A Daughter's Choice Read online

  A Daughter’s Choice

  MARGARET FORD

  WITH JACQUIE BUTTRISS

  A.M.D.G.

  With everlasting love for my mother, Ray, Les and Jim

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 - Playing with Otters

  Chapter 2 - Family Frictions

  Chapter 3 - Ghandi in Blackburn

  Chapter 4 - Kidnapped!

  Chapter 5 - A Pinch of Snuff

  Chapter 6 - New Challenges

  Chapter 7 - A Royal Visit

  Chapter 8 - Look, Duck and Vanish

  Chapter 9 - New Beginnings

  Chapter 10 - A Scary Warning

  Chapter 11 - Red Alert!

  Chapter 12 - The Mystery Visitor

  Chapter 13 - Bittersweet

  Chapter 14 - Making a Splash

  Chapter 15 - Let Me Go!

  Chapter 16 - The Worst Tragedy

  Chapter 17 - The Palais Glide

  Chapter 18 - The Bush Hat

  Chapter 19 - Tickling Trout

  Chapter 20 - A Long Goodbye

  Chapter 21 - A World Apart

  Chapter 22 - Ship Ahoy!

  Chapter 23 - Best Laid Plans

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Photographs

  Prologue

  The pavement was hidden under a sparkling white blanket of snow as I stepped out of the front door of our house on Robinson Street for my long-awaited wedding day. Uncle John, who had reluctantly agreed to walk me down the aisle, sat in the back seat of the hired car, waiting for me. I took a deep breath and got in next to him. We sat in silence as we drove through the snow and the slush to St Alban’s Church, watching the glittering rooftops and trees go by.

  I should be happy and smiling, I thought, but instead I was full of anxiety that things would not go to plan: would tension bubble up between our families? Would my older brother Bobby try to stop the wedding? Or even worse, would Joe find a way to ruin everything? At that moment, it seemed to me that the whole world was against us having the perfect day we’d dreamed of.

  Perhaps I’d had too long to think. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Conflicting thoughts raced around my brain. By the time we reached the entrance to the church, as I saw him standing there, stamping his feet in the snow, waiting for me with a wide grin on his face, I felt overwhelmed by doubts . . . I couldn’t do it.

  ‘Drive away please,’ I said suddenly.

  ‘Are you sure, miss?’ the driver replied.

  ‘I need to get away.’

  Uncle John gave me a sideways look, but he didn’t say a word – just tutted and turned back, staring straight ahead.

  As we reversed out of the drive I watched my fiancé’s smile drop, replaced with a look of baffled dismay, then shock. How could I do this to him? But wouldn’t it be worse to subject him to a shattered dream? And it wasn’t just about him. I knew he loved me completely, but what if I didn’t love him enough? What if I lost my independence? I could see a future stretch ahead of me that I wasn’t sure I wanted . . .

  1

  Playing with Otters

  1926–1929

  Born blue, the baby was slapped and swung round in the air by her ankles till she cried.

  I was that baby. I started life loudly amidst the silenced mills of Blackburn following the General Strike of May 1926. I was born in our two-up, two-down terraced house in Goldhey Street, Little Harwood and was weaned on Oxo. These were hard times for working families in Blackburn, but, although we were cash-poor, both sets of grandparents made sure we always had enough to eat.

  Our house was on top of a hill, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the centre of the city and not far from where my mother’s parents lived. Grandad Harrison was a master builder and had his own building company, with a large yard near to their home. They lived in a detached house near Daisyfield Station, about two hundred yards from Goldhey Street.

  Grandad had bought our house for my parents when they got married, so we occasionally stayed there, but most of the time we lived at the Tanners’ Arms in Dinckley, a village about six miles away from central Blackburn. The Tanners’ was a popular pub which was owned and run by my father’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Holden, with the help of my father, Horace, and his brother, Uncle Eddie. They both worked full-time because Grandpa Holden also had another job as a mills inspector, touring all the local cotton mills to check they didn’t break any laws. He was a stern man with dark, greying whiskers, a moustache and a bushy beard. He wouldn’t tolerate any bad behaviour.

