My parents, one year after they were married (1941)
It isn’t until we have children of our own, or are of child rearing age, that we begin to understand just what a remarkable (or not) job, our parents did with us. Even if everything wasn’t ideal, the fact that we’ve made it to adulthood and are reasonably sane and healthy is to be celebrated. If we are happy, so much the better. If we have been successful and managed to achieve some, or all, of the goals we had in life, that’s a real bonus. But If we actually like our parents – well, that’s the icing on the cake, and not to be taken for granted.
I have three siblings - two brothers and a sister - and we all agree our parents were amazing. They are both dead now but certainly not forgotten. They were very different, but each great people - and parents - in their own way. This is surprising really, because neither had the ideal upbringing. My mother’s father left when she was 12. She never knew where he went or why he left, and she never saw him again. As the only child, she was brought up from then on by her mother who never remarried.
Many years later (when I was about five or six) my mother was contacted and told she had been left a small sum of money by a woman she had never heard of. It transpired that the money had come from her father with instructions to be passed on to his daughter when this woman, his wife, died. We will never know whether this was a woman he left his first wife and daughter for, or if this second marriage happened later, but at least my mother learned some small piece of information about his disappearance, although I can’t imagine it brought her much comfort.
My father’s mother died of cancer when he was around eight years old and the eldest of his three sisters became a mother to the other children, as his father was, by all accounts, not the most reliable of men. To be fair, few men would cope well if left with four young children, and certainly not back in the 1920s. The family group moved around a lot and so my father had few friends as a boy. He believes these constant moves from one boarding house to another was because they couldn’t afford to pay the rent.
In my parent’s partnership, my mother was the driving force: she was confident, determined and broad minded. She was well-informed and always fashionable. She was clever and very creative. She was also glamorous, sexy and full of joie de vivre.
When I think of her, the image that comes to mind is what she looked like when I was growing up. She would have been in her late forties then – she had me, late, at 41, my sister, even later, at 43. I see her sitting in one of the G-Plan armchairs at home, legs elegantly crossed, cigarette in her right hand, a curl of smoke drifting above her head. She is wearing capri pants, pumps and a v-neck sweater, her dark hair is swept up into a bun, with a velvet band holding it in place and her makeup is impeccable. She is flicking through the magazine on her knee and looks up with a smile when I enter the room. She is a woman with style and class and my role model for life.
My glamorous mum (1939)
My father, too was a man with style. His business was men’s outfitting and tailoring and so he was always exceptionally well turned out, in a suit and shirt and tie with matching handkerchief for work and at the weekends, usually wore a tattersall shirt and twill trousers. His build, upright stance, moustache and the glasses he wore gave him a look of Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army and indeed he was in the Territorial Army during WW2.
He didn’t have the pompous, officious demeanour of Mainwaring but he had high standards and liked to be seen as a man of status and substance even though my parents were not particularly well off. He smoked cigars in the manner of Churchill and this look certainly gave him gravitas but he was extremely kind and caring and a complete softy (especially where his daughters were concerned) and much easier to persuade than my mother, to let us have what we wanted. If we had ever been really naughty and frustrated my mother to the point of complete exasperation, she would say the classic “Just wait until your father gets home”. My sister and I would look sideways at one another and smile because we knew we could wind him round our little fingers and any anger he showed would soon abate.
My dapper dad (1961)
My parents adored one another right up until my mother died just a few months short of their 50th wedding anniversary and my father mourned her passing, pretty much every minute of every day for the eleven years he outlived her. Both while she was alive and even more so after she died, my father would regularly talk about my mother with undisguised awe and admiration “She taught herself to cook from scratch, you know” he’d say (she was a good cook), or “She brought all of you children up brilliantly. She rarely bothered me with any of the problems that arose at home, as she knew I had enough to worry about with the business”.
It certainly seemed she took her role as a housewife and mother very seriously, even though I realise now, that as a clever, creative and well-informed woman, she must have been bored to tears a lot of the time. Slightly more of a shock was when he once said to me “She taught me all I know about sex” but when I thought about it, that didn’t seem at all surprising!
They met in the 1930s in Leeds at the department store Marshall and Snellgrove’s staff dance. My mother worked there, in the Ciro pearl concession while my father was a salesman in a men’s outfitters shop in the city. Whenever he talked about their meeting, my father’s eyes would shine as he rekindled the memory and described the moment he first saw “the girl that was to become the most important person in my life.”
