Biscuit Girls Read online

  ‘The woman who trained me was Ivy Graham, a few years older than me. She seemed to have been there for ever. She was very nice. Can’t say anything against Ivy. And my charge hand was called Jean. She had an accent I had never heard before.’

  Chapter 7

  Jean

  Jean as a young woman

  Dorothy’s, Dulcie’s and Ivy’s memories of wartime Carlisle and Cumbria are nothing compared with Jean’s wartime memories. But then Jean, unlike the other three, had grown up somewhere enemy air raids were frequent, and bombs and deaths were a reality.

  Jean was born in West Derby, Liverpool on 3 July 1936. And she was born a twin – though it was only many years later that she discovered this fact. The other baby was born dead. She doesn’t even know whether it was a boy or a girl. It was her grandmother who told her about it when she was a teenager, but never revealed the baby’s sex, and Jean never asked.

  ‘All I know about my birth is that I was born very small, premature, and they put me in a shoe box with cotton wool round me.’

  Her dad, at the time of her birth, was working in a furniture factory and then moved to a bakery. Her mother, so she was told later, had been an actress and singer and once went to Paris with a production of the Pirates of Penzance. ‘She was called Babs Melia, that was her stage name, she was really called Margaret. My grandmother told me this, but I don’t know how correct it was.’

  The reason for the mystery was due to the fact that her mother died, aged twenty-seven in May 1940, when little Jean was only three, so her memories of her mother are few and faint.

  ‘My mother had TB. I do remember being taken to see her in hospital but they wouldn’t let me in. Children were not allowed in hospitals in those days. I sat outside on a bench with my dad while my grandma went in to see my mother.

  ‘I remember being lifted up by someone, I don’t know who it was, so I could see my mother in her coffin. I don’t remember at the time being scared or worried or thinking anything really, but ever since, whenever anyone in the family or any friend has died, I don’t want to see the body. I didn’t even look at my own father in his coffin.’

  By this time, the war had started and her dad had joined up and gone into the RAF where he flew in a Lancaster bomber as a navigator. He crash-landed once and injured his knee and was in hospital for some time. ‘He used to tell me stories of trying to sneak out of the hospital, hiding under the bed, then running out of the door, but they always brought him back.’

  By some remote and amazing coincidence, could his crashed Lancaster bomber possibly have been the same one which little Dorothy went to see on the Cumbrian hillside when she was three in 1942? That was the year the Lancaster bomber was introduced, so the dates tie in. Lancasters were the RAF’s heavy bombers – 7,377 were built and they did 156,000 sorties during the war years. One of them was modified to carry Barnes Wallis’s famous bouncing dam-busting bombs.

  After the death of her mother, Jean lived with her grandmother, her father’s mother, whom she always called by her nickname of Ninner. Then her father got married again, and Jean was brought back from her gran’s to live with her father and her new stepmother, Elsie.

  ‘She didn’t like me, I don’t know why. She treated me like a slave, making me scrub the front step, scrub the bedroom floors, clean the dishes, go for messages. If I did anything wrong, like come back with the wrong change, she would hit me. Many a time I was black and blue through being beaten.

  ‘The teachers did find out, but did nothing about it. You didn’t in those days. There wasn’t all the Social Services like today.

  ‘She kept me short of food as well, so my grandmother used to meet me at the school gates and pass me a sandwich or a bottle of lemonade.’

  But while Jean was unhappy at home, she enjoyed primary school at Vine Street, and quite liked the war, finding it interesting and exciting, despite all the bombing and destruction going on all around her in Liverpool.

  At school when the bombs went off, Jean and all the other pupils would go into the cellars and lie down, each pupil on their own mat. At home, they didn’t have a shelter in their house so when the bombs fell they would go into the communal shelters in the street. ‘I hated them. They were so smelly and filthy, people used them as lavatories. I would rather have stayed in our house and sheltered under the stairs.

  ‘We were sheltering at home one night when the back door flew open and all the cats of the neighbourhood flew in – terrified by the noise of the bombs. I was alarmed at first, when they burst in, then I had to laugh. It was so funny.