  His wife, my grandma, was just as stern. I once heard one of their customers calling her ‘a cantankerous woman’. She always wore long, dark clothes and was fierce in her mission for cleanliness. She had a temper and I remember her snapping at my mother if she didn’t do something the way she wanted it. She was often cross with her sons too. Uncle Eddie was never quick enough for her, and Father was too generous when he measured out the drinks. Everyone had to jump to, or there’d be trouble.

  Although all seven of us lived together on the first floor of the pub, it was a large building and I didn’t spend much time with my Holden grandparents. I shared a room upstairs with my brother Bobby who was five years older than me. Downstairs was all to do with the pub. In the main room, there was a big open fireplace and a long bar with a wooden top that had to be polished every day. I think that was my father’s favourite place, drinking with his friends at the bar. Along the back was a row of wooden barrels with low taps on them.

  One day, as a toddler, I was sitting on the stone slabs of the floor behind the bar and I turned on one of the taps. The brown liquid poured out all over me and I screamed because I couldn’t stop it. I was sitting in a spreading pool of ale, crying my eyes out, when Uncle Eddie rushed across and turned the tap off, then roughly lifted me up and bundled me upstairs.

  ‘You must never do that again,’ he scolded as he handed me over to my mother. I didn’t like Uncle Eddie much as he wasn’t very kind or friendly. I don’t think he liked me either. He ignored me most of the time.

  The bar area led to two smaller rooms filled with curved-back chairs around tables, each with a heavy ashtray. There was also a kitchen on the ground floor. Most of the customers were local agricultural workers, passers-by or travellers during the week, but at weekends, high days and holidays people from Blackburn came in their droves to the countryside for a day out, especially in good weather.

  The Tanners’ Arms was surrounded by acres of open fields and farmland. Veevers Farm, across the road, had land that stretched out in all directions with a long walk from the road to the large stone farmhouse. It was a wonderful place to grow up.

  Grandpa Holden also used to keep animals, like pigeons and hens, on some ground outside. At the time I thought they were pets but we sometimes used to eat pigeon pie and I never thought to ask where the filling came from! I only realized one Sunday, when Grandad wrung a chicken’s neck so that we could cook and eat it for lunch. I had watched this chicken and her friends running carefree around their pen in our garden just an hour before. Now the hen squawked and screeched in her death throes. I was horrified, but none of the grown-ups comforted me. This was not a demonstrative family. Only Bobby put his arm round me, which cheered me up.

  Apart from the chicken incident, I have only happy recollections of my early childhood, not then knowing or even sensing the frictional undercurrents that existed across my extended family.

  My two earliest memories were of being with my gentle mother, Alice – a pretty young woman with thick chestnut curls, a round face and a thin waist. The first was at our Goldhey Street house, where Mother was always more relaxed. Perhaps that’s why we went there, away from the pub, just the two of u
s. I was sitting on her knee in her rocking chair in the living room, rocking to and fro in front of the coal fire in the hearth just as the klaxon was sounding for the mill workers to go home. I watched the flames leap in the fire and I remember the cosy, warm feeling I had, feeling safe in her company. The other was on a bright, sunny day when she took me half a mile down the lane from the Tanners’ to the river Ribble in my big pram.

  When we reached her favourite spot, she lifted me out of the pram and held my hand as I toddled down to the water’s edge and sat on the patch of sand that she called ‘Little Blackpool’. While she sat next to me and did her crocheting, I splashed about with my stubby fingers in the puddles on the sand. Slowly, a baby otter approached and dared to come out of the water, followed by his more timid siblings. I remember watching them as they played with each other, turning and tumbling on the sand around my legs as if they trusted me. I think the brave one let me touch him. Mother laughed with me at their antics. I’ve loved otters ever since. It’s just as well that I knew nothing then about the annual Boxing Day gathering of otter hounds and their masters, along that very stretch of the river. I was always happiest with my mother. Unlike Father and some of the other grown-ups, she was never raucous or unpredictable, angry or upset when it was just the two of us – always calm and happy.

