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

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have scans that could tell you in those days.

      I hauled myself up on my elbows to catch a glimpse of my new daughter.

      ‘My goodness,’ the midwife marvelled, ‘I’ve never seen a baby with so much hair.’

      She was right: a thick mop of blue-black hair stretched down the back of the new baby’s neck, a clear sign of her Chinese ancestry.

      ‘She’ll probably lose it all over the next few weeks,’ she said, ‘before she grows it back in again.’

      But she didn’t lose it. Julie’s hair just grew thicker and darker and more lustrous with every passing week. The midwife, who became a regular visitor and friend over the following years, had to cut it after a month to let some air get to her little neck, pushing a hair slide into the side to keep it out of her eyes at an age when most babies have no more than a few tufts of fluff for a mother to brush lovingly.

      I needed a few stitches after the delivery so Charlie was sent back to the kitchen to boil some needles for the doctor in a pan of water that he’d been preparing to cook some vegetables in for our lunch.

      It was a Wednesday, 22 February 1967. ‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe’, as the saying goes, which is what we used to say to Julie later whenever she was moaning at us about something or other. We could never have imagined how prophetic that silly little saying would turn out to be as we went about building our family life just like everyone else. None of us can ever know what lies in store for us, which is just as well.

      As I lay in bed that afternoon, holding her in my arms for the first time, I never for a second would have believed that this tiny, helpless baby would die before I did, or that she would die in one of the most terrible ways possible. Such a thought would have been simply unbearable. At that moment my maternal instincts were to protect this vulnerable little bundle from everything life would throw at her – but it was an illusion because no mother can ever really hope to do that.

      When your children are small you keep an eye on them most of the time, although even then accidents can still happen or terrible luck can befall them. But once they have grown up and left the nest you can do nothing but have faith that they will be all right, that they will not take too many risks or make too many bad judgements. And then all you can do is be there for them if things go wrong. But no matter how grown up and capable they become, I don’t think a mother ever loses that initial instinct to guard her babies and fight for their safety and their rights against the rest of the world. Thankfully, not many have to do it in such horrific circumstances as I would have to.

       Chapter Two

       Meeting Charlie Ming

      Ifirst spotted Charlie Ming in 1962, sitting with a group of other men in a Chinese restaurant in Middlesborough called The Red Sun. I was just sixteen but had been out of school for a year and was more than ready for a bit of life. It was an exciting place for a young girl to be because there weren’t many Chinese restaurants around in those days, not like today when there are fast-food outlets of every nationality on every street corner. In fact most people didn’t eat out much at all; we didn’t have anything like the amount of disposable money they have today.

      Everything going on around me seemed exotic and foreign, including the men at the nearby table and especially Charlie. I couldn’t tell how old he was, but it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me that he was twenty years older than me. I’m not sure I gave the question any thought at all. I’d never met a Chinese man before – not many people in our area had. They were still a rarity and viewed by most people with considerable suspicion. These were the days before any of us knew anything about race relations acts or the rules of political correctness; people still clung to their comforting prejudices and spoke their minds to the point of rudeness.

      It all seems a bit like ancient history now, even though it was only forty-six years ago. This was the year when a young Nelson Mandela had only just been arrested and imprisoned in South Africa and when Marilyn Monroe was found dead under suspicious circumstances in her Hollywood apartment. It had also just become the Chinese year of the Tiger, traditionally said to be a volatile year in which there is likely to be massive change. There certainly was for me!

      I’d been invited to the restaurant that night because a friend of mine was going out with one of the waiters and wanted me to go along with her for moral support. I’d been keen to accept the invitation, wanting to have a look at him. Boyfriends were still a very new experience for both of us, objects of considerable mystery and curiosity.

      The group of Chinese men who had caught my eye were sitting in the corner, at a table that was almost next to ours, and I had a good view of them from where I was seated. To my young, inexperienced eyes they all looked the same, except for Charlie. There was something about him that caught my attention, and kept drawing it back. Apart from anything else, he was very good-looking.

      ‘Who’s that?’ I asked my friend’s boyfriend as he hovered round the table, bringing us food and flirting a little nervously at the same time.

      ‘That’s Charlie,’ he told me. ‘His mother’s English and his father’s Chinese.’

      ‘Not a bad result when you mix them,’ I said cheerfully, and probably quite loudly, assuming that none of this foreign-looking bunch of men would be able to speak English.

      ‘Oh, thanks very much,’ Charlie piped up in a thick Yorkshire accent, bringing the blood rushing to my face.

      ‘You speak English?’ I asked, shocked.

      ‘I should hope so.’ He grinned at my discomfort.

      From that moment I was hooked, fascinated by someone who looked so mysterious and oriental but sounded so down to earth. As I got to know him and we told one another about our families, I found out his father had been the first Chinese man to come to the Middlesborough area, having travelled over from China to Birkenhead as a ship’s steward in the days before air travel. It sounded like something from the movies, suggesting worlds beyond anything that my friends or I had ever experienced, or could even imagine. None of us had ever travelled outside our own hometowns, let alone gone abroad.

      When he came ashore, Charlie’s dad met an English girl, married her and decided to stay. He set up his own Chinese laundry, something that Chinese immigrants were doing all over the world in the first part of the twentieth century. It must have been a good business to be in then, despite the heat and the steam of the working conditions, in the days before washing machines or laundrettes had been invented.

      Before long-distance travel became common, people were still very ignorant about foreigners and frightened of the myths and tales they heard circulating about Chinese men. Charlie told me about customers coming to the door with their laundry, or with their tickets and their money, and refusing to step any further inside for fear of being abducted or having their throats slit.

      ‘You can come in,’ he would tease them once he was old enough to start working there himself. ‘We’ve not got any knives.’

      He’d had a few troubles at school. He didn’t really belong to either nationality – English or Chinese – so he was always the outsider, watching and smiling patiently, learning to be philosophical about life. It was a difficult upbringing that stood him in good stead for what life held in store for all of us. Charlie never expected life to be easy and he knew that you had to stick up for yourself or other people would walk all over you.

      There was an immediate spark between us that night and he asked me out on a date. Unlike boys my own age, he had a car and on that first date he drove me over to Whitby for a day out. After I’d been out with him a couple of times I didn’t think any more about his Chinese origins than I did about the age gap between us. He was just Charlie, the man for me. But other people didn’t adapt quite so quickly.

      I’d

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