  ‘You never knew what local houses and buildings had been hit till you went out next day. The worst were the whistle bombs, whistling over your head, and you’d be wondering where they would fall. I liked looking up at the sky in the dark, seeing all the crisscrossing lights, with the bombs and barrage balloons and the aeroplanes, trying to work out which were the Germans. You were not supposed to be outside, so the ARP wardens would chase you inside.

  ‘I did enjoy going on the trams next day with my friends into town to see the bomb damage. My stepmother didn’t know I was doing this, but four of us would go for a penny ride on the tram. I remember seeing Blacklers, which was a very big posh department store, a bit like Binns in Carlisle, and it had been totally demolished and was still on fire. But they were already setting up makeshift stalls, putting up tarpaulins over the wreckage and selling stuff. Lewis’s was bombed – they had a zoo at the back which was wiped out.

  ‘At school you didn’t know who would turn up each day, or who had been bombed. I did know two people who got killed by a bomb near us.

  ‘They weren’t really trying to bomb us in West Derby, just by accident really. They were heading further on, for the docks and the Pier Head.

  ‘I went down to the Pier Head one day and I saw a German plane stuck in a wall. It was on fire, but I couldn’t see if there was a pilot inside, dead or not. It looked so weird, stuck right in the wall of a warehouse.

  ‘I don’t remember being scared. Our lives went on as normal really, being kids, having fun, playing games. I would go to Woolton Woods with my friend and sit by the floral clock and watch our RAF planes landing and taking off at Speke airport.

  ‘Because my dad was in the war, away in the RAF, and my mother was dead, I was treated in a way like an orphan and my grandmother found out I could get free shoes. She took me to the Walker Gallery, which was a very big building. At the back there was a room that had these tables and you lined up. My gran gave my details, I got weighed and measured, then I was given a free pair of shoes. In the summer you got free sandals.

  ‘We also got free stuff from the Americans. We would stand at Blundell Sands and there would be the American boats coming in and we would all wave and cheer. They would see us and throw stuff overboard, wrapped in cellophane. We would wait for the tide to bring them in, then all rush. Things like chewing gum, chocolates and sweets. In the streets, if the US convoys were coming through, going to Burtonwood, we would stand by the road and they would throw things to us. The Yanks seemed to have all the stuff we didn’t.’

  At home, the abuse continued, with Jean’s stepmother hitting her for any misdemeanour. One day when she was about seven she decided to run away to her grandmother’s, though she didn’t really know which was her house. ‘I asked a woman in the street and she said follow me. She turned out to be my aunty. I never knew I had one. In fact, I had two.

  ‘My gran could not put me up, as she had no room, so they went to the police as I had run away. I was taken down to Dr Barnardo’s. I was checked out, forms filled in and I spent one night there. Then my gran came to see me and said that she could take me in after all. So I went to live with her again.’

  Being brought up during the war, Jean didn’t have things like bananas and can’t remember having many biscuits either. ‘Even when the war finished, we didn’t have biscuits in the house very often, usually just at Easter. I did buy them now and again in shops, when
you could get loose biscuits like custard creams, buying them by the pound in a paper bag. I always liked Jacob’s cream crackers.

  ‘My grandmother did all the cooking. I have no memory of my mother cooking, but then I wouldn’t have, as she died when I was so young. My grandmother fed us very well – usually the same dishes on the same day of each week.

  ‘Sunday morning we always had a cooked breakfast: egg, bacon, tomatoes – which were home-grown – black pudding and fried bread. Sunday dinner was a roast if possible, but of course during the war you couldn’t always manage that. Sometimes my uncle would give us a chicken from his smallholding.

  ‘On Monday, it would be leftovers. Tuesday and Thursday was whatever was in the cupboard. Wednesday we would often have scouse, which was a famous Liverpool stew made from neck of lamb. Friday was fish – and on Friday we would also have tripe. Saturday lunch she cooked spare ribs or pig’s feet. They were lovely, done with bread in the oven.