They married in 1940 in Belfast Registry Office, having moved to Northern Ireland because my father got an offer of work and the chance to open up his own men’s outfitting and tailoring business. All four of us children were born there but one by one we left to ‘seek our fortunes’ in London. It seemed ironic that they, who were English, remained and we, with our Belfast accents, lived in England. They eventually moved to live near us all on the outskirts of London.
When we were growing up, mealtimes were sacrosanct. Everyone was expected to sit down to eat together for breakfast and dinner (or tea as my parents called it because of their north of England roots). Sundays heralded a “Full Irish” around 10am and at 2pm my mother served up a roast dinner centred around chicken, lamb or beef with all the traditional trimmings and a home-cooked pudding to follow. I always thought it remarkable that we were not all hugely overweight. The dining table was where we discussed and argued, shouted and laughed and generally put the world to rights. We were, of course taught, “No elbows on the table” “No stretching across the table” and also, as presumably it must have been necessary, “No singing at the table”!
Me, top left, aged eight and my family (1964)
I loved the noisy, slightly chaotic nature of our family meals, but it wasn’t long before it was just me and my sister with my parents at the table. My brothers were quite a bit older than me – 10 and 13 years - and both left home in their late teens/early twenties. This big age gap was due to the fact that my mother had contracted tuberculosis while the boys were young, and was told she mustn’t have any more children for ten years as there was the chance of passing on the infection.
She was moved into an isolation ward at the fever hospital and spent two years there. It was impossible for my father to cope with looking after two small children as well as working so, amazingly, neighbours that my parents barely knew - two spinster sisters, said they would look after the youngest, who was just a toddler, while my other brother was at school.
Because of the highly infectious nature of the disease, my mother was not allowed any visitors. It always made her, and me, cry when she would talk about my father bringing the boys to stand outside and look at her through the window. They would press their hands against the glass while she mirrored them on the other side, none of them knowing if she was going to survive. It must have been excruciating for all of them and certainly affected my brothers: how do you explain to such young children why their mother is not there to look after them any more? My father once told me how he would cry himself to sleep most nights because he could not imagine how he would survive if he lost her.
Thankfully and remarkably my mother recovered: she was particularly vulnerable because she had pneumonia as a young woman and although treatable, TB was an extremely dangerous disease where patients often had relapses and spent their lives in and out of sanitoriums. She followed the doctor’s orders and didn’t have any more children for ten years but as soon as she could, got pregnant again and I was born in 1957 with my sister following three years later. My father had desperately wanted daughters so although my mother would have been happy to not have any more kids, she did so to please him. As a result we were the apple of my Dad’s eye and probably thoroughly spoilt because of it.
When my sister and I were growing up, my parents didn’t have much of a social life – PTA quizzes and dances offered rare opportunities for an evening out and occasionally they would invite friends round. I always knew when this was in the offing, as my mum would prepare a series of ‘snacks’ – cheese and pineapple on sticks, the thick ends of celery filled with grated cheese and pickle, cream horns made with strips of her homemade puff pastry wound round metal cones and once baked, filled with fresh whipped cream and jam.
Everything was laid out on the wooden trolley that was kept for special occasions and the sherry came out of the drink’s cupboard or occasionally, a bottle of Blue Nun would appear: this was very outré for the time, as they would only drink alcohol very occasionally, at parties or special celebrations. These social evenings all seemed fairly modest affairs, although there was much laughter and I know they enjoyed them as interludes in their otherwise fairly hum-drum lives.
My dad’s tailoring business in Belfast (circa 1965)
My father worked hard at his business in the centre of Belfast six days a week, but often dropped us at school in the mornings and was almost always home to eat with us at 6pm. Half an hour before he arrived, my mother would disappear off upstairs to do her hair and “put her face on” so that she looked her best for his arrival. It was, she once told me, “The best way to keep your man”. It seemed to work. After our meal my mother and father did the washing up together – she washed, he dried, while they discussed their respective days with one another and occasionally he would sing to her “Rose of Traleee” or “The Yellow Rose of Texas”.
Once I had moved from the teenage years of thinking my parents were old and boring, my mother became my advisor and confidante and I was convinced she knew the answer to everything. To teach me independence she told me, “I can’t fight your battles for you”; when I had my heart broken, she tried to console me with “The first time is always the worst” and when I was with a boyfriend who didn’t seem to want to have sex with me, I was somewhat surprised when she advised, “Sex isn’t everything. If your relationship is good in other ways, stick with it and have affairs”!
