Forged with Flames Read online

  The night panics began around the time of Jill’s birth. I don’t think my mother was really aware of them, thinking that I just wanted an excuse to come downstairs, the way children do, when I was meant to be asleep in bed. One day, while my mother was feeding the baby, I came and stood beside her and came straight out with what was plaguing me.

  ‘Do you still love me, Mummy?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she replied, giving me a cuddle.

  When Jill became a toddler Dad would take us both with him to scouts while Mum was working. We’d walk to a hall in Barrowford where the brigade met, about thirty minutes away, with Dad carrying Jill on his shoulders. He took us with him camping once too, when the brigade set up their tents in a nearby field. The scouts seemed so grown-up and impressive in their fawn uniforms and neckerchiefs. I was desperate for them to notice me but they couldn’t have been less interested. They would take Jill, though, into their tents and play with her for hours. It was unbelievable. Disgruntled, my behaviour became even worse. I was positively ratty. It wasn’t long into the weekend before my father sent me off to the other end of the field in disgrace.

  Having a sister did have its advantages, though. I loved playing games with Jill once she was old enough. She would come into my bed on weekends and we’d pretend to be fleeing deadly assailants, waving the limbs of dolls and teddy bears. We played this game endlessly, always managing to escape at the last minute. Sometimes, though, I enjoyed scaring my unsuspecting little sister by telling her, with great drama, that I was going to die in the night and she would discover me gone in the morning. Jill, saucer-eyed, believed me absolutely and would burst into inconsolable sobs and beg me to stay alive. I’m ashamed to admit that I took great delight in her sadness at the thought of losing me.

  Baby sisters could be entertaining but they had their limitations; I needed some older company. I found my first friend, Glenys, by knocking on our neighbours’ doors and asking, ‘Do you have a little girl I could play with?’ Eventually, to her parents’ amusement, I found Glenys. We shared our first cigarette when I was seven and she was ten. I’d watched my father smoke every day and figured that cigarettes must have tasted pretty good for him to do it so often, so Glenys and I devised a way of getting a couple of cigarettes for ourselves to try.

  A friend of the family called Tony lived in the next street and smoked roll-your-owns. The plan was that we would go round to “Uncle Tony”, as our family called him, and I’d ask him for a couple of cigarettes, saying that my father had run out and would he mind rolling a couple for Dad until he could next get to the shop. We were both very impressed with ourselves for thinking up this clever plan. We walked up to Uncle Tony’s house, where I repeated the request I’d rehearsed, flawlessly. Uncle Tony didn’t hesitate to go to his tobacco tin and deftly roll out two cigarettes for me. I thanked him and told him that Dad would be very grateful. We were beside ourselves, coming up with such an excellent scheme and executing it so brilliantly, that we could hardly contain ourselves as we ran back to Glenys’s house for the big event.

  The smoking was something of a letdown. We tried hard to look grown-up and tell each other that we were enjoying it but, like countless other novice smokers, we coughed and spluttered as the smoke caught in our throats. We soon abandoned the cigarettes for a bag of potato crisps, wondering why anyone would bother. Nevertheless, we congratulated ourselves on the ingenious way in which we procured the cigarettes as we parted and I walked home across the road for tea.

  Uncle Tony, in the interim, had begun to feel uneasy, then suspicious, and eventually called my parents. I could tell I was in trouble the moment I walked in. My mother was in tears which was unnerving, and my father was furious. He told me he was going to teach me ‘a lesson I would never forget’, one of his favourite sayings. I wondered nervously what was in store this time as he sat me down on one of the kitchen chairs. I vowed that I wouldn’t cry—my father hated tears and if I ever cried he’d tell me to stop or ‘I’ll REALLY give you something to cry about’, another favourite saying. Maybe the fact that I was born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger and my zodiac sign is Taurus the bull, might explain my stubbornness and strong will, but I swore I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry.

