Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

Two

I THINK WHAT SAVED ME DURING THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS AFTER MY FATHER died was my dancing. By practising daily and trying to ignore the pain in my heart, I managed to work my way to the top of my tap class and was all set to try for a silver medal. I already had my bronze, which was my pride and joy. I kept it in a special place in my bedroom, touching it like a talisman whenever I passed it.

Then one day my mother broke some bad news. ‘I’m so sorry, Pauline,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to give up your classes. I can’t afford them any more.’ I knew that money had been tight since Dad had died and that luxuries were out of the question but nothing much else had changed; we still had a lamb roast every Sunday and it hadn’t occurred to me that my dancing might have to stop. I was devastated but, looking at my mother’s expression, I could tell that she had no choice.

Instead of tip-tapping my way through dance classes after school, I turned my feet in the direction of a house in Queen’s Park, just over the suspension bridge in Chester, where Mum now worked as a cleaner. Wandering through the lofty rooms of that beautiful red-brick Georgian house, its silver and brass gleaming from all her polishing, I’d wonder what it would feel like to own such a place. Not that I ever imagined I would. I reckoned I’d probably stay in our little terraced home for the rest of my days, taking care of my mum and helping her pay the bills. I hated that she had to work so hard. As well as cleaning, she had a full-time job at the Ideal Laundry in Boughton Heath, which rented out linens to big hotels and restaurants. She operated the hot iron press and came home smelling of starch.

Peter, at sixteen, was now the head of our household. Still just a boy but trying to be a man, he took his responsibilities very seriously. My father had always teased him that he was ‘the brainy one’ and would never end up getting his hands dirty. Once Dad died though, Peter left school and went to work at the same factory, albeit behind a desk as a trainee in the sales department. The personnel welfare officer who’d offered him the job had been one of those who’d come to the house to pay his respects when Dad died.

Within just a few months of starting his first job, though, Peter started to lose weight and became quite poorly. He went to the doctor on several occasions but, as with Dad, no one seemed able to help. By the time he finally went to see a specialist, it was discovered that he had pleurisy and his lungs were filling with fluid. He was rushed to hospital and ended up in the same ward Dad had been in. My poor mother must have feared the worst. Peter’s pleurisy then developed into tuberculosis and the doctors warned my mother that he’d ‘outgrown his strength’.

Peter was sent away to the three-hundred-bed Cheshire Joint Sanatorium at Loggerheads in Staffordshire, where he remained on a ‘fresh air and rest’ cure for the next eighteen months. Every Sunday, Mum and I would take the bus all the way out to beyond Market Drayton to take him magazines, fruit and a fresh pair of pyjamas. He was very poorly, and so pale. TB was a killer in those days and was treated very seriously. The nurses gave Peter enormous pills to swallow, as big as an old penny. Only one visitor was allowed into his room at a time, so Mum and I would take turns. Later, the nurses would wheel his bed out into the fresh air to help improve his breathing. All wrapped up in blankets over his striped pyjamas and dressing gown, he virtually had to sleep in the grounds overnight, so convinced were they of the benefits of oxygen. Mum and I would stay for an hour or so before making the long journey home to a house that felt emptier still.

I knew the day was looming when I’d have to leave school too and decide how to earn my keep. Because I was good with my hands I often made my own clothes. Dad had bought me a sewing machine a year or so before, although when he tried to mend his overalls on it once he’d broken it. Maybe I could become a dressmaker or work in a ladies’ wear shop? My interest in fashion probably came from all the classic films I’d watched as a child. My parents had both been dapper and I loved dressing up in Mum’s clothes, especially her hats.

There was a wonderful hat shop in Chester run by a lady called Mary Jordan. It was in the Rows, a sort of medieval shopping mall that I used to skip down as a child. The Hollywood actress Margaret Lockwood, star of The Wicked Lady, used to go there to have hats specially made for her. That really impressed me: a big star like her coming to our town. I dreamed of working in Mary Jordan’s, making hats for film stars like Joan Collins, Audrey Hepburn or Jean Simmons. When I learned that the shop was offering an apprenticeship I wanted it with all my heart but another girl from my school was offered it so my chance was lost.

