For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice.. Ann Ming
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice. - Ann Ming страница 4
Название: For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice.
Автор: Ann Ming
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007283958
isbn:
It wasn’t just the family who didn’t like the idea of a mixed marriage. When we bought our first house in Acklam, a nice area outside Middlesbrough, the next-door neighbour almost immediately got together a petition to persuade us to move straight back out again. The first I knew of it was when she turned up on the doorstep with a letter that she had persuaded five of the other neighbours to sign. It was a shock because I’d thought we were all getting on very well whenever we talked face to face.
‘I’ve noticed,’ she said, sounding a bit surprised, ‘how clean you are. We don’t mind you, but it’s when your husband’s friends come to visit that it lowers the tone of the area.’
Shocked, since I had always found Charlie’s friends very pleasant, I told Charlie I thought we should move after that, not wanting to live somewhere there was an atmosphere and where we weren’t wanted, but he wasn’t having any of it.
‘No.’ He was adamant. ‘We’re staying here.’
When I thought about it I realized he was right. Who was to say the next set of neighbours wouldn’t be even more hostile? We couldn’t allow them to bully us like that so we took the petition to show to a solicitor and asked his advice. He wrote to all the neighbours who had signed it, pointing out the error of their ways. I guess they hadn’t had their hearts in it – maybe they had just done it to please the woman next door – because they all apologized after that, even her. Perhaps they hadn’t expected us to respond in that way, assuming we would just pack up and scurry off into the night. Ordinary people were still easily intimidated by official-looking letters from lawyers. Like all potential bullies, their resolve crumbled as soon as they saw we were going to fight back and not simply do as they told us. So Charlie was right to stand up for himself because everything settled down after that and we went back to being normal neighbours.
The political atmosphere has changed so much since then. If someone got together a petition like that these days, I imagine it would be all over the front pages of the papers and there would be questions in Parliament. It was really just a question of sticking up for ourselves, something we would become very good at over the years.
In the end I got used to people who didn’t know him talking to Charlie in Pidgin English, as if he was just off the boat. I even managed to see the funny side sometimes. ‘What pricey you likey?’ someone at a cinema ticket desk would shout at him helpfully, and sometimes Charlie would play along with them, looking vacant as if he couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I couldn’t really be too indignant since I had made almost exactly the same mistake when I first met him.
We had our first child, Gary, in 1965, a couple of years after we married, by which time I’d just turned nineteen.
‘What colour’s Ann’s baby?’ our next-door neighbour asked Ellen, a friend of mine.
‘He’s green,’ Ellen replied, with a straight face.
Julie came along in 1967 and then Angela made her appearance in 1969. With three small children running around, the house was soon too small for us all and we put it up for sale. The woman who had organized the petition when we first moved in asked me how much we were asking for it.
‘That depends,’ I replied.
‘Depends on what?’
‘Depends on the colour of the buyer’s skin,’ I said. ‘The darker they are, the cheaper they can have the house.’
Although I was only joking we did end up selling to a man who had a half African wife, so that probably confirmed the neighbour’s worst fears about how the neighbourhood had now gone completely to pot. Times were changing in so many different ways.
Once we had found a buyer for our first home in Acklam we moved round the corner to a bigger house, where we stayed while the children grew up, creating a happy stable family base.
Gary was always the mischief-maker amongst the three children and Angela took after me, brimming with confidence and plenty to say for herself on all occasions. Julie was the quietest, shyest one of the bunch. She wasn’t as outgoing as her brother or sister and didn’t make friends quite as easily. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have friends, but they were a small, select group rather than a big crowd. Once someone had become her friend she tended to keep them in her life for a long time.
As she grew up she looked a lot like the few pictures we had of Charlie’s English mam, although her pretty, almond-shaped eyes gave a hint of the oriental blood that flowed in her veins, showing she was definitely a member of the ‘Ming dynasty’.
Charlie worked for Shell as a ‘heavy goods fitter’, which is another way of saying he was a mechanic working on their lorries. He worked hard and was a good provider, but bringing up three children is never going to be cheap. From soon after Julie was born, I worked on Friday and Saturday nights at the cash desk of a local Chinese restaurant in Billingham. The restaurant was owned by one of Charlie’s friends and they used to get quite a few actors and performers coming in from the nearby theatre after the shows finished. (We didn’t call them celebrities then, although I guess they were because they were usually off the telly.) I’d first gone to the restaurant to help them out for a week and ended up staying there for fifteen years, mainly because I enjoyed the buzz of the place.
Once Angela reached the age of five and started at school I found I had a bit of time on my hands so I got myself a job at the local hospital as an auxiliary nurse, to earn us a bit of extra money and to keep myself busy. I was lucky that my mam could look after the kids while I did my shifts – usually twelve till nine – and Charlie took over when he got in. I had never wanted to live a life like Mam’s with no outside interests beyond home and family and I’d always liked the idea of being a nurse, even when I was a little girl. Meeting Charlie and starting a family had only temporarily distracted me from doing something about it.
Once the hospital took me on I was very quickly working inside the operating theatre, doing a bit of everything. Despite having always thought that I wanted to be out on the wards, chatting to the patients, I loved the work and I soon got used to dealing with the temperamental surgeons, men who everyone used to treat as if they were gods. Hospital life was still very formal in those days with a strict hierarchy and no one on first-name terms or anything like that. The surgeons used to do a lot of shouting and none of us ever dared to answer them back; we were too busy running around to do their bidding as quickly as we could.
Julie was never any trouble to us or to her teachers at school when she was a child. She took up gymnastics and soon proved able to fold herself in two and make her body do all sorts of things that seemed impossible to me. She was a good dancer as well, being small and slightly built.
Of all our children she was the one who could always wrap Charlie round her little finger the easiest. If the others wanted anything they would tell her to go and ask him for it, knowing he could never refuse her anything. It was a bit like my relationship had been with my dad, I suppose. She was a proper daddy’s girl and I think maybe he saw a bit of his СКАЧАТЬ