Child of the North. Piers Dudgeon

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СКАЧАТЬ more urgent note and the hands all began clapping as Sal Tanner executed a frenzied dance – showing her pink, grinning gums at one end and her pink, dimpled thighs at the other.

      Soon after meeting Jo it became apparent just how completely the novels are based on her own personal experiences – not just the places, but the people, too, though this may be subtly done, so that, for example, Jo’s real Auntie Biddy, who lived in Bedfordshire, was a quite different character to the one portrayed as the mother figure in Her Father’s Sins. Only her name is used. Biddy’s fictional character is in fact that of the author’s mother, Mary Jane, who was the fulcrum of Jo’s existence as a child, and in a sense remains so to this day: ‘My mother was a lovely person. She was shy, but a very lovely looking lady – long dark hair, big dark eyes. She was ever so warm, you could never fall out with her.’

      It was Jo’s mum who encouraged her to realise her ambition to become a writer, when the prospect seemed absurd. ‘Sadly I didn’t have success with the novels when she was alive, but she’s up there, she knows…She is Marcia in Angels Cry Sometimes, and I keep her alive in each new novel. She’s always there, sometimes she’s an old woman, sometimes a young man…I had to keep her alive, you see. Molly Davidson was also my mother [Cradle of Thorns]. Marcia is most like her, but she appears in every novel. She could be an old man, a young woman, a little boy – the persona, the soul of that character is my mother. My readers are beginning to guess: “That is your mother!” In fact, reading the book I am writing now [The Woman Who Left], they might think that the female character, Georgie, is my mother, but they’ll be fooled if they do, because it is someone who comes into the story later on…’

      When I ask Jo what she particularly remembers about her mum, it is the simple things, how well they got on, the special, private, one-to-one moments of spontaneous laughter. Any one of the stories she tells me is typical: ‘I remember once we were in the scullery and me mam said to me, “Take the potato peelings out of that water in that bowl, put them in the bucket there and swill the yard with the water.” You had to go down a flight of steps to the backyard and as you came off the steps at the bottom you’d go into the smallest cellar, where the toilet was, and all the coal was kept in there. After telling me to do this, she went out, and I didn’t know where she’d gone. So, anyway, I did what she said, took the potato peelings out of the bowl and put them in the bucket – we used to give them to the milkman who’d take them to the farm to feed to the pigs. Then I took the bowl of water and opened the back door and stood at the top of the steps and I just threw it. At that precise moment me mam came out of the toilet cellar and it went all over her! I thought I’d killed her! I cried my eyes out, and then of course we just laughed and laughed together. Just things like that, so lovely.’

      Jo’s dad, Barney Brindle, hailed from Kilkenny in southeast Ireland and had a job with the council when she was a child. ‘He had these beautiful blue eyes and he was fair-haired, this little man, and I loved him very much,’ said Jo. ‘He worked for the Corporation on various jobs; he kept the roads, maintenance jobs, everything. Later, he kept Blackburn Rovers football ground, which he was immensely proud of. He was fanatical about Blackburn Rovers. Oh, my dad and my brothers were fanatical. And I loved it. I used to play football in the street and I’ve got a scar to prove it! See that scar? I dived for the ball and slit my left hand on some glass.

      ‘Like the rest, my father worked extremely long hours. They had to because they had all these children. I mean, many of the families down the street had lots of children. So, the mothers were busy having the children and the men had to work to provide, and come the Friday they were worn out; they headed for the pub with the wages. It was a vicious circle.’

      When Barney first met her mum, Mary Jane, in the 1930s, he was working as a quarryman and she was in her early twenties, lodging with her parents, Granddad and Grandma Harrison. Jo remembers her maternal grandparents well. They lived in Henry Street, Church, a suburb of Accrington, a town just east of Blackburn. Grandma Harrison is Grandma Fletcher in Angels Cry Sometimes – ‘bossy, cantankerous, but with a heart of gold…I remember her old mangle, sitting in the yard through all weathers until Monday morning when it came alive at the turn of a handle.’ And Jo remembers her grandpa as the one who opened her eyes to the magic of storytelling, when he sat her on his knee and told her stories of his adventures with his dog. Seventythree-year-old Jasper Hardcastle in Jo’s recent novel, The Beachcomber, ‘was partly based on my granddad Harrison, a wonderful man, very special,’ Jo admits. ‘I remember one Sunday morning when I visited my beloved grandparents, I was eight years old and asked why the pan lid was dancing up and down on the stove. My granddad, who worked in the butcher’s and used to get titbits at the end of the week, proudly lifted me up to show me a full pig’s head boiling away in the pan, with the lid bobbing up and down on its ears! I ran screaming from the house, and it took them a full hour to get me out of the backyard loo.’

      Jo learned all about her parents meeting from her mum, and the story became an essential part of the background to her third novel.

      ‘Angels Cry Sometimes takes onboard a great deal of my mam’s life,’ Jo recently told the nation on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. ‘When she was eighteen she was married to a man [before Jo’s father] who made her life a misery. She was in love with this man. He married her. They had two little boys. And then about four years down the line the police came knocking at the door one day and they arrested him for bigamously marrying her and he was jailed for seven years.’

      Readers will recognise this as the way Marcia Bendall’s marriage to Curt Ratheter breaks down in the novel, even to the number of years that Curt is sentenced to serve at Lancaster Assizes:

      When Curt came to the doorway of the little parlour, the policeman close behind, what he saw in there tore his heart to shreds. Seated on that very settee where many a time he and his darling Marcia had experienced so many tender and wonderful moments, was that same woman whom he idolised…It gave Curt the deepest pain he had ever known when, at that moment, Marcia sensed his presence, for of a sudden she raised her large dark eyes to look on him. Their painfully stricken expression made him ask silently for the Lord’s forgiveness.

       On seeing him there also, both the officer and Grandma Fletcher got up from their seats. He asked whether the fellow’s name was Curt Ratheter. She charged forward and angrily demanded of him, ‘Is it true what they’re saying? ‘Ave yer already a wife?’

      ‘My mother wouldn’t talk about it for a long, long time because it was such a stigma,’ Jo told me. ‘Suddenly she was an unmarried mother and he was in prison. It made her life a misery. I think she must have still been in love with him when he was taken away. He moved south when he came out. Then she met Dad, Barney. He was a happy-go-lucky chap, up for a laugh, charming as ever. And he loved her very much. And she grew to love him.’

      With such a background to a marriage, successful as it was in one sense, with ten of Barney’s children born to Mary over the next two decades, it cannot ever have been easy for Jo’s dad to accept that it had only been made possible through a breach of the law. Did Barney know that his new wife still loved this man who had been put in prison? Did that count in the sad balance of fate that led Jo to say on BBC Radio: ‘They had lots and lots of children, and I am obviously one of them, but along the way, somewhere, they started to bring out the worst in each other’?

      Whether or not it did, there are plenty of other reasons that would count against the marriage surviving, to be found in the difficult environment in which the young family was immediately thrown.

      In the fiction, Barty Bendall (who is Barney Brindle, Jo’s father) begs Marcia to marry him and give her and Ratheter’s children a father. When, finally, she consents, they marry and move to Blackburn, just as in reality Barney and Mary Jane did.

      Derwent Street, their first home, had been fields until the СКАЧАТЬ