  Dad said nothing but slowly and pointedly drew a cigarette from his jacket pocket and, taking his time for extra effect, put it in his mouth and lit it. Then turning quickly to me he said, ‘I’ll teach you not to smoke. You’ll never want another cigarette again in your life after I’ve finished with you.’

  This cigarette was a different proposition from the daredevil puff we’d had before: Dad was rough and forced me to smoke it. The whole episode was upsetting and made me feel quite ill. It was a relief when I was finally sent off to my bedroom. But I didn’t flinch once—I had developed a mask that I would wear, at times, throughout the rest of my life.

  You’d think this episode might have cured me from ever picking up another cigarette again but, no, ten years later at a friend’s party I had another crack at it. I burnt a hole in the front of my best dress, which was to be my school dance outfit but I admitted it to my mother this time and never smoked again.

  I also made friends with three sisters who lived next door but one to us. They were called Pauline, Christine and Geraldine. Christine was my age and good at ballet, and I dreamed of being a ballet dancer, of twirling around in a glorious blur of white and leaping high into the air on stage as everyone watched. We spent hours in Christine’s attic dressing up in skirts we fashioned out of brightly coloured crepe paper, which you could buy for sixpence a packet. I was quite chummy with two boys as well: Roddy, who lived right next door to us, and Stephen a couple of streets away. I played cowboys and Indians with them, and other wilder games in the fields nearby that we used to call the Big Woods.

  Most of the neighbourhood children went to the same school—Wheatley Lane Primary—a brown stone building with attractive arched windows so high up on the walls that our teacher, Miss White, needed a long pole with a hook on the end to open them. The school had two main rooms—the larger one for the “big class”, the smaller one for the “babies”. It was only a small building, surrounded by a black, wroughtiron fence, with a playground made entirely of old flagstones; no grass anywhere. At the back, to one side, was a small patch of garden where we grew turnips which we were allowed to buy for a penny when they were ready. We were supposed to take them home, but most of us couldn’t resist eating them raw before we got there. Every lunchtime, Miss White would set up tables at the top end of the Big Room and like all English school children, we’d sit down to our hot dinner. We weren’t allowed to leave anything on our plates and I remember washing down stodgy grey dumplings with a glass of water, sure that they’d make me sick. On the positive side, Miss White took us for country dancing once a week—a favourite time—keeping the old gramophone rolling by turning the handle at one side with one hand as she directed the dancing with the other. Quite a feat.

  Like any school, Wheatley Lane had its bullies. The one who made my life hell was Donald Smith, who started bullying me when I was not quite seven. Donald would taunt me at the bus stop in the mornings as we waited for the bus that took us on the ten-minute ride from Barrowford to the school in the small village of Fence. There were usually adults waiting at the stop with their children, which meant he had to be careful, but he still managed to slip in a few threats under his breath. ‘You’d better watch out later’ or ‘You’re gone’ or, worse still, ‘I’m going to get you’. I was aware of his malevolent stares at school but Donald was at his most menacing when he was away from it and the watchful eye of Miss White, roaming the streets of Barrowford with his gang, a small band of sycophantic chums who applauded his bullying.

  Donald commanded attention. He was a good-looking boy with smooth, fair hair and blue eyes, a few years older than me and a lot bigger. He lived in the block of houses next to ours and was friends with Roddy, next door. Whenever he was close eno
ugh, he’d threaten to beat me up and do all kinds of other things, which I really believed possible. He ripped open the hood of my doll’s pram one day as I stood by and watched, completely powerless to stop him. We had coal fires then and there were little sheds in the rear yards where the coal man delivered his load. Donald would climb on the roof of Roddy’s shed and incite him to pelt my sister and me with stones and sticks when we appeared in our yard. I began to flinch whenever we opened the back door to step outside.

  Gradually, a vague dread turned to paralysing fear. Much is made of bullying now, but then it was regarded as just something that happened or perhaps, if you were a boy and your father knew about it, he’d teach you to retaliate with a well-aimed jab to the stomach. I was defenceless. I would peer around our back gate to see if Donald was there whenever I went out and scan the streets ahead and behind as I walked. Eventually, just the thought of the next confrontation with Donald Smith made me feel ill ... until one momentous Sunday afternoon.

