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| Taken at the Bolton Evening News in 1962 |
By
early 1962 when I was 23, I was still single, at a time when if you weren’t at
least seriously ‘courting’ or engaged to be married, you were considered to be
on the shelf.
While I pondered on my seemingly bleak future,
changes were taking place at the Bolton Evening News where I’d worked for a
couple of years. In our little accounts department, we'd been doing more work
and an extra person had been taken on, Lucy*. Her family had gone to live in
South Africa a few years previously and with going to school there, she had
become indoctrinated with the apartheid ideology. As a child in the Fifties, I'd become used to and accepted the influx of West Indians but her attitude was
the first time I’d come across outright racism. I remember one day she came
into work, shaking and crying, ‘because a native came and sat next to me on the
bus.’
One of the girls I'd worked with had married and moved away from Bolton with her husband. The vacancy caused by her leaving
was filled by Elaine*, Lucy’s sister. Elaine was completely different than her
younger sister and although she’d been married for a year or so, they’d
returned with her family to England because they weren’t too happy with the apartheid
politics of South Africa. She invited me to the family home and there I met her
brother, Fred*.
Older than Elaine or Lucy, he was
different again to either of his sisters, small, slightly built, with a gentle
quietness of manner. He and I started to go out together, enjoying each other’s
company. He loved ballroom dancing and was very good at it. We used to travel
to Manchester in his little Austin every Saturday to go to the Tudor Ballroom
at Belle Vue. We had to be there was soon as they opened, while there was still
room to dance properly. There was a great feeling of freedom in the way we
swirled and dipped round the ballroom and we talked more than once about entering
competitions.
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| Belle Vue dancing days! |
Neither the idea nor the romance
came to anything for I soon found that poor Fred suffered from depression. Then
he’d talk about his time in South Africa and I learned more about the
inequalities of the apartheid system from him than I did in the newspapers. I
learned too of the fear in which the far-outnumbered whites lived, with high
security and guns, and the heavy drinking they indulged in to blot out the
unspoken dread in their hearts.
If I’d still been at the Bolton
Evening News working with Elaine, it would have been difficult but by this
time, in early 1962, I was working as a shorthand typist for an advertising
agency, F John Roe, in St Ann’s Square, Manchester. At first, it seemed as if
it would fulfil all my expectations. Even the tedious bus and train journey was
exciting, especially when Philip Lowrie, who played Dennis Tanner in the new
and innovative serial, ‘Coronation Street’, sometimes caught our train in the
morning on his way to Granada Studios. Walking through the streets to and from
work with worldly-wise commuters made me feel that I was much more at the heart
of things, even if I was only a minor cog in the wheel of advertising.
I worked for several people in a
small typing pool at F John Roe’s and they were all very patient with me for my
shorthand was abysmal. I could take it down fairly well, a mixture of shorthand
and abbreviated names, but I could never read it back. That never changed.
Being used to doing nothing more than invoices at the Evening News, letters
were almost beyond me and more ended up in the waste bin than in my out tray.
I made one very good friend there,
Kathy, a down-to-earth girl and although she was younger than me, she took me
under her wing. She was also at a loose end and we started to go around
together. We solved the problem of me not being able to get home to Horwich
from Manchester after a night out by me staying at her house a couple of times
a week.
Manchester, for all that it was a
large city, still had that small town feel about it, an intimacy that meant you
were often likely to bump into people you knew in one jazz club or another, or
come face to face with Dennis Law of Manchester United or Peter Adamson, who
played Len Fairclough of ‘Coronation Street’, at a party in Prestwich.
Yet it was about to change again.
Kathy had started going out with the lovely man who was to become her husband
so I didn’t stay over in Manchester quite so often. With no boyfriend of my
own, I was lonely once more. As was often the case, it was Mum who solved the
problem. She still purchased ‘The Lady’ magazine every week in case that
superlative job turned up. One day, she spotted an advertisement for an
American couple who wanted a ‘Mother’s Helper’ for their three boys in
Princeton, New Jersey. I was dubious at first, wondering if I could cope with
three boys especially if any were like my young brother Mark. Although I loved
him, he was a little terror and one of the few things my parents and I argued
about was that they let him get away with so much when they’d been so strict
with me. Still, I decided to give it a try and sent a letter off, telling them
about myself.
Letters and photographs flew back
and forth across the Atlantic. When the Peters, as the couple were called,
offered me the job, sight unseen, I think it was the fact that it rained nearly
every day that summer that finally decided me to accept. There were no
restrictions then about people going to work in the United States providing you
had a job to go to. It was decided that initially it would be for a period of a
year, they would pay my fare there and back, but if for some reason I left
before, I’d have to pay my own return fare. It was an exciting day when my
tickets for the Cunard Line’s ‘Sylvania’ departing from the busy port of
Liverpool, arrived.
With so much to do and a visa to
arrange, it seemed as if I was on a roller coaster. The trip to the American
Consulate in Liverpool was a nerve-wracking experience. It was awe-inspiring to
be faced with armed guards standing stony-faced in the entrance lobby of the
Consulate. And the form I’d had to fill in was something else, pages long and
virtually wanting to know every detail of my past life and those of my parents.
There was even a section on subversive activities, which listed peace
organisations. I was glad then that I hadn’t actually joined the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament during its Aldermaston period although I had been on the
fringes for a while. Young people everywhere, having seen pictures of the
devastation caused by the two atomic bombs in Japan in 1945, felt threatened by
the seemingly endless conflict, known as the Cold War, between the two super
powers, the US and the USSR who tried to outdo each other with bigger and more
powerful weapons.
If the armed guards were daunting,
being ushered into the Official Presence was worse. She sat, a middle-aged
woman, at an enormous desk with the Stars and Stripes flag at her side and a
picture of John Kennedy, the new ‘glamour boy’ President on the wall behind
her. Peering over her spectacles, she meticulously took me through every aspect
of the form I had filled in. She made me feel decidedly uncomfortable as if I’d
got something to hide and I squirmed several times. Finally, I walked out with
my brand new passport stamped with that precious visa.
Almost before I knew it, it was 29
September 1962 and time to go. My cabin trunk, purchased second-hand, with my
favourite books and records wedged in between clothes that I wouldn’t need
until I arrived in Princeton and my suitcase for the journey had both been
packed.
Having to accept whatever date I
was given, my departure date had clashed with one of Mum’s periodic day trips
that she still organised for the women from the Beehive Mill. She was horrified
when she found out, but then she had an inspired thought. She’d juggle the
day’s programme a little and divert the coach, so that the whole party, many of
whom I knew from my mill days, could wave me off.
And that is precisely what
happened. My last sight of Mum was being
Slowly, the gap grew wider and the
coach party on the quayside grew smaller so that Mum was no longer
distinguishable in the crowd. I stood there, hands clenching the rail, until all
I could make out of Liverpool were the twin towers of the Liver Building. Time
to face the rest of my life, I decided, and turned away from Liverpool and
England.
*Names
changed to protect their privacy.
