The political atmosphere has changed so much since then. If someone got together a petition like that these days, I imagine it would be all over the front pages of the papers and there would be questions in Parliament. It was really just a question of sticking up for ourselves, something we would become very good at over the years.
In the end I got used to people who didn’t know him talking to Charlie in Pidgin English, as if he was just off the boat. I even managed to see the funny side sometimes. ‘What pricey you likey?’ someone at a cinema ticket desk would shout at him helpfully, and sometimes Charlie would play along with them, looking vacant as if he couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I couldn’t really be too indignant since I had made almost exactly the same mistake when I first met him.
We had our first child, Gary, in 1965, a couple of years after we married, by which time I’d just turned nineteen.
‘What colour’s Ann’s baby?’ our next-door neighbour asked Ellen, a friend of mine.
‘He’s green,’ Ellen replied, with a straight face.
Julie came along in 1967 and then Angela made her appearance in 1969. With three small children running around, the house was soon too small for us all and we put it up for sale. The woman who had organized the petition when we first moved in asked me how much we were asking for it.
‘That depends,’ I replied.
‘Depends on what?’
‘Depends on the colour of the buyer’s skin,’ I said. ‘The darker they are, the cheaper they can have the house.’
Although I was only joking we did end up selling to a man who had a half African wife, so that probably confirmed the neighbour’s worst fears about how the neighbourhood had now gone completely to pot. Times were changing in so many different ways.
Once we had found a buyer for our first home in Acklam we moved round the corner to a bigger house, where we stayed while the children grew up, creating a happy stable family base.
Gary was always the mischief-maker amongst the three children and Angela took after me, brimming with confidence and plenty to say for herself on all occasions. Julie was the quietest, shyest one of the bunch. She wasn’t as outgoing as her brother or sister and didn’t make friends quite as easily. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have friends, but they were a small, select group rather than a big crowd. Once someone had become her friend she tended to keep them in her life for a long time.
As she grew up she looked a lot like the few pictures we had of Charlie’s English mam, although her pretty, almond-shaped eyes gave a hint of the oriental blood that flowed in her veins, showing she was definitely a member of the ‘Ming dynasty’.
Charlie worked for Shell as a ‘heavy goods fitter’, which is another way of saying he was a mechanic working on their lorries. He worked hard and was a good provider, but bringing up three children is never going to be cheap. From soon after Julie was born, I worked on Friday and Saturday nights at the cash desk of a local Chinese restaurant in Billingham. The restaurant was owned by one of Charlie’s friends and they used to get quite a few actors and performers coming in from the nearby theatre after the shows finished. (We didn’t call them celebrities then, although I guess they were because they were usually off the telly.) I’d first gone to the restaurant to help them out for a week and ended up staying there for fifteen years, mainly because I enjoyed the buzz of the place.
Once Angela reached the age of five and started at school I found I had a bit of time on my hands so I got myself a job at the local hospital as an auxiliary nurse, to earn us a bit of extra money and to keep myself busy. I was lucky that my mam could look after the kids while I did my shifts – usually twelve till nine – and Charlie took over when he got in. I had never wanted to live a life like Mam’s with no outside interests beyond home and family and I’d always liked the idea of being a nurse, even when I was a little girl. Meeting Charlie and starting a family had only temporarily distracted me from doing something about it.
Once the hospital took me on I was very quickly working inside the operating theatre, doing a bit of everything. Despite having always thought that I wanted to be out on the wards, chatting to the patients, I loved the work and I soon got used to dealing with the temperamental surgeons, men who everyone used to treat as if they were gods. Hospital life was still very formal in those days with a strict hierarchy and no one on first-name terms or anything like that. The surgeons used to do a lot of shouting and none of us ever dared to answer them back; we were too busy running around to do their bidding as quickly as we could.
Julie was never any trouble to us or to her teachers at school when she was a child. She took up gymnastics and soon proved able to fold herself in two and make her body do all sorts of things that seemed impossible to me. She was a good dancer as well, being small and slightly built.
Of all our children she was the one who could always wrap Charlie round her little finger the easiest. If the others wanted anything they would tell her to go and ask him for it, knowing he could never refuse her anything. It was a bit like my relationship had been with my dad, I suppose. She was a proper daddy’s girl and I think maybe he saw a bit of his mam in her.
We led a very normal, contented family life, with all the usual ups and downs, petty rows and reconciliations, family treats and family chores. Every year when the kids were young we used to go down to Devon or Cornwall for our holidays, always taking my mam with us. For seven or eight years in a row we hired a big caravan in Looe. Mam was always good for baby-sitting and for giving Charlie and me little breaks. On our final trip there, with Charlie’s brother and his wife, we had fourteen days of solid rain and decided that next time we would go to Majorca for some guaranteed sun. Julie was eighteen by