  I was playing inside that day when something came over me—perhaps it was that inner tiger! I had to act. No one else was going to save me—I had to do it myself. I calmly picked up my small wooden cricket bat and left the house, unusual in itself as we weren’t allowed to play outside on a Sunday; Sundays were sacrosanct and quiet whether you were religious or not. I stood alone beside our back gate and waited, fired with confidence that I’d know what to do.

  I didn’t have to wait long. As if by inbuilt radar, Donald and his gang homed in and headed down the street straight towards me. He stopped, stood and glowered, then took a step closer, bearing over me. The stance said it all. I waited until he leaned close and before he could touch me, brought the cricket bat from behind my back and whacked him on the arm with all the force a seven-year-old could muster.

  Donald’s reaction was instantaneous. He screamed with pain and indignation, and wonder of wonders, he cried. The other boys looked at him, and then at me. I stood my ground ready to deal out the same punishment to anyone else who dared move towards me. It wasn’t necessary. Donald ran home bawling and his little band scattered. It was brilliant. I was calm and at peace as I walked back into the house, job done, cricket bat in hand. I’d surprised the boys, but most of all myself; I had discovered a tenacious fighting spirit. This would prove vital later as I battled the worst that life could throw at me. At the time, though, I was just happy to know that Donald Smith would never bother me again.

  4

  WINNING

  I left Wheatley Lane in 1961 and went to Nelson Grammar School in the next big town along. Nelson Grammar was a co-ed school with a headmistress who, on first impressions, appeared stern and austere. She was particularly strict at one stage about us all being in complete uniform—we girls had to lift our skirts each morning as we went into school assembly to show her that we were, indeed, wearing our bottle-green knickers. When she taught me English in my last year of school, I discovered that she was, in fact, warm, funny and an excellent teacher. I topped the English class that year, which made me even more positively disposed towards her.

  But it was sport that was my forte at school. I’d been good at rounders and high jump at Wheatley Lane but not outstanding. We used to do a lot of ‘running’ as we called it—‘athletics’ was the more grown-up term—but although I qualified to compete in interschool sports once or twice I was, at best, average. At grammar school though, it didn’t seem to matter what it was—netball, hockey, tennis, athletics—it all came easily. I could get into any team I wanted to almost without trying—an exciting development for an eleven-year-old. If you were good at sport you were popular and people looked up to you, which wasn’t the case if you were brainy. I realised just what a standing it gave me one interschool sports day in my second year. Waiting in the middle of a group of competitors, one of the girls turned to me and said, ‘I hope I don’t have to compete against Ann Dixon. I’ve heard she wins everything.’ I struggled to stop smiling. It was unbelievable. All I could say was, ‘Yes, me too’.

  There was one girl though, in the year above, who kept me grounded. Rowena Crowther was the daughter of our geography teacher and a magnificent runner—tall, with legs like a thoroughbred, and very fast. We’d compete against each other occasionally and Rowena always won. In a way it was good not to have the pressure of being expected to win all the time, but I still daydreamed about the time I’d beat her.

  I hardly trained until Fourth Form, just turning up wherever I was supposed to be and doing what I needed to do, easy as pie. I realised though, that I couldn’t be so lackadaisical if I wanted to out-run Rowena. Early that year, when I was fourteen, I decided to have a go at improving my style and speed. The first step was to buy a book on athletics from our local bookshop, a sort of do-it-yourself text. I found the section on sprinting and vowed to follow its training schedule religiously. The book had tips such as when you were running alone, imagining there were competitors alongside, then picturing the outcome of the race exactly as you wanted it to be—ahead!—a sort of positive visualisation. you were supposed to have a stopwatch to record times as You progressed but I didn’t, which made it a challenging exercise.

