LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Nothing much happened in Billingham apart from the giant ICI chemical works, which covered several hundred acres at the side of the town. The factory had originally been built during the First World War to produce the ingredients needed for the manufacture of explosives. It grew even larger during the Second World War and even in the 1960s it still provided most of the employment in the area, giving jobs to thousands of locals.

      It’s hard to imagine when you look at the wastelands around Billingham now just what a huge factory complex it once was, dominating the landscape for miles around with its gleaming towers and chimneys, belching smoke and steam, all part of the ‘white heat of technology’ that politicians liked to talk about in the 1960s. No one back then could have predicted just how much the world was going to change for all of us with the arrival of the internet, global warming and so forth.

      There were still virtually no oriental faces to be seen in this traditional industrial community, so Charlie and I got our fair share of racial abuse in the street when we were out together. A lot of people couldn’t cope with the sight of a mixed-race couple and didn’t hesitate to say so as they passed by, unbothered whether we heard or not. It was as if they thought girls like my friend and me were letting them down in some way by ‘consorting with the enemy’. I can only imagine how much trouble Charlie’s mam must have gone through when she married the very first Chinaman in the area back in the 1920s. She must have had a lot of guts.

      My dad was one of the many thousands of men working at the ICI plant as a research chemist, but he died very suddenly at the age of sixty-two after having a massive brain haemorrhage while coming home from work on the bus. I was only fifteen at the time – this was shortly before I met Charlie – and I was completely devastated. It was such a shock because he hadn’t been ill at all; it came right out of the blue. Dad had always pampered me and I idolized him. I was an only child and he and Mum had adopted me as a baby, but neither of them ever let me feel for a moment that I wasn’t their daughter. They were always happy to do anything I asked. Dad and I never used to argue about anything. I couldn’t even boil an egg by the time he died because he would insist on doing everything for me. Maybe that was why I was attracted to an older man like Charlie – especially one who was happy to do all the cooking.

      Dad had looked after Mam well, too. She had never had a job outside the house that I could remember, had never written a cheque or paid a bill herself; he took care of everything like that. I think most men of that generation did in those days. Dad was the brainy one of the partnership.

      Once he’d gone I automatically took on the role of doing all these practical things for her, even though I was still only fifteen years old, which meant I had to grow up a lot quicker than I would have done otherwise. That part of it didn’t worry me. I just got on with things, but I still missed him terribly.

      I didn’t tell my mother about Charlie for a while, knowing that she was going to find it a bit difficult to get used to. It wasn’t until a few months after I first went out with him that we were spotted together in Middlesborough by a friend of the family, who gleefully reported the news back to Mam. She went just as mad when I got home as I had imagined she would.

      ‘You’ve been seen in Middlesborough with a Chinaman,’ she announced the moment I walked through the door. ‘Your father would turn in his grave. You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you? He’ll get you on a slow boat to China and he’ll fill you full of opium. I’ll tell you something else, they breed like rabbits and they’re full of T.B.!’

      There’d been an outbreak of tuberculosis (a deadly infectious disease that attacks the lungs and central nervous system) in Hong Kong a few years before, and this had been added to all the myths and prejudices that surrounded everything to do with the Chinese. The fact that Charlie had never been outside Yorkshire in his life didn’t seem to make any difference to Mam’s fears about disease-carrying foreigners who she imagined pouring off the boats like rats. People always like to gossip and to frighten one another with shocking tales of doom and gloom, and immigrants who look and sound different are always a good source of material. Mam had never got out much, always staying at home and looking after the house, so it was easy for the outside world to worry her.

      Although I got on well with Mam and Dad, I became a bit of a rebel when I reached my teens, and I knew my own mind right from the start. I was never too bothered about conforming to other people’s ideas of what I should or shouldn’t do if it didn’t suit me. When it came to choosing the man I wanted to be with I certainly wasn’t going to take any notice of anyone else’s prejudices. By the time Mam found out about us I already knew Charlie was a good catch and I wasn’t going to give him up just to please her and a few neighbours who might disapprove of a mixed marriage. I didn’t argue with her all that much; I just took no notice of her dire warnings and carried on with my life as if she hadn’t said a thing.

      ‘Well, you might as well bring him home then,’ she huffed eventually, once she realized I wasn’t going to change my mind no matter how black a picture she painted of the future I was choosing, or how often she pointed out the danger I was putting myself in by consorting with a ‘foreign devil’.

      Of course, the moment she met him Charlie worked the same gruff, twinkly charm on her that he had on me and a year later we got married, by which time Charlie was looking on her as a second mother and she couldn’t praise him highly enough. He was always happy to do any odd jobs she needed doing, he’d include her without being asked when we were going on holiday or for a day out somewhere, and I’d sometimes arrive at her house to find he’d popped in for a coffee and a chat with her.

      ‘I couldn’t wish for a better son-in-law,’ she would tell her friends at every opportunity, cutting off their prejudices before they could even leave their lips.

      If I ever grumbled to her about anything Charlie had said or done she would immediately jump to his defence, making it clear she believed I was lucky to have landed such a good catch and that I should be grateful. Although it sometimes felt as though they were ganging up on me, I was relieved that we all got on well because if you can’t keep your immediate family together around you, what hope do you have of leading a truly happy life? I’ve always believed that immediate family is the most important thing for anyone. Perhaps knowing that I was adopted and feeling lucky at being taken in by two such loving parents had a big effect on my thinking, making me more appreciative than other people who might take such things for granted.

      It was Charlie who wanted to get married and start a family quickly because he was already in his late thirties. He wanted to have children while he was still young enough to enjoy them and I was quite happy to go along with him, thinking there would be plenty of time for me to work and have a life of my own later, once the children were off at school and didn’t need me to be at home with them all the time.

      We only had about twelve people at the wedding, which made it feel more like the Last Supper, because none of my other relatives were speaking to me, even though they knew Mam was now perfectly happy about the match. I wasn’t too bothered. If they felt like that I didn’t want anything to do with them anyway.

      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

Скачать книгу