Disappointed, I heard from a school friend called Norma Hignett that a big new development was about to open in Chester as part of the Lewis group, which owned the famous Bon Marché department store in Liverpool. There’d be a shop, a restaurant, a jazz club, a bar, dance floor and a hairdressing salon, all under the name Quaintways.

‘They’ve got vacancies for trainee hairdressers,’ Norma told me. ‘You don’t need any experience; I’ve been taken on already. The salon opens in a week. If you like, I’ll see if I can get you in.’

Hairdressing, I concluded bravely, was fashion too. After all, film stars had to have good hair as well as fancy clothes. With Norma’s help, I applied for a job at Quaintways and was signed up for a three-year apprenticeship with a starting salary of three pounds a week. I’d begin as a trainee learning how to wash hair and give manicures before moving up to the position of ‘improver’. By the end of five years, I’d be a fully qualified hairdresser and manicurist with my own clients and the chance to make up my income with tips. Aged fifteen, I left school on the Friday afternoon and started work when Quaintways opened the following Monday morning. I could tell my mother was relieved. Although our house was like a new pin and she always kept a good table, she was undoubtedly struggling without my father’s weekly pay packet and mine, though small, would make a difference.

On my first day at work I wore a skirt I’d made myself from a favourite Vogue pattern. Conscious of being so thin, I’d added layers of petticoats underneath to make it a dirndl skirt, which I hoped would make me look shapelier than I really was. To hide my overly long neck, I wore a high-necked polo sweater. The whole look was finished off with a little waspie belt and flat shoes. Oh, and a matching umbrella cover: I made one for all my outfits and they became my trademark.

I arrived at the salon on opening day with the ten other juniors who’d been taken on. We were all given pink overalls to wear and I slipped mine on. Because my skirt stuck out so much, the overall rode up and didn’t cover anything. Miss Jones, the manageress of the salon, laughed. ‘You’ll never get near the wash basin,’ she told me. ‘You’ll have to take off your skirt.’ I was horrified. I knew that wearing the skimpy overall on its own would make me look thinner still but I had no choice. The next day I made sure to wear a less bulky outfit.

Try as I might, I couldn’t gain weight. The film stars I most admired had curves in all the right places, none of which I possessed, although I did at least have a bust. Mum had already taken me to see the doctor about it. After examining me, he asked how much I ate. ‘Like a horse,’ my mother replied, which was true.

‘Please, doctor,’ I asked him, ‘how can I get bigger?’

‘Take more exercise,’ was his reply. Mum and I looked at each other in disbelief I had never stopped dancing and even after I’d had to give up my classes I kept practising at home. When my mother told the doctor this, he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Being skinny must be in her genes,’ was all he could suggest. It was just as I feared; I was a hopeless case.

Not long after I joined Quaintways, something happened that completely took my mind off gaining weight. I was told I had a telephone call at the salon, which shocked me. We’d never had a telephone at home and I’d hardly ever used one. Taking the unfamiliar receiver I listened as a woman from the Ideal Laundry told me that my mother had been taken to hospital after an accident at work. I threw off my overall and hurried across town to the same Chester City Hospital where my father had died and where Peter had first been admitted for pleurisy.

My mother’s left hand was heavily bandaged and she was in a great deal of pain. She’d been working on the double press, smoothing down the sheets and tablecloths while another woman stood by operating the floor pedal which brought the hot iron thumping down. On this particular day, her colleague wasn’t paying attention and she accidentally hit the pedal while Mum’s hand was still smoothing under the iron. When they managed to extricate her hand from the machinery, her wedding and engagement rings were so flattened and embedded into her flesh that they had to be cut off. Her fingers were horribly disfigured and burned down to the bone. She was told that she’d have to endure a series of grafting operations, using skin taken from her thigh.

My great-aunt Mabel and my cousin Rita, who lived next door, helped look after me while Mum underwent her operations. Rita took me shopping or to the pictures, but I still remember feeling terribly lonely. My father was dead; Peter and my mother were both in and out of hospital. I couldn’t help but feel abandoned.