  Rowena and I were due to compete against each other that coming summer in the one-hundred yard and the one-hundred-and-fifty yard races at the interschool sports. I loved the longer event, enjoying the feeling of building up speed and flying around the bend. But the hundred-yard race was much more difficult because I could never get that burst of power you need right at the end. Rowena was strongest over the hundred so that race would be the more testing. I started to practise twice a day when the last of the really cold weather was behind us and I could concentrate on running the whole spring.

  Rising at six-thirty, I would drag my tracksuit on over my shorts and creep down the stairs and out into the quietness of the fields. It was beautiful then, the day crisp and new, and it felt as if the world was all yours. In England you’re allowed right of way in fields so I found one that was fairly flat and didn’t have cows in it, and just ran and ran until my stomach told me it was breakfast time. After school in the evenings, I’d do it all over again.

  I kept getting myself out there week after week without any idea if I were improving, not having a stopwatch. It did get tedious sometimes getting up so early every day and trying to keep motivated doing it alone; and there were mornings when I really could have stayed curled up in bed, but I was absolutely determined. I was going to beat Rowena Crowther. I don’t remember telling my parents what I was doing over those two or three months but they must have twigged because they both came to watch me race on the big day of the sports meeting; usually only Mum came.

  Finally, the sports day arrived—the Saturday just before we broke up for summer holidays in June, 1965. I was so nervous getting ready that morning, tying and re-tying the shoelaces of my runners to get them just right, wondering if all the hard work would pay off. What if I’d just got fitter but not faster? What if Rowena had trained and she’d got faster? I hadn’t told anyone about my ambition to beat her and I was glad I hadn’t—losing to Rowena would be disappointing enough after weeks of training without the ignominy of everyone knowing about it.

  The sports were held at a school in a nearby town. It was a sparkling clear day when I arrived at those grounds proud and excited to be part of Nelson Grammar’s team. Just walking around in your shorts as a competitor was a thrill. Dozens of parents had already arrived to watch, as well as the teachers and students from the competing schools. Parents greeted each other and stood in little knots chatting. Spectators lined the rope that separated off the running track, edging in beside each other, peering over each other’s shoulders, waiting for the next event to start. Some people brought their own chairs or sat on the grass behind the track, but most stood, moving about between the competitions to get a better view. A fairground atmosphere pervaded despite the competition and rivalries.

  My first race against Rowena was the one hundred yards, held in l
anes off to one side of the oval. A couple of friends wished me luck as I made my way to the track but I was so nervous I barely registered them. I knew my parents were watching somewhere but I couldn’t see them anywhere close to the track. I told myself over and over, ‘If I can win this race, the longer one will be much easier’.

  I was trying to stay calm as we got into position at the starting line, but my heart was already taking off on its own race. Toes on the line, poised in starting position, I smiled across at Rowena. We were rivals but there was no animosity between us.

  The gun went off. I started well. Rowena did too. We were neck-and-neck as we sped down the first twenty-five yards of the track. We soon left the other competitors behind; the race was now between the two of us. Legs straining, elbows jabbing the air, we sprinted side-by-side. The finishing tape neared but I didn’t fade as I usually did. As we entered the final ten yards we were still inseparable. I focused hard and began to pull ahead. The crowd was cheering, the shouting reaching a climax; they could see we were both putting all we had into the finish. I thrust my body across the line, finishing first, with Rowena hard on my heels. I’d done it! People rushed up to pat me on the back. My friends gathered around, delighted and excited. It was wonderful and exhilarating. Rowena had made me push myself to the limit. I’d discovered an inner strength and determination that I’d never considered possible.

  There was hardly time to settle down again—perhaps twenty minutes—before the megaphone called us up for the one-hundred-and-fifty yards. I walked around, warming up, flexing my calves, moving about with a new confidence. This was my best race; I loved the feeling of running round the bend and dashing ahead of the pack at that stage. The hardest contest was over and the training had paid off. I knew I could win, and I did, easily. I was on such a high: I felt invincible.