by Mary Hayward
Terry continued to have problems. He was an excellent salesman, but paperwork wasn’t his strength. Selling was his strength, but the sheer number of orders overwhelmed his ability to complete the paperwork. Terry was so focused on the sale, however, that he would get awards and win competitions for meeting sales targets, and he even won a week’s cruise to the Greek Islands.
Whenever his paperwork was behind, he would blame it on some event. I swear that he faked a car crash when his boss began to suspect he hadn’t kept up with the administration. I felt he was lying not only to his manager, but to me as well. I couldn’t pin him down. He was like a ferret. The stories went on and on, without end, always plausible. I was his wife, and I had to stand up for him.
Another time he faked appendicitis, and even went as far as having an operation, such was his determination to outfox his manager. Eventually the relationship with Pedigree Pet Foods reached an end, and Terry lost his job again.
I wondered when Terry was going to grow up and keep a job long enough for us to get on top of things. Each time he lost his job it took us two months to recover the financial loss.
I felt myself start to get upset, but I carried on.
27
The Bacon Factory
TERRY WAS WORKING FOR DC MARKETING selling life insurance policies, working in Bury St Edmonds. He was doing so well that he was promoted to Branch Manager. He trained all the reps to go out and sell insurance policies and it was going really well, until a television programme went on air.
Esther Rantzen, a presenter for a Consumer Watchdog television programme, showed some instances where insurance brokers had misled customers.
The company responded in good faith, and refunded a few of the customers who had been affected by this mis-selling. This triggered a run as customers saw the opportunity to exploit the situation, claiming that they too were mis-sold polices. The company was soon forced into liquidation. Terry lost his job, again. I felt upset, but I carried on.
It was November 1977, about the time all the firemen were on strike. I remember thinking how lucky we were because Terry had been paid, and I could do the shopping. But it wasn’t long before the liquidators clawed it back and we were left with nothing. Unemployed, we limped on from November 1977 through to March 1978, when, much to my relief, Terry got a job at Webley & Scott, the gun manufacturers.
I was used to being without money, and ran a tight budget saving as much as I could.
I got a knock on the door. The mortgage hadn’t been paid. They had sent out warning letters, but I never got to see any. When I found out that the mortgage hadn’t been paid for several months, I went ballistic.
He never told me we were in so much trouble. It never occurred to me that the mortgage hadn’t been paid, and the thought of losing the house now started to become a reality. After all the work and struggle to get the house in the first place, I was determined it wouldn’t be lost without a fight. The very next day I went out and got a job in the bacon factory, DanePak at Thetford, Norfolk.
At first I was humping great sides of pork from the cold room, into the factory. I was a dainty girl, size ten, struggling to carry large cuts of pork, and then trying to hoist them up onto the large hook of the assembly line; not a pretty sight! Later, because of my dainty hands, or perhaps more realistically because of the ridiculous struggle which I had lifting the bacon, I was given a dexterity test—picking up match-sticks with both hands and putting them into the two rows of holes on a Cribbage Board. I had been a typist, and I guess I was used to using both hands, had good coordination and agility, and so they gave me the job of packing the rashers of bacon into packets.
I was on the bus at 7 a.m. with all the other female workers. Inspectors continually checked our hygiene hats, and I would have to stop work to tuck my hair in. The other women on the production line would complain.
It was oppressive, and I felt like a battery chicken in the hen house. There was a core of production workers, who perpetuated a culture of bitchy hate. At times I thought the other girls would turn and peck me to death.
The swearing and bitching was constant, and I found myself uncomfortable with it. Some would have assumed that being brought up on a council estate in London, I would be used to swearing and coarse language. I was used to the ‘fucking’ this and that, from my father when he was drunk, but he didn’t use that language when he was sober. Yes, some Londoners could be a little rough in their tongue, no ‘airs and graces’, so to speak, but it was rare to hear vulgar language. Let’s face it, we all like to be nosey about our neighbours, but in the factory it was destructive—almost corrosive.
I sensed that the factory was divided almost along tribal lines. They started as soon as they got on the bus to the factory.
“Look at so-an’-so in her new coat—thinks she’s the fucking Queen, does she?” one shouted loudly.
“You’re only packing bacon love!” someone shouted from the back.
“Does hubby know you’re seeing someone?”
It was all about undermining, screwing up and destroying those around them, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Soon I found a job at Travenol Laboratories as a secretary. I worked on the diagnostics side of the business. I absolutely loved working there; people were nice, and the job was fabulous. I was secretary to someone who looked a dead ringer for Kojak’s sidekick, Crocker, played by Kevin Dobson in the TV series.
Joyce rang, and we had a chat about things. I said everything was fine—I didn’t want to tell her my troubles. She told me she had separated from her husband; he had run off with another woman and she was filing for divorce. I spoke to her a number of times, listening to her and trying to help with suggestions and ideas to help, but Joyce was Joyce, and I couldn’t always persuade her to make the right decisions.