  During the day at the Tanners’, everyone in the family had their jobs and Bobby was at school, so I was very happy to be left to my own devices. Looking back, I expect the adults were happy to get me out from under their feet. It might seem strange now, but in those days nobody worried about young children playing unsupervised in the countryside, which seemed so safe. I became a very independent child and loved making up my own games to keep myself occupied.

  Outside the pub, the farmer from Veevers Farm stood his milk-kits every morning, on two platforms at the side of the building, one higher than the other. I sat and waited to watch them being collected by a man driving his horse and wagon. This carthorse was a gentle giant, with its long fetlocks and glossy mane – it gave a friendly whinny whenever it saw me.

  Across the road from the Tanners’ was a small, rectangular red postbox on a wooden pole, next to a grassy mound. There was very little traffic passing down the road then – just the odd, lumbering horse-drawn cart or pushbike, as very few people had motor cars yet in Blackburn – so it was safe to let me play out there. In fact, it was an exciting occasion if ever we did see a motor car, and everyone would go outside to have a look.

  Every morning, after breakfast, I used to wander across the road to the postbox, and scramble up the grassy mound. Then I could grab hold of a branch that jutted out of the overgrown hedge to pull myself up to reach the slit. I spent many happy hours carefully picking grasses and gathering stones, roots, pebbles, twigs, nuts – anything I could find – from around the Tanners’. I started to build a pile of them on top of the bank, so that I could have a lovely time posting them all through the slit of the postbox until I had filled it right up to the top.

  Having finished this task, I would potter off a few yards down the road to talk to the horse that lived in the field. He always came to the fence as soon as I arrived and listened intently to whatever story I told him that day, while he patiently munched on the tufts of long grass in my hand, plucked from the verge on my side of the fence.

  After I’d filled up the postbox for three days in a row, it began to cause some alarm at the Tanners’.

  ‘Somebody has blocked up the postbox!’ complained one rather large lady who popped into the pub with her letters in her hand. ‘Who could have done such a thing?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ was my grandpa’s curt reply, though I think he might have guessed the small vandal’s identity. ‘Just put your letters up on the bar for now and I’ll tell the postman to call in for them.’ As I continued with my mischief, he put a table outside where people could leave their post. Then, at the right time, he would go out and bring all the letters and parcels in to put on the bar, ready for the postman’s visit. Well, anyone who came inside would stay for a drink, wouldn’t they?

  So, each day, the postman pedalled up to the Tanners’ to collect the letters . . . and stayed for a pint to ‘wet his whistle’. Sometimes he stayed for two!

  It wasn’t long before the local policeman, patrolling on his clattering bike, took to popping in as well. It was always at about the same time, just to make sure everything was all right . . . and to have a drink while he was there. Some days he stayed so long that the inspector came to join him! When I was old enough to think about it, I realized I must have done my family a favour by filling up that postbox so efficiently.

  The Tanners’ Arms was quite an old building, probably Victorian. It had no flush lavatories or hot water. Consequently, we had outside latrines and chamber pots that were emptied into ‘tubs’ with carrying handles at each side. At the end of each day, after I’d gone to bed, Father and Uncle Eddie had to empty them somewhere outside. I never knew where. It was only when I was older that I realized why we so often ate mushrooms for breakfast!

  Down the side of the Tanners’ there was a long, narrow tea room, which was a glass-fronted extension. It had a lovely garden where people brought their children to have free lemonade and play, while the adults sat on old school benches and paid for their drinks. Even when I was very small, I always joined in the fun and games, though many of the children were older than me.

  Beside the tea room there were lots of sheds and the area of ground where my grandfather kept his hens, pigeons and doves. There was one smelly shed I was forbidden to go into. One day I asked my mother why.

  ‘That’s where they make gas for the lights,’ she explained. ‘So it’s dangerous. You haven’t to go anywhere near it.’ For once, I did as I was told.

  As an independent three-year-old, I continued to seek out new adventures. One very hot day, whilst Mother and I were at our Goldhey Street house, with all the windows and doors open to let the air through, I couldn’t resist the chance to have a little wander, as I often did at the Tanners’. As soon as Mother noticed I was missing, she went round to all our neighbours, looking for me. They came out to help search the street, gardens and alleyways, whilst Alice Fish, from the shop over the road, ran down to the police station.

  ‘They’re sending a policeman out to help us find Margaret,’ Alice told my mother. ‘They said for you to stay at home, in case she turns up again.’

  Mother must have been very worried about me, waiting at home for news. But I was having a whale of a time . . . until our friendly local policeman looked over the school railings half an hour later and recognized me sitting in the middle of a circle of children in the playground, as they took turns to roll a ball to me. He tried to pick me up, but I struggled and kicked and screamed.

  ‘Let me go,’ I wailed, tears running down my cheeks. ‘Go away!’

  So in the end he had to go and ask my mother to come and fetch me. When she arrived, she walked across and took my hand.

  ‘Come home now, Margaret,’ she said in as calm a voice as she could, highly relieved, no doubt. But I was completely oblivious to all the worry and upheaval I had caused. Despite her anxiety, she was such an easy-going person, kind and considerate to everybody, that she didn’t tell me off that afternoon. In fact, I don’t ever remember her telling me off for anything. Thinking back now, I know I was quite a handful for my mother to manage. I often led her a merry dance, but she was as stoical as a saint.

  I was glad my father wasn’t there that day. He would have been furious!

  One day, I can remember my mother dressing me up in a pale-blue outfit, trimmed with white fur. ‘Your father wants to take you on an outing,’ she smiled brightly, in an attempt to give me confidence. But I was not so sure, as I was not close to my father and feared his temper. Now I realize Mother must have had her qualms about this ‘outing’ too, particularly as my father had never taken me anywhere alone without the rest of the family. I wasn’t excited about the trip bu
t he did make a fuss of me sometimes, giving me sweets and once buying me a doll.

  So off we went. I don’t know where we went or what we did, except for a vague memory of walking across Blackburn and going into a big house with a wide doorway, up the stairs, and being left in a room on my own. It was a small, pretty bedroom and I lay down on the pink candlewick bedspread. It was so comfy that I must have fallen asleep. After a little while, Father woke me up and we walked to another noisier building, where he left me sitting outside while he went in. Much later in the afternoon, my father arrived back home without me.

  My mother frantically asked him where I was but he was so drunk he couldn’t remember where he’d left me. Exasperated with him and worried about me, she had to send for the police again. He was probably too drunk to care. This time the search was much wider, as Father couldn’t even remember where he’d been. There were a lot of pubs in Blackburn, so I could have been anywhere. I suppose I was always such a happy child that I must have amused myself in some way while I was waiting for him – playing with stones or making patterns with leaves, maybe.

  All I remember is a kind policeman coming to find me, sitting on the bench where I suppose Father had left me, outside one of the pubs. I don’t think I would have been tempted to wander away in a strange place. The policeman took me back to our house in Goldhey Street, where my mother rushed up to me, bent down and looked at my face. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, stroking my tangled hair with relief.

  I nodded. I was fine. Knowing me, I probably wondered what all the fuss was about. Mother made me something for tea and then helped me wash and put me to bed. I don’t know what happened between the grown-ups after that. However, I do know that Mother was ‘not pleased’, as she told me years later, when relating the tale to me.

  As I grew older, my mother started to talk to me about her past. She used to tell me how, as a young girl of about fifteen, at the end of the First World War, she used to bake cakes or shortbreads and take them in a basket down to the railway station at Daisyfield. There she distributed them to the returning wounded soldiers, some of whom had been prisoners of war.