  ‘My childhood memory is of eating well, but with rationing at the height of the war, perhaps we didn’t eat so well as I now remember it and it must have been a struggle. But I can clearly remember all those dishes, and enjoying them. I wasn’t faddy.

  ‘I can also remember my father doing some cooking, this was after the war, when he had returned home. I never did any cooking, not when I lived at home with my grandmother. My grandmother always did her shopping at a shop called Costigan’s.’

  Jean loved all the wartime and post-war radio programmes, like ITMA – It’s That Man Again, starring Tommy Handley, who came originally from Liverpool. It was mainly an adult show, with funny voices and catch phrases and some double entendres. Dick Barton, Special Agent, appealed mainly to younger people. It was a fifteen-minute exciting serial story which came on every evening on the BBC Light Programme at 6.45. Ex-commando Captain Dick Barton, who had a clipped posh voice, aided by Jock, who was Scottish, and Snowy, a cockney, saved the nation from baddies every evening. Children all over the country, as soon as they heard the signature tune, rushed in from playing in the street to catch the next exciting episode. It always finished on a cliff-hanger, usually with the words ‘Quick, Jock, Snowy…’ You then had to wait till the next day to hear what happened. It ran from 1946 to 1951 and at its height had twenty-one million listeners.

  Despite all the various dramas and deprivations in her early years, Jean passed the Eleven Plus, or the ‘scholarship’ as it was known in Liverpool. Along with two others girls from her class she found herself at Grove Street College, a girls’ grammar school. She had to have a proper uniform, complete with a velour hat in winter and a straw hat in summer, which was paid for by the Education Department, on the grounds that she was a semi-orphan.

  After two years, her stepmother reappeared in her life, insisting that Jean returned home to live with her and Jean’s father. By this time her father and stepmother had had a child, a boy. Jean, by then aged twelve, suspects she was being seen as cheap labour again, to be a babysitter for her half-brother.

  Not long after she had returned, her stepmother said the tram fares into town to her grammar school were too expensive, so Jean had to leave school and go to the local secondary school nearby.

  At fourteen, Jean fell ill. She was found to have polio, then X-rays discovered TB, which is what her mother had died of. For the next year she was in hospital at Fazackerley, in the isolation wing, then in the sanatorium, where she could have school lessons.

  Aged sixteen, Jean left school and got a job in the offices of the Liverpool Echo in the advertising department, then moved on to work at Vernons Pools.

  Vernons Pools, founded in 1925, and Littlewoods, founded in 1923, both originating in Liverpool, dominated the football pools business for decades and were deadly rivals. In 1935, Littlewoods hired a plane to fly over London with a streamer behind which read LITTLEWOODS ABOVE ALL!

  By 1948, the pools companies were taking in £50 million a year in bets from eight million punters – with the government grabbing a large slice in tax. The most popular was the treble chance, where you ticked eight games, hoping they would all be score draws. The first big individual win to hit the national headlines was in 1961 when Viv Nicholson – famous for Spend Spend Spend – won £152,319. Ten years later, the prize had reached £500,000.

  The prizes were not as enormous in the 1950s when Jean was working there, but while checking the pools one day in 1953, Jean came across eight correct draws in a row, thus winning the treble chance. When the winner was announced, he asked for a tour of Vernons. While there, he asked to meet the girl who had first spotted his winning line.

  ‘He offered to give me something, but I refused. It would not have been correct.’ As a working woman, though still a teenager, Jean was earning good money, making lots of new friends, but still her stepmother was trying to dominate her life. However, unbeknown to her stepmother she managed to arrange a holiday in North Wales with five of her girlfriends. They booked two caravans, three girls in each, and had a good time, meeting some lads from Liverpool who were also on their summer holidays. She swapped addresses with a couple of the boys.

  ‘A few weeks later, I got home one day from work to find my stepmother in a fury. She sent me straight to my room. When my dad came home, I could hear her shouting at him as I sat on the stairs.

