streaming down my face. ‘Please could you take my husband back into your hospital instead?’

  ‘Why?’ the doctor asked, concerned.

  I explained that I wasn’t happy with the level of care Johnny had received.

  ‘I feel as though they’re sedating him to keep him quiet.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stewart,’ the doctor said gently. ‘But I can’t. He’s under another doctor’s care, so it’s not ethical for me to do it. I just can’t intervene and remove him.’

  But I was desperate and the doctor knew it. I felt my husband was being allowed to die without the high level of care he deserved.

  Later that evening, I was sat at home, unsure what to do or who to turn to, when the telephone rang. It was a colleague of the doctor.

  ‘We are doing some tests into vascular dementia and we’d like your husband to take part. Would you be willing?’ he asked.

  I knew what it was. The doctor had moved both heaven and earth to bring Johnny back under his care during the last months of my husband’s life. The news lifted my heart no end and I readily agreed.

  ‘Thank you,’ I gasped, emotion overwhelming me.

  To my relief, Johnny was moved the following morning. Within days, because the hospital hadn’t sedated him, not only was he moving, but the nurses and I had got him up walking again. I sang and hummed old dance tunes as we stepped through some of the old stage routines – anything to try to keep his brain alive.

  Towards the end of his life, Rachel was sat holding her father’s hand, as we remembered our visit to Holland.

  ‘Dad,’ she whispered, ‘would you like to go back to Arnhem?’

  Johnny was holding my hand too. As soon as she said the word Arnhem, he squeezed it in reply.

  ‘Well, you’re not going back there on your own,’ I said, stroking his face gently. ‘This time, we’ll all be with you.’

  I was there with my children and my beloved Johnny when he died just a few weeks later, on 15 February 2000. It was the day before Stephen’s fortieth, but he was with us as we registered his father’s death on his birthday, and Stephen took care of all of the funeral arrangements on that day. It sounds strange, but we took Stephen a bottle of champagne and a cake because we knew it’s what Johnny would have wanted. My husband was, without a doubt, the love of my life and I still miss him with every breath I take.

  After his death, we held a simple service at Wick village church, followed by a cremation at Bridgend crematorium. Peter had arranged for a jazz band to accompany us to the church. It must have been the half-term holidays because, as we drove through Wick village, I noticed that children were dancing in the street in time to the music.

  ‘Your dad would have loved this,’ I smiled as we passed by in the funeral car. ‘Pantomime and entertaining children was what he always loved the most.’

  I pulled out a tissue to soak up my tears.

  Rachel had chosen one her father’s favourite songs to sing in church. It was a pantomime song called ‘John Brown’s Baby’s Got a Pimple on his Nose’, although it was more widely known as ‘John’s Brown’s Body’.

  At first, I’d been surprised by Rachel’s choice but, once she started singing, the whole congregation joined in, clapping along. It was joyful but, at the same time, extremely moving. I knew, without a doubt, that Johnny would have been looking down approvingly. When we reached the crematorium, Johnny’s elder brother sang a Welsh song and the British Legion provided us with a bugler, who played ‘The Last Post’.

  After my husband’s funeral, life was a bit of blur. One morning, I searched through some old boxes and pulled out documents with Johnny’s regiment and army number written on them. Rachel contacted the Dutch branch of the British Legion, which managed to trace my husband through his documents. An official there spoke to the War Graves Commission in Belgium, which agreed it would be possible to inter Johnny’s ashes at Arnhem cemetery. Someone had even asked the Canon of Northern Europe to conduct a service for Johnny, so that his ashes could be formally interred alongside his fellow soldiers.

  With all the arrangements in place, we travelled over to Holland with Johnny’s ashes in a casket. I’d placed it inside a cool bag because I’d wanted to be discreet. Once we’d cleared customs at Schiphol airport, Rachel met us outside in her Range Rover. Together, we began the final part of Johnny’s journey to Arnhem. But as we taxied along the road, the back of the car flew open.

  ‘Rachel, the back hatch has come open!’ Stephen called out in a panic.

  ‘Oh, heck!’ said Rachel, signalling and pulling to a halt at the side of the road. She turned around in the driver’s seat to see the door of the boot swinging open to reveal the open road behind us.

  ‘My God!’ she gasped. ‘You’ve not lost Dad out of the back door, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Stephen said with a grin, wrapping his hands protectively around his father’s wooden ashes casket. ‘He’s right here, on my lap.’

  With that, we all began to laugh and cry with both hilarity and emotion. As usual, Johnny Stewart had had the last laugh. Even though I knew life would never be the same again, it was time for Johnny to take his final bow and bid his audience farewell.

  CHAPTER 26

  BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  Following Johnny’s death, I asked myself a question that most widows must find themselves asking: ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

  I’d spent most of my life caring for my children, and then my husband, so I suddenly felt redundant. I was lost and seemed to have no place in the order of things. One day, something else dawned on me: ‘Who will look after me?’

  The answer had echoed loud and clear inside my head: ‘I will.’