Mum had trouble with her left hand for the rest of her life and was never able to do manual labour again. She eventually received compensation from the company after a drawn-out legal process. They didn’t award her a huge amount, considering how disfigured her hand was, but it certainly seemed enormous to us. She took me into Liverpool on the train and bought me a beautiful fuchsia-coloured coat with a fur collar, which I kept for years. She bought herself and Peter something special too, and then put the rest of the money away. As soon as her hand was mended, she took a job behind the counter in Woolworths in Chester where she was brilliant at dealing with people. From there she went to work in a shop that sold raincoats and umbrellas. The manager couldn’t believe she’d ever been a manual labourer because she was such a stylish little lady who could speak to anybody. My mother wasn’t a snob, though. She’d take any work as long as it paid.

At around the same time as my mother was recovering from her accident, she began dating a local man called Harry Dawson, who was an inspector on the buses. I knew his two daughters Pat and Shirley from my dancing days. Harry was a widower and a lovely man. Although it had been not much more than a year since my father had died, I was happy that she had someone to share her life with, especially during such a difficult time. After all, she was only in her late thirties.

Everyone else around me seemed to have new interests too. Once Peter was discharged from the sanatorium after eighteen months, he was transferred to the Wrenbury Hall Rehabilitation Centre near Nantwich. Under the care of the Red Cross, he gradually gathered his strength although the TB had weakened him terribly and he would spend another thirteen months recovering. He was placed on the Disabled Persons Register until he was twenty-one.

Joyce, my childhood friend, got engaged to her future husband Peter and moved to Ellesmere Port and we lost touch for a while. I became friendlier with her sister Barbara, but then she found herself a regular boyfriend as well. I didn’t realize it at the time but my loneliness and the feeling that life was happening to everyone else but me made me vulnerable.

At least I had my job, which I loved, although most of the girls at work had busy social lives too. The other juniors especially became like a second family to me. From day one, we were ‘the Quaintways Girls’ and I became known to all as ‘Tilly’ Tilston, a nickname which stuck for life.

Quaintways soon became the place to go in Chester and ours was the premier salon. With a food shop, restaurant and nightclub, it felt more like a luxurious social club than a place of work. We even put on little modelling shows after hours for customers with each of us wearing a new outfit chosen from the store. The Quaintways restaurant was very popular, as was the Wall City Jazz Club run by a man called Gordon Vickers, who became a lifelong friend. He booked acts like the clarinettist Monty Sunshine and the Chris Barber Band. When one new group from Liverpool asked if they could play at the club, Gordon told them they could only if they cut their hair. The Beatles refused.

Several of the senior hairdressers who’d been brought into Quaintways from all over the country had famous clients like the singers Alma Cogan, Rosemary Squires, and Dickie Valentine, who’d come to Chester to sing at the Plantation Inn on the Liverpool Road. Through them, the hairdressers were often invited to the Oulton Park race circuit to attend parties with Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn and other famous drivers. There was even glamour among some of my fellow juniors too. One called Trish Fields had a fabulous voice and was a part-time singer at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, taking her turn between bands like the Swinging Blue Jeans and those rebellious kids who wouldn’t cut their hair.

The older women in the salon seemed so grown up and worldly-wise to me. They dated everyone from sporting heroes to servicemen; they drank, smoked and stayed out late. I used to listen to some of their whispered conversations and wonder what on earth they were giggling about. My mother had never spoken to me about being intimate with a boy and there had never been any sex education at school. Because Peter had been in hospital throughout my teenage years I’d not had a big brother to advise me and I’d never even had a boyfriend, apart from one nice lad who lived across the street and who sometimes took me to the church hall dance. I’d had a silly crush on another boy at school who sometimes let me ride on the crossbar of his bicycle but it had never gone beyond holding hands.

One hairdresser in particular often spoke to me about the airmen she dated from the USAF bases nearby at Sealand, Queensferry and Warrington. ‘The Americans are great company,’ she’d tell me during breaks. ‘They love to dance and they really know how to treat a girl. Why don’t I fix you up on a blind date, Tilly?’

