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kids wherever I went, everyone wanting to touch my blonde hair because they’d never seen anything like it before. When we walked into one busy, crowded restaurant every single person stopped eating and talking, turning as one to stare. It was a shock to see huge crowds of Chinese faces everywhere we went because I’d spent my whole life in Europe, never even thinking about what colour I was.

      ‘Keep hold of me,’ I warned Charlie when we first arrived, ‘or I might lose you and end up going home with the wrong one.’

      Obviously Chinese people don’t ‘all look the same’ once you get to know them, any more than Europeans do, but when you are confronted by crowds of strangers it’s very confusing. Charlie always says it’s the same in reverse for him in Middlesborough.

      My mother was living in a council bungalow in Billingham at that time and the rent kept going up every year, leaving her very short of cash.

      ‘Why don’t we buy the house as an investment?’ Charlie suggested. ‘Then your mam can live there rent free.’

      At first the council refused to sell to us because they said the bungalow was supposed to be for old people, but I’d known the area a long time and knew that wasn’t true, so I wrote to the Secretary of State in London and got the council overruled. I’ve never been willing to just accept what people tell me simply because they’re in a position of authority, although at that stage I had no idea how far this stubborn streak in my nature would one day be tested.

      We eventually bought the bungalow off the council in the April of 1980 but Mam had a stroke a couple of months later, which turned all our carefully laid plans upside down. She was still able to shuffle about on her feet once she’d recovered, but her brain never really worked properly after that and it was obvious she was going to be going steadily downhill over the coming years. We realized there was no way she was going to be able to look after herself much longer so we sold our house in Acklam, had Mam’s bungalow extended and moved the whole family in there together. It was an easier option than trying to uproot her from her own house after so many years now that she was becoming frail.

      Although I was worried about Mam and didn’t know whether we would be able to look after her properly, I liked the idea of going back to Billingham, back to where all my roots lay. When you look back at the decisions you make in life you can’t help but wonder how things would have gone if you had just followed a different path. How different it might all have been if we had moved Mam in to live with us in Acklam rather than the other way round. I can’t help thinking that if we hadn’t made that move our Julie would still be alive today.

      If I had known how difficult looking after Mam was going to be I don’t know if I would have had the courage to take on the job for those last few years. By the end she was incontinent and away with the fairies most of the time. The kids were always good at helping out with her; we couldn’t have done it without their support. Angela was particularly good, willing to clean her up when she soiled herself and everything. Our Julie was a bit more squeamish; she would be willing to keep Mam company, feed her, curl her hair and generally entertain her for hours on end, but she didn’t like the other stuff. We developed a routine of caring. I had Mam during the week and went to work at the hospital at weekends, when Charlie and the girls would take over. Charlie never complained. In fact it was him who insisted that she stay with us and not be put in a home. She had done too much for both of us and for the children over the years for us to think of abandoning her to the mercies of strangers. So we soldiered on.

      Mam continued to live with us until she died five years later in 1985. It was sad to lose her, obviously, but it was a relief too because she hadn’t really been with us mentally for several years by that time yet she had needed looking after twenty-four hours a day. With Mam gone and the children growing up, Charlie and I thought that perhaps now life would get a bit easier for us. Shell decided to close the depot he worked for so he took early retirement. We had some money in the bank and a chance to stand back and think about what we wanted to do with the next part of our lives together. Charlie decided to invest some of his money in buying a catering trailer, serving drinks and snacks to passing motorists, which he set up in a lay-by on the A66 to Darlington.

      We worked hard and we were proud of how we had brought up the kids. Now we felt we could relax a bit and enjoy ourselves. How wrong could we have been? It’s just as well none of us could see into the future because if we had had any idea what was coming a few years down the line I don’t know how we would have faced it.

       Chapter Four

       Our Julie Grows up

      When Julie was sixteen, just after leaving school, she met a Billingham boy called Andrew at a local youth club. She was the same age as I had been when I met Charlie but somehow she seemed much less mature than I had imagined I was at that age. Maybe we all kid ourselves that we are more grown up than we are when we first start to spread our wings.

      Although she was never outgoing in a crowd, Julie was a bit of a rebel in the way she dressed, did her hair and made herself up. She always liked to wear weird clothes, often adopting fashions long before other people she knew would have had the nerve. At that time she was going through her Boy George phase, dressing like him and doing her hair the same way. She would get Angela to tie rags in it and then put a black hat on the top of the whole thing. She would pinch Charlie’s white shirts and cut the collars off and wear black gloves and lots of eyeliner to go out in the evenings. Once she was out on the dance floor all her usual inhibitions seemed to vanish. It’s strange how some people can be shy and introverted in some ways and extroverted in others. I suppose it’s all part of what makes people different and interesting. When she was dancing she seemed to come into herself.

      She liked to wear really high heels to try to make herself look taller, fed up about the fact that she was so much smaller than Gary and Angela. As a result she didn’t always choose the most practical shoes for everyday life but that never worried her. I went into Middlesborough with her once when she had these bright orange high heels on.

      ‘My feet are killing me,’ she grumbled after we’d been walking round the shops for a bit. ‘Will you swap, just for ten minutes, Mam?’

      ‘Only ten minutes,’ I said firmly.

      What is it about being a mother that makes you willing to put yourself through agony rather than see one of your children in pain, even when they have inflicted it on themselves in the first place? A mixture of natural instincts and motherly love, I suppose. I was still wobbling along in these ridiculous bright orange stilettos when we bumped into someone from my work and I had to do some fast explaining.

      When she left school, Julie started training as a hairdresser. She had always been interested in messing around with her own hair, dying it shocking pinks and blues long before such colours were generally accepted, so it seemed like a good choice of career for her. Her hair was still incredibly thick, just as it had been when she was a baby, and when she permed it, it became even more spectacular. Big curly perms were all the fashion round our way in the 1980s, and Julie’s was the biggest and curliest. When she came home with blue hair after my mother had had her third stroke, Mam was convinced it was a hat.

      ‘What a lovely hat,’ she kept saying. ‘What a lovely colour.’

      ‘It’s not a hat, Mam,’ I told her, ‘it’s her damned hair!’

      Julie wanted to practise her hairdressing on everyone and she even persuaded her dad to have a perm in his dead-straight, coal-black Chinese hair. It actually didn’t look too bad once she’d done it, so he kept it.

      Charlie and I liked Andrew from the first time Julie brought him home. He was very relaxed about life and good at gently humouring her if she was in one of her moods. He was a couple of years older than her and working as a painter and decorator. Having been married for nearly twenty years to Charlie by then, who was a strong and sometimes controlling

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