  But it still felt odd because it had be the first time in forty-six years that I was responsible for only one person. I’d expected it to feel liberating but, instead, it’d felt lonely. I had lots of acquaintances but no real friends. Johnny’s illness had spanned over twenty years and I’d discovered, to my cost, that, if people can’t ‘see’ an illness, they are frightened by it. If something is visible and regular, people accept it. Dementia is not. It’s a cruel illness that steals away the person you love until all you are left with is a shell of their former selves. But you refuse to walk away or give up because you still love them.

  My family had been supportive throughout, but they had families of their own to care for, so I didn’t want to burden them. At the same time, I didn’t have a clue what I should do next. One Sunday morning, I was sat wondering where life would take me, when I made a decision. I knew I couldn’t stop from growing old, but I didn’t want to have to be nursed by my family. I glanced across at the cigarette packet on the side cabinet. In many ways, cigarettes had been my salvation when times had been stressful and challenging. But I knew they’d slowly kill me, just as they’d done to Johnny. I got up from my chair, picked up the packet and crushed it between my fingers. Then I began to search the house until I’d emptied it of all the cigarettes I could find. I picked up the lot in a heap and threw them in the bin. With nothing else to do, I stood up, put on my coat and walked over to the bingo hall. I decided I may as well enjoy Sunday lunch there because I couldn’t be bothered to go to too much effort cooking for just one person. After lunch, I sat back to let my food digest. As I did, a telltale wisp of grey cigarette smoke curled around in front
of my face. A young woman had lit up a cigarette behind me. As the smoke continued to swirl around in the air, I thought how I would’ve done exactly the same had I not just binned the lot earlier that morning.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, turning to tap the woman on the shoulder.

  Her head turned defensively, as though I was about to scold her for lighting up a fag directly behind me.

  ‘Yes?’ she replied, blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth.

  ‘My name is Pat Stewart, and I gave up smoking this morning.’

  The woman put the cigarette back in her mouth and took a long drag from it as she considered what I’d just said. She blew out a lungful of smoke, looked up at me and smiled.

  ‘Well done, babe,’ she said, patting me warmly on the arm.

  I’d never been called ‘babe’ in my life before, so I wasn’t sure if it was a derogatory remark. But then the woman did something quite remarkable. She looked at the cigarette in her hand and stubbed it out on the flat metal ashtray in front of her.

  ‘If you can do it, so can I,’ she replied.

  Her mother, who was sat at the side of her, was also smoking. She looked at her daughter and then over at me. Without a word, she took her half-smoked cigarette and did exactly the same.

  ‘Me too!’ she agreed.

  We started chatting and the three of us soon became good friends. I began to open up and tell them all about Johnny and his dementia.

  ‘Smoking robbed my brilliant husband of his wit, his memory and his life.’ I said as the women listened.

  After that day, I never smoked another cigarette. I can’t be sure if my new friends stuck to it, but I do know they didn’t smoke for a very long time afterwards.

  A few months later, my friend Sadie, who was visiting relatives in Wales, called me up.

  ‘Pat, have you seen the Daily Mail?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you should go out and buy it. There’s a woman in there who is claiming to be you. She says she’s the girl in the spotty dress!’

  Sadie wasn’t far from me, so she nipped over with her copy of the newspaper. Sure enough, there was a woman called Norma Edmondson, who had claimed to be me, sitting on the railing at Blackpool prom in 1951.

  ‘Told you!’ Sadie said, crossing her arms in annoyance. ‘You should ring the paper and tell them they’ve got it wrong. That woman,’ she said, jabbing the paper with her finger, ‘is an imposter!’

  ‘But what can I do about it?’ I asked.

  Johnny’s death hadn’t just knocked the stuffing out of me; it had robbed away my confidence too.

  ‘You should ring up the reporter and let him know he’s made a mistake,’ Sadie insisted.

  But I was still grieving for Johnny, so I really couldn’t be bothered to get involved in a wrangle. However, Sadie had made such an effort in bringing the newspaper over to me that I felt I owed it to her to make the call.

  The journalist at the Daily Mail was very charming but he suggested that, if I truly was the girl in the spotty dress, I should be able to prove it.

  ‘But how can I do that?’ I asked Sadie after I’d put down the phone. ‘The photo was taken years ago. How on earth do I prove I’m the girl in the photo and not this Norma whatshername?’

  Sadie seemed as stumped as me.

  ‘I don’t know, Pat,’ she said, shaking her head sadly.

  With no energy or clue how to stand and fight my ground, I put the whole thing to the back of my mind. I allowed the lady her moment in the spotlight, while I tried to pick up the pieces of my life. Lonely and bored, I visited Age Concern and offered to become a volunteer. At first, I helped out doing the charity’s banking every Wednesday, which helped my confidence return. Slowly, I’d begun to feel like a member of society once more. Desperate to keep busy, I set up a keep-fit class for the ladies who visited the Age Concern café. I ran the class every Wednesday at 9am, charging each person £1, which I donated back to Age Concern. Soon I had more and more ladies attending.