As children and young adults, we always felt loved and treasured and my parents took their role as parents very seriously. There was discipline – my father kept a cane hanging on the wall in the dining room when the boys were young and it had been used, so the stories went, once or twice, although more to whack the treads behind them as my brothers ran howling up the stairs. The cane had gone by the time my sister and I were growing up but my parents were not beyond smacking our legs or pulling our pants down and spanking our behinds if we really stepped out of line. I only remember it happening on two occasions – once to me, once to my sister and the humiliation was enough to make us think twice about badly misbehaving ever again.
There was fun, too and whenever they could my parents organised family outings and took us on holiday: we had a caravan for years in Ballywalter on the Ards Peninsula and we would decamp down there for the summer each year while my father drove up to work and back each day. They were great days, when my sister and I were out, swimming, on the beach or elsewhere on the caravan site, from dawn till dusk, running riot with a crew of other unruly kids who had nothing to think about but having a good time.
My parents never hot-housed any of us but we did all go to good grammar schools and were encouraged to do well. My father spent many fruitless evenings trying to help me understand my Maths homework to no avail – I got an E in my GCSE! Their philosophy was that we should do what made us happy (within reason), and we always knew they would support us in any endeavours we chose to take part in.
Both my bothers eventually left Belfast for London as there were better opportunities for work. The eldest, and the only one of us any good with figures, became successful and had a longstanding career in ‘The City’. The second had dreamed of working in television since he was young: his Dinky Toys were BBC TV vehicles and he made film cameras from balsa wood and sewing pins. When he got the chance, aged 17, to move to London and work for the BBC, my parents encouraged him wholeheartedly even though they were sad to lose him. My mother always cried thereafter when Tony Bennett’s “I left my heart in San Francisco” came on the radio because it had been playing the day my brother left.
He worked his way up through the ranks in TV becoming a director in light entertainment and subsequently produced and directed several widely known programmes including “It’ll Be Alright On The Night” and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” He broadened out into movies and amongst others, produced “Slumdog Millionaire” which won eight Oscars.
My sister also went to work in television and still has a successful career as a TV director in sport, working on Wimbledon, Premier League football and snooker amongst many other sporting events.
I have written in my article Choose a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life (find it in my Substack archive) about my desire to work in magazines from a young age and how, when I told my parents at the age of 12 that was what I wanted to do, they never left me in any doubt that I could and would achieve it. I began working in magazines as a designer having trained in graphic design at art school and eventually went on to become editor of British Country Living magazine, a post I held and loved for 24 years. This was typical of their approach: they believed in us and allowed us to believe in ourselves and to follow our dreams wherever they took us.
I was sad to discover, when I was older, that both my parents had hankered after other careers. In her teens, my mother won a scholarship to Leeds College of Art but my grandmother refused to let her go as she didn’t consider becoming an artist a suitable role for a respectable young lady: at that time artists were viewed in much the same way as actresses ie rather louch and loose.
My mother occasionally painted at home when we were children (I still have one of her paintings from that time) and later in life joined a painting class but she was never as good, and fulfilled, as she would have been if she had had the proper training.
My father told me he always wanted to be a teacher but that the opportunity and the right time never came along. It seems such a modest aspiration and such a shame that he didn’t manage to give it a go.
I applaud and admire my parents for their unstinting loyalty to parenthood. They provided us with a happy and stable home in which to grow. They showed their love for us by many actions every day. They taught us the rules of engagement that would launch us into adulthood. They allowed us to fly the nest when we chose to. They made many sacrifices to support us, train us and help us follow our dreams.
So, when people ask how come all four of us became successful and ended up working in relatively high flying jobs, I tell them the answer is simple: even though we didn’t realise it at the time, our parents were practically perfect.
I’d love to hear about your lives and how your parents helped you achieve (or not) your aspirations. If you’d like to, please leave a comment below and I shall respond.
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This was so wonderful to read. Thank you for sharing all those lovely memories and photographs. Very moving x
Hey susie so moved by the memories of your parents. My memory is of a lovely welcoming mum and dad. Your dad picking Claire and I up from a disco and having his wing mirror taken off bt a mad probably drunken driver travelling in the opposite direction..... Your mum and dad taking us to see the rocky horror show in London with Tim curry and my mother would have gone white overnight if she had known.... They were so welcoming and open minded..... Happy memories