For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice.. Ann Ming

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СКАЧАТЬ herself look taller, fed up about the fact that she was so much smaller than Gary and Angela. As a result she didn’t always choose the most practical shoes for everyday life but that never worried her. I went into Middlesborough with her once when she had these bright orange high heels on.

      ‘My feet are killing me,’ she grumbled after we’d been walking round the shops for a bit. ‘Will you swap, just for ten minutes, Mam?’

      ‘Only ten minutes,’ I said firmly.

      What is it about being a mother that makes you willing to put yourself through agony rather than see one of your children in pain, even when they have inflicted it on themselves in the first place? A mixture of natural instincts and motherly love, I suppose. I was still wobbling along in these ridiculous bright orange stilettos when we bumped into someone from my work and I had to do some fast explaining.

      When she left school, Julie started training as a hairdresser. She had always been interested in messing around with her own hair, dying it shocking pinks and blues long before such colours were generally accepted, so it seemed like a good choice of career for her. Her hair was still incredibly thick, just as it had been when she was a baby, and when she permed it, it became even more spectacular. Big curly perms were all the fashion round our way in the 1980s, and Julie’s was the biggest and curliest. When she came home with blue hair after my mother had had her third stroke, Mam was convinced it was a hat.

      ‘What a lovely hat,’ she kept saying. ‘What a lovely colour.’

      ‘It’s not a hat, Mam,’ I told her, ‘it’s her damned hair!’

      Julie wanted to practise her hairdressing on everyone and she even persuaded her dad to have a perm in his dead-straight, coal-black Chinese hair. It actually didn’t look too bad once she’d done it, so he kept it.

      Charlie and I liked Andrew from the first time Julie brought him home. He was very relaxed about life and good at gently humouring her if she was in one of her moods. He was a couple of years older than her and working as a painter and decorator. Having been married for nearly twenty years to Charlie by then, who was a strong and sometimes controlling character, I could appreciate the attraction of being with a man who was a bit more easy-come, easy-go. Andrew just fitted into our family as if he had always been there.

      In 1985, the year Mam died, Julie and Andrew got married and moved into a council house just down the road in Billingham, 27 Grange Avenue. It was only five minutes’ drive away from us. I was very happy for them. I’d been born and brought up in the area myself and knew it well, so it felt as though Julie was staying close to her roots.

      It was a lovely wedding and when I watched Julie and Andrew dancing to ‘Ave Maria’ at the reception I felt like the complete proud mum, happy to have brought up such a pretty girl and to be able to see her settling down with a nice man. ‘Ave Maria’ was her favourite song and she looked so beautiful and so joyful as they whirled around the dance floor that at that moment it didn’t seem possible they wouldn’t have a wonderful happy life together.

      Even though Julie was now a married woman it often felt as though she hadn’t left home at all. We would see her every day, and there would be phone calls from her all the time. Gary had left home and started work as a bricklayer and, even though Angela was still living with us, she was very independent and had just starting her training as a dental nurse. But our Julie wouldn’t let go of the apron strings.

      ‘Are you in, our Mam?’ she would ring and ask at least once a day. ‘I’ll pop round then.’

      She was nearly always round for her tea, because we usually had the sort of Chinese food the children had been brought up eating. Charlie had taught me how to cook it at the beginning of our marriage and we all thought of it as our staple diet. As a family we used chopsticks all the time without even thinking about it.

      Sometimes she would come round for one of her daily visits, then go home and ring half an hour later, even though she didn’t have anything new to say. She just liked to chat about nothing or about anything that had come into her head in the previous few minutes. Although I would get exasperated with her sometimes if I was trying to get on with doing something else, I wouldn’t have had it any other way; I loved having her around. Even when I was at work she would be ringing all the time; the others in the operating theatre used to tease me about it every time another call came through.

      ‘You’ve got to stop ringing me so much at the hospital,’ I’d tell her every so often. ‘You’re going to get me into trouble.’

      ‘Oh, aye,’ she would reply, good-naturedly. ‘I will.’

      But she never did. The moment she thought of something to tell me or ask me she would be dialling again without a second thought.

      My colleagues at the hospital were used to her ways, having known her since she was little. Because I worked weekends the kids often used to come in to see us when they were little, if we weren’t busy. All the other staff knew them and they weren’t nervous about the theatre or even the god-like surgeons.

      Julie came into the hospital to see me one day when she was about seven months pregnant, the year after she and Andrew were married. There were just three of us on duty that day and nothing much was happening so we were able to pay her some attention.

      ‘Get up on the table,’ one of the other nurses told her. ‘We’ll get the stethoscope and see if we can hear the baby’s heart beating.’

      She was up on the table with her belly exposed while we tried to find the baby’s heart when one of the surgeons, Mr Clark, suddenly burst into the room.

      ‘What the bloody hell is going on in here?’ he wanted to know.

      ‘Our Julie’s pregnant and we’re trying to find the heartbeat,’ I explained nervously.

      ‘Oh, get out of the way,’ he barked. ‘I’ll find it.’

      Julie went bright red as he took over and found the heartbeat almost immediately. This same surgeon had been very generous when Julie was married, passing on a load of furniture that he and his wife didn’t want to go in her new home. Everyone around the hospital was good to us like that, treating us like family.

      When she was close to her due date both she and Andrew came to live with us for two weeks because she wanted to be at the heart of the family at such an important time. I guess maybe she still didn’t feel ready to leave the nest even though she was a married woman and soon to be a mother. Andrew never seemed bothered about anything like that, always fitting in easily wherever he was, happy to go along with whatever Julie wanted.

      The birth all went smoothly and Julie instantly took to motherhood. A few weeks after little Kevin had arrived she and I popped out to the off-licence to buy some chocolate, leaving the baby with Andrew and Charlie.

      ‘I feel really strange,’ she said once we were away from the house. ‘This is the first time I’ve come out without Kevin since I had him.’

      ‘I feel like that with you,’ I told her, ‘even though you’re married now. I don’t think a mother ever feels complete without her children around her.’

      ‘Ah, Mam,’ she teased, ‘but I’m a woman now.’

      ‘Yeah, I know, but I still feel the same about you.’

      When the time came to take Kevin to the mother and toddler СКАЧАТЬ