I thought things were getting better because I was now bringing in a decent wage, but it wasn’t enough. I watched the finances slip further into decline, until eventually we realised we were drowning in a sea of debt. The breaking point came when the insurance company reclaimed Terry’s company car, leaving him stranded.
Terry travelled to London by train and got commission-only work. But that didn’t help us much as it only covered the train cost, and on top of that, he was coming home late.
It was approaching Christmas and he realised he wouldn’t be able to keep the family tradition and buy all the family presents. He phoned me up, and told me that he was at the river Thet, at Thetford, and that he felt like killing himself because it was all closing in on him.
I told him to just come home, I would make a cup of tea, and it would be okay. We would find a way.
I put it all on the credit card for Christmas, and that action bought us some time.
28
Coming back from Brandon
AFTER CHRISTMAS 1977, Terry and I sat down and discussed what to do. He hadn’t been able to get a job in Brandon, and without work, it was impossible to continue living there. We decided to rent out the house and go back to Brentwood, Essex.
A lot of people were in negative equity and were losing their houses. But I was determined not to be one of them; after all, we had equity in our house and I didn’t see why we couldn’t pay off the arrears. All I needed was for Terry to get another job. But it was the time of strikes and three-day weeks of the Labour government and he wasn’t having much luck. Finally the interest rates went up to a point when it was clear we couldn’t keep up the payments on the mortgage any more.
As luck would have it, we managed to rent out our home to an airman from Lakenheath. The income didn’t cover the entire mortgage, but it was close enough to manage.
I stayed in Brandon for a few months before the tenant moved in, while Terry went down to Hornchurch, where his parents lived, to organise a house and school for Colin, who was nearly seven years old.
Our tenant made an offer to buy the bungalow for £13,150, and we accepted the offer. We had bought it at £9,250 in 1973 so
that meant that if we sold it, we could clear both the backlog of mortgage arrears, and credit card loans.
We heard that the Brentwood Housing Association was building a new estate of flats in Brentwood, Essex, and thought that we might have a chance of getting one of those. We still had £1,500 left over to put down on an Association house.
Housing Associations had a strict procedure for the vetting of residents before they were allowed to get a house on the estate, and our application was no exception. I was still stuck up in Brandon with young Colin, and so I had to rely on Terry to organise things.
I didn’t find this out at the time, so I have to rely on Terry’s account of the events. Terry was apparently full of his usual optimism and confidence as he went for the application interview before the panel. After all, it was to be fairly straightforward because he had a regular job with a large company. He had been working for them for six months, and they had given him a glowing reference. Terry always scrubbed up well, and looked every bit the upstanding pillar of the community. He appeared to be the ideal candidate. So what could possibly go wrong?
On arrival he met with the panel from the Association. The interview appeared to go reasonably well at first; after all, Terry was a very experienced salesman, always confident with people and could sell them anything. They asked why he wanted a house on the estate, and then questioned him about his family and so forth, until they came to the employment section. When they asked Terry the name of his employer, he naturally told them he worked for Webley & Scott.
Looking at each other, all members of the panel seemed to have an epiphany—they looked horrified, went into a little huddle and starting muttering. They thanked him for his application and then proceeded to tell him that unfortunately he had been unsuccessful, and that he would be unable to have a home on the Association development.
I didn’t remember him telling me at the time; perhaps he didn’t want to disappoint me, I didn’t know. But later he told me that they apparently thought that because he worked as a salesman for Webley and Scott, he must therefore be some sort of dubious Gun Dealer. They simply refused point blank to let him have an Association house and that was it. He was absolutely furious that they could be so blinkered. But there was nothing else he could do. We couldn’t afford to buy a house on the open market, so we were completely stuffed!
I moved from Brandon with my son Colin with nowhere to live. The personal disappointment I suffered was devastating. One minute a proud owner of my own home, a well furnished, large new bungalow, in rural Suffolk, and now, God knows what.
I had escaped poverty for a better life. The clean air and low crime of village life was my dream. But now I was back in Brentwood—a failure. I hadn’t escaped. Not really. Snatched back on elastic, as if that’s where I belonged.
Angry? I’ll say I was angry! That churning anger crushed my very soul. Did I blame Terry for the loss of his job, and with it, the failure of all my dreams? Yes.
If only he had kept his job, or at the very least if he hadn’t accepted half pay we could have made it. When the first letter from the bank dropped on the mat, I sprung into action. I started humping sides of bacon in the Danepak factory. I thought we could make it, that between us, we could save the dream, but it was like bailing the Titanic.
Going back to Brentwood was hard and if I could have got a Housing Association house I could have retained some sort of self-respect, some sort of pride; at least I could have mitigated my loss. But it was not to be, and even my dignity was snatched away from me at the last minute because of Terry and his job.
I had just returned from Brandon, Suffolk. We had sold the house and finally I had come back to Hornchurch in Essex with my son Colin, who was now eight years old. A friend of the family, Richard, owned a furniture shop at Ardleigh Green Road, Hornchurch. He agreed to let us rent his dingy, one bedroom flat above the shop. It was a complete dump, mainly because it had only been used for storage and that made it difficult, but it was all we could get at the time.
Terry was supposed to arrange a school for Colin, and when I got to Hornchurch I found out that he hadn’t done it; he simply left it all to me! Angry? I was furious at him. Again.
Despite the misery of it all, and our best efforts to do better, we still ended up staying there for a full three months. It was so small Colin had to sleep on a bed in the kitchen.
Luckily Terry had a friend called Ron, who sat on the Brentwood Housing Association Committee and helped us get a spacious flat. Colin started school, in Brentwood, and life settled down to the normal roller-coaster ride that we were going through.
I suspected that Terry was cheating on me for some time. My suspicions were confirmed when I found a photograph of him lying on a beach, with a woman feeding him grapes, when he was supposed to be working.
Terry was having difficulty with work again, and wanted to start his own business, but he was like some sort of grasshopper jumping from one project to another. He set up a franchise selling soft toys, and when that failed, he went on to a number of get rich quick schemes. I didn’t think he could hold it together.
It was Thursday, 26th October 1978, and I was putting away the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang. I lifted the receiver, my ears still ringing from the noise of the cleaner.
“Hello Mary.” It sounded like Joyce.
“Hello, is that you, Joyce?”
“How are you?” I didn’t answer; for a moment I found her voice comforting, as if I had slipped on an old pair of slippers.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Oh, yea know how it is, fun and games. I’ve just given my son Peter back to my ex.”
Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I didn’t think that she was happy about giving her son away.
“What’s the matter, love? I can come over, and spend some time together?”
“Can yea?”
“Of course I can—for you, anything. Would Saturday do? Then I could ask Terry to babysit Colin.”
“Sounds grand, Mary. Aye, will yea come to my belated birthday party on Sunday night?”
“Love to. Just need to get Colin babysat. We’ll talk about it Saturday, about 5 p.m. if that’s all right.”
“Saturday afternoon,” she said. “I’ll show you my new flat.”
“Where’s that then?”
“Hornchurch, Woodlands Avenue, Emerson Park.”
“Never! It’s not far from here.”
“I know. Afterwards we can go for a drink at the Chequers Inn.”
“Okay, sounds good, see you about 5:30 at the flat.”
“Bye.” I hung up the phone.
She was devoted to her son Peter in every way. She loved him so much and I remember seeing the two of them, cuddling all the time. There was nothing wrong with Joyce as a mother. She lavished love on her little boy; he was everything to her.
Yes, she sounded her bubbly old self, but it was an act she couldn’t hide from me. Underneath I detected a tinge of sadness. I was worried about her. I thought we would find a moment to talk.
When we met, we ran toward each other like lovers in the park. We held each other, gripped in a deep hug, both mourning the loss of our closeness. It felt so good, yet I was anxious for her.
Joyce took me back to her apartment in Emerson Park, Hornchurch. She had put on a bit of weight, perhaps from partying. She introduced me to her flatmate, a fluffy dressy girl. She showed off her wardrobe full of clothes, then we sat on her smart sofa reminiscing over the events that mirrored, echoed and shaped our lives—the birth of Colin just six months after Joyce had Peter, and those moments when we told people that we were sisters. I wished we could have been. Our birthdays were only days apart.
As Joyce and I went to the pub, I wanted to talk to her privately about her son. But as we arrived, she purposely drowned herself in a crowd of friends, flirting, and cracking rude jokes. More butch and slightly vulgar, for a woman. I felt uncomfortable, as if something had changed wi
th her.
We had kept phone contact, and tried to meet, but with one thing and another things always got in the way. I invited her to Brandon a few times, but she never came, and I never went to Essex. I thought I knew her, but with the distance between us, it appeared, really, that I didn’t.
Later that evening, after a few drinks we sat down and had a moment alone.
“What are you doing back in Brentwood?” She seemed desperate to find out.
“We’ve lost the house,” I said. “Terry lost his job, and then...” I just blurted it all out: “I found a picture of Terry fooling around with another woman.”
“Oh, Mary…” She put her arms around me. I felt myself start to get upset, but I carried on. “As soon as I saw it—this girl on the beach with him—that was it, I stormed out of the house. The next thing I knew was when he roared up in the car, threw Colin out onto the street, and left me standing with him at the side of the road.”
I didn’t want to dump it on her, but she was the first person I had spoken to about it.
Joyce didn’t say anything—she sat quietly holding me.
“Enough about me, what’s happening to you?” I was concerned for her.
“I’m all right.” She looked up.
“You don’t seem the same, Joyce?”
“I am, I am, what do you mean?”
“You can’t hide it—it’s me you’re talking to.” I grabbed her hand, forcing her to look up at me.
“How are things really, Joyce?”
“Yeah, well at least I have Mannie, but I have always loved Pete. He’s still with this woman with money and a big house.”
“Who’s Mannie?”
“I’m seeing him at the moment—I quite like him.” She looked coy.
“Do you?”
“I’m not sure.” She looked up over my shoulder.