  ‘She had opened a letter from one of the boys I had met. She said it showed I was going out with a married man and I was pregnant. It was totally untrue. She had read things between the lines that weren’t there.

  ‘So that determined me. I couldn’t stay at home any longer. When I got my wages that Friday, I answered an advert for a bedsit, went to see it and paid two weeks ahead and moved in.

  ‘I sat in the dark that first night and wrote a letter to my dad. I went in the dark and put the letter through his letterbox. I told him what I had done, but did not reveal my address. I said the things my stepmother has said were a pack of lies. I didn’t want to see her again. Nothing had happened with those boys, not even kissing and cuddling. We just sort of socialised together. I was very young and very innocent.’

  Not long afterwards while at work at Vernons, someone came round recruiting girls for the Women’s Royal Auxiliary Air Force. A group joined up, including Jean. They wore uniform, went on manoeuvres, were taught various skills and also got paid. Jean became a plotter – plotting aeroplane routes. There were weekend camps, but Jean was unable to attend them because of her history of TB.

  Now that she was a working and independent woman she was able to spend a bit more on clothes, but was never all that obsessed by fashion.

  ‘My stepmother or gran bought my clothes when I was young and they were mainly second hand. As a teenager my stepmother bought me my first stockings – and they were thick rayon and they itched like anything. When I had some money I went out and bought my first pair of nylons. They had a nice silk sheen, with a nice black seam up the back.

  ‘I had a party once, when I was living with my gran, and my aunty bought me some French knickers. I was fifteen at the time, and had just come out of hospital, so the party was a special treat. My stepmother went mad when she heard.’

  French knickers, which were silky and loose, were indeed considered very naughty, not the sort of thing respectable young women were supposed to wear in the 1940s and ’50s.

  ‘I mainly did my hair myself, though I would have it cut now and again at the hairdresser. It had a natural wave. It was long when I was small but my stepmother had it cut short. One time the hairdresser cut it so short it was cut right up to my ears and my stepmother went mad.

  ‘The music I liked when I was young was Irish songs, because my grandmother sang them. When I heard Bing Crosby, I thought he was lovely. I also liked Andy Williams and Doris Day, all those nice singers of the time. Among the film stars I liked Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston. One of my heroes, you might say, I mean heroines, was Bessy Braddock, the Liverpool MP. She was such a character.

  ‘I don’t t
hink I was ever really interested in fashion styles, though I could see that Christian Dior clothes were good but very expensive. I usually wore cardigans, blouses and skirts. I never liked trousers and never wore them.

  ‘When I went out in the evening I used to wear a taffeta skirt in two colours – black on one side and the other side was red or green – with an underskirt underneath, made of layers of tulle.’

  One day in 1955, aged nineteen, after a few drinks at the WVS club, where all the forces socialised, Jean got on the bus to go home. She went upstairs to find it was full of soldiers

  ‘An army lad came and sat down beside me. He asked me where I was going. I said West Derby. When the conductress came round, he said, “Two to West Derby please,” and bought two tickets. I thought cheeky devil, who does he think he is.’

  They got off the bus together at her stop. Jean started walking towards her street, followed by the cheeky soldier, chatting away. She did not want to reveal her exact address, or that she was living alone in a bedsit, and earning a very good wage at Vernons, all of which would have made any young soldier start panting. So she stopped before she got to her house, and bid him farewell. But she did agree to meet him again.

  Jack was a young soldier from Carlisle. He was in the REME, stationed in Liverpool, having signed on aged seventeen in 1953 as a regular for twenty-two years, with the option of leaving every three years. He had for a while been transferred to the 10th Royal Hussars, who were known as the Shining Tenth. ‘I soon found out why. All you did was shine and polish your uniform.’

  Jean and Jack went out for about a year, by which time Jack came to the end of his three-year period. There was not a great deal to hold Jean to Liverpool, having no mother and disliking her stepmother. They decided to move to Jack’s hometown of Carlisle, but still as single people. Jack went back to living with his family while Jean found a bedsit in Carlisle and an office job at 14 MU.