I resisted at first, feeling shy and awkward, but the more she spoke about her ‘lovely Americans’ the more I thought back to the party I’d attended that first Christmas after Dad died. The airmen there had been so charming and kind. Where would be the harm? Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask Mum if she thought it would be all right.

‘OK,’ she said as she was getting ready to go out with Harry one night, ‘but make sure you’re back by ten.’

My friend originally set me up with an airman called Joe but he was sent back to the States so I ended up with someone I’ll call ‘Jim’. He’d just turned twenty-one and I was not quite sixteen when we first met. He knew how old I was but what he probably didn’t realize was that I’d never even been kissed. He took me to the Odeon in Chester to see a film called Johnny Dark in which Tony Curtis played an engineer who’d designed a racing car. I don’t remember much about the film because I was too excited by the company I was keeping. At six feet two inches tall with smouldering good looks, Jim was quiet, courteous and kind. Better still, he was a singer of country and western songs and he played in the clubs and bars on the American bases. He sang to me on the way home and had a really lovely voice, a bit like Jim Reeves. I was convinced my music-loving father would have approved.

For the next six months I was in a whirl. My lonely days were at an end. Jim was just like a film star, and he was mine. I thought about him night and day and the feeling appeared to be mutual. When we weren’t together he’d call me up on the telephone and sing to me down the line, which made my knees buckle. He took me to a dance at one of the bases to meet some of his friends. They were all much older and more sophisticated than me but with Jim on my arm I felt invincible. I wasn’t ‘Tilly’ to Jim, I was his ‘Paula’ – the name he always used for me – and I suddenly felt so grown up.

He’d meet me in Chester after work and walk me home. More often than not, my mother would be out working or courting Harry so we’d have the place to ourselves. I’d play house – cooking him a meal and making him tea and imagining what life would be like if this was how it always was. I even presented him with my most precious possession – my bronze medal for tap dancing. He said he was thrilled. When he held me in his arms and told me he wanted to marry me, I believed him completely and gave him all that he asked. In my heart, I was still a little girl and he was my first love. I barely knew what I was doing, although I did know it was naughty and that if my mother ever found out she’d be furious. Nobody had ever told me about taking precautions and Jim never said anything, so I carried on obliviously.

All I could think about was that Jim was going to marry me. Excitedly, I blurted out the news to my mother. She was my best friend in the world and I couldn’t wait for her to share my joy. Her reaction wasn’t at all what I expected. ‘You’re far too young to think about marriage yet!’ she told me, horrified. Although I was disappointed, I was too blind to take any notice.

Then one day she sat me down after work. ‘I think you should know: Jim’s married already,’ she said. I looked up at her in disbelief. ‘Harry’s sister-in-law works at the base. She found out.’

I was shattered. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me, although I knew she’d never lie. A day or two later, my mother summoned Jim to the house to confront him. I had never seen her so angry. All five feet of her stood up to his lanky frame and she dominated the room. I just sat there, crying and trying to take it all in.

His response relieved me enormously. ‘Yes, I have a wife, ma’am,’ he told her, looking genuinely contrite, ‘but I’m getting a divorce.’ He pulled out a photograph of a baby daughter he’d also never mentioned. My head was in a spin. I didn’t know what to think, but then he told my mother, ‘I love Paula, Mrs Tilston, and I want to marry her. I’m going home to arrange the divorce and then I’ll send for her.’

Having veered from shock to despair, I was on cloud nine once more.

Mum wasn’t at all happy but she knew how strongly I felt about Jim so she reluctantly agreed that I could carry on seeing him until he left for America. I pined for the end of each day when I’d be seeing him after work. Although I dreaded him leaving the country, I couldn’t wait to join him and would lie awake at night imagining what our life together would be like across the Atlantic. He told me that we’d be living on a military airbase to begin with and he tried to prepare me for what to expect. He said I’d have to go to a special school to learn about American culture for my citizenship exams. I told the girls in the salon all about it and we chattered excitedly about me moving abroad. Secretly, I was terrified by the idea. I’d never lived anywhere but Chester; I’d not even been to London, and I hadn’t ever flown in an aeroplane. But as long as Jim was waiting for me, I knew I could do it – even if it meant leaving everything and everyone that I’d ever known.