  ‘This is great, Pat! I love coming here,’ one of my regulars said after we’d finished the hour-long session. ‘It gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.’

  That’s when it had occurred to me: there were lots of other widows, just like me, who needed a hobby – something to look forward to. Our class began visiting other groups of old people in the area, to give a demonstration and to encourage them to get up out of their chairs and move around again. Being the ultimate professional, I used my dance training to choreograph easy-to-follow routines.

  ‘I think we should all wear black with matching neck scarves, so we look more uniformed,’ I suggested, recalling my time with the world-famous Tiller Girls.

  ‘That sounds like a great idea!’ someone piped up from the back of the room.

  With our new uniforms, our ‘dance’ routines were timed to precision. In fact, we became an OAP version of the Tiller Girls! I decided to nickname our group The Geriatric Tillers as word spread and the dance class began to flourish. It became so popular that we began to take more and more bookings in old folks’ homes.

  One of my favourite dances was a cane routine to ‘All that Jazz’, although most of my ladies used walking sticks instead of canes. After one show, we even received a standing ovation. Recalling my time on the stage, I turned towards our audience.

  ‘Would you like some more?’ I cried, cupping a hand against my ear.

  The whole room chorused an overwhelming, ‘Yes!’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted one of my ladies. She was leaning up against her stick, panting for breath.

  ‘No more, Pat!’ she begged and we all laughed along with her.

  Sadly, the more I danced, the more my hips and knees began to ache. It became so bad that I had to give up teaching. With a more sedate lifestyle, in the years that followed, I became grandmother to nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Inside me there remained an overwhelming sadness that Johnny hadn’t lived to witness our ever-growing family. Out of all my grandchildren, only Rebecca had ever seen her grandfather perform, although she was far too young to recall it. I’d have loved the others to have watched him in pantomime or appear alongside him, just as their parents had done.

  A few months later, I visited Holland, and I was thinking about Johnny when a crushing loneliness swamped me.

  ‘What’s the matter, Granny?’ Jacob, my grandson, asked.

  I looked down at him, his eight-year-old face crumpled with concern.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Jacob. I just miss your granddad, that’s all. I wish he could be here to watch you all grow but, instead, I’ll grow old without him.’

  Jacob listened, thought for a moment and then took my hand in his.

  ‘Don’t be sad about growing old, Granny,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this: the life we are living now isn’t our true life.’

  I was puzzled. I didn’t understand what he meant.

  ‘Go on,’ I encouraged.

  ‘No. This isn’t our true life. You see, we are all asleep. It’s only when we die, like Granddad Johnny, that we wake up. That’s when we start to live the life we are meant to.’

  I shook my head with bewilderment.

  ‘Who taught you that?’

  Jacob looked up at me. Now it was his turn to look puzzled.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘But where did you read it? You must have read that in a book somewhere?’

  Jacob shook his head.

  ‘Nope, I just know it.’

  I looked down at my grandson as though I was seeing him for the very first time. I couldn’t believe a boy so young could say something so profound.

  It had been ten years since Johnny’s death but, somehow, in just a few words, Jacob had not only managed to comfort me but convinced me not to view death as an ending but as a new beginning. It certainly wouldn’t bring Johnny back, but it had made his loss easier to bear.


  I was staying over in Holland, looking after Eve and Jacob, because Rachel was away in Belgium, taking part in an art show. I was sat in her lounge, waiting for EastEnders to begin, when I heard Jacob’s voice shout me.

  ‘Quick! Granny Pat. You’re on television!’ he gasped, grabbing my hand and dragging me over towards the TV.

  I looked at the TV and saw Phil Tufnell, the former cricketer, holding a book up towards the camera. On the front of it was the picture of me and Wendy – the Blackpool Belles – taken on the promenade many years ago. Suddenly, Phil turned towards a woman I vaguely recognised. He started to ask her about the photo. It took me a moment to register but then it clicked – she wasn’t an expert, or even a photographer – it was bloody Norma Edmondson, the woman who’d been in the Daily Mail – the woman, who, by the looks of it, was saying she was the girl in the photograph!

  ‘The bloody cheek!’ I snorted angrily.

  I turned up the volume as Phil asked the woman about the photograph taken on that blustery day on Blackpool promenade. But she couldn’t remember – in fact, she couldn’t really answer any of his questions.

  ‘That’s because you weren’t there. It’s not you!’ I shouted at the television.

  Jacob looked at me with wide eyes, as though his granny had gone completely mad. But I hadn’t gone mad – I was mad! I was bloody fizzing!

  I was about to ring up BBC’s The One Show to complain when the phone rang. It was Kay, my friend from Cardiff.

  ‘Pat. Thank goodness! Are you watching The One Show? There’s a woman on there pretending to be the girl in the photograph!’

  ‘I know!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve got it on right now! The bloody cheek of it!’

  ‘Pat, you have to tell them it’s you. You have to prove you’re the girl in the spotty dress, not her!’ Kay insisted.

  ‘I know but how on earth can I do that?’