Adele. Sean Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ She was never happier than when sketching in her bedroom or playing her trusty acoustic guitar. She was determined to use her gifts by studying art at university and, as many students do, she enrolled in a one-year foundation diploma in art and design at a college in Barnet.

      While Penny’s family were very much working-class North Londoners, she didn’t have the rough edges. Marc explained, ‘Penny doesn’t have that sort of cockney twang. She could walk into a pub anywhere and you wouldn’t know she was from London. It’s not so much that she is posher – she is more reserved.’

      Even though he had a girlfriend at the time, Marc sensed there was real chemistry between himself and the teenager. ‘She was a very, very attractive girl. She had lovely long dark hair, legs up to her neck and, what can I say, Bob’s your uncle.’

      He wasted no time in ringing her to arrange a date a few days later at his favourite pub, the Punch and Judy in Covent Garden. Although it was a chance to get to know one another properly, Marc quickly realised that she wasn’t the sort of girl to jump into bed on the first date. ‘She wasn’t like that,’ he recalled.

      ‘It was not a big love story,’ he added. However, they continued to meet at the pub, which became ‘their’ place. Over the next few weeks, things between them got more serious and Penny agreed to stay the night at the flat in Turnpike Lane.

      About two months after they met, they were passing the time at the Punch and Judy, when Penny suddenly blurted out, ‘Marc, I’m pregnant.’ He was shell-shocked at the news, but put on a brave face for his eighteen-year-old girlfriend: ‘All right, babe. No worries. We’ll sort it out.’

      Despite her young age, Penny was to prove hugely resilient. There was never any question, or even discussion, about the possibility of her not keeping the child. The most pressing concern was telling Penny’s parents, who, at this point, hadn’t even met their daughter’s new boyfriend.

      Despite his bravado, Marc had been brought up traditionally and insisted that he would be there when she broke the news. Penny arranged for him to join them for a Sunday lunch. ‘I told myself to “man up”, and so I went along and explained to them that I was the father. They were shocked, obviously, and asked me what I intended to do. I told them I didn’t know.’

      A week later, he had made up his mind. Back at the pub, he asked Penny what she was doing for the next thirty years. ‘Do you fancy getting hitched?’ Despite being eighteen and pregnant, she said no, telling him they were too young. It was an early indication of her strength of character. Marc observed simply, ‘She was a very tenacious young girl, a very strong woman. If she’d wanted to marry me, she would have said, “Right, you’ve asked me, now let’s do it.” It wasn’t in the stratosphere, you know. She wasn’t even thinking about it. She probably saw me as a bit of a Jack the Lad and thought that this wasn’t going to work out.’

      Marc still had the job of telling his own parents that they would be grandparents for the first time. He took the train back to Penarth and told them he had met a girl called Penny, who was now pregnant. His father John, a strong-minded, masculine man, wasn’t a touchy-feely chap, but took it well enough.

      During the next nine months, Marc and, particularly, Penny had some important decisions to make. He moved into a shared house in Crouch End, nearer his round, when his pal Nigel got a job as a surveyor with Tower Hamlets and moved to Chingford in North East London. Penny, meanwhile, decided to give up her college course and become a full-time mum. Fiercely independent, she left home and moved into emergency accommodation for unmarried mothers on Queen’s Drive, an unappealing street near Finsbury Park Station. She also received support from the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) charity.

      Marc saw her regularly, but it would be stretching it to suggest they were a devoted couple. He wasn’t the sort of man to hold her hand while she practised her breathing at antenatal classes.

      Two weeks before the baby was due, he was eating breakfast at home in Crouch End when the phone rang. It was Penny’s mum Doreen. ‘Congratulations, Marc. You are the father of a baby girl.’ Despite being premature, there were no complications and the baby weighed a healthy 5lb 10½oz.

      Marc dashed to the florists, bought an extravagant bunch of flowers and hopped on a bus to the North Middlesex Hospital in Edmonton, just off the North Circular Road, to see his daughter for the first time. It was 5 May 1988.

      The new parents needed to decide on a name for their baby. Marc suggested Blue, his favourite colour. It was nothing to do with enjoying blues music; he just really liked the name. Penny considered that for a second or two before replying firmly, ‘I’m not calling her Blue.’

      She had, in fact, already made up her mind that her daughter would be called Adele. It was an unusual choice, which perhaps was the point. In literature, Adele features in the classic novel Jane Eyre as Rochester’s young French ward. Jane takes the girl under her wing when she is employed as her governess. An art student might know that the Countess Adele was the mother of the Post-Impressionist master Toulouse-Lautrec.

      For her second name, Penny chose Laurie, something suitable for either a boy or a girl. As a sop to Marc, she agreed that her third name could be Blue. He was delighted. Penny didn’t appreciate it, however, when Marc started calling his daughter Blue. She would snap, ‘Don’t call her that. Her name’s Adele.’ Penny never shortened it to Addie or Della. It was unusual in both their families for someone to have three first names. Adele Laurie Blue was certainly something to remember.

      Fortunately, Penny, who had been kept in hospital for only a day, didn’t have to stay long in Queen’s Drive either. She was rehoused in a two-bedroom council flat in Shelbourne Road, Tottenham. If the wind was blowing in the right direction, she could hear the Saturday roar from the crowd at White Hart Lane. The famous Spurs ground was less than a mile away down the ironically named Park Lane, which bears no resemblance to the famous West End thoroughfare that is a byword for opulence.

      The sight of football fans wearing the black and white scarves of Tottenham Hotspur as they strode to the match was a familiar sight throughout Adele’s childhood and helped generate a feeling of community in what was a drab neighbourhood. On match days, Shelbourne Road and the surrounding streets would be turned into one enormous car park.

      The football club was somewhat in the shadow of neighbours Arsenal, but back in 1988 the prospects for the future seemed brighter with the signing of Paul Gascoigne from Newcastle for £2.2 million. Gazza helped them to finish sixth that season, but the champions were once again their North London rivals – much to the delight of the Adkins family.

      Tottenham, at that time, would have won votes in a contest to decide the least attractive place to live in England. Much of the negativity came from the fallout from the notorious Broadwater Farm riots in October 1985. Penny was still a schoolgirl when the disenchanted young black men of the neighbourhood took to the streets following the death of local mum Cynthia Jarrett. She died from a heart attack when four police officers arrived unannounced to search her home in nearby Thorpe Road. During the subsequent unrest, which included the use of guns and petrol bombs, a policeman, PC Keith Blakelock, was hacked to death.

      Marc helped Penny move in to an upstairs unfurnished flat in a street that had little to recommend it. It would be home to her and her daughter for the next nine years. An elderly couple, Henry and Jane Barley, lived downstairs and, in the years to come, they would watch Adele if her mother had to pop out. Marc wasn’t living there at first. About a month after they had settled in, he gave up his own place and joined them.

      Together the new family took the train to Penarth to introduce Adele to her Welsh grandparents. Penny could be forgiven for being apprehensive. She had never met Marc’s parents before and here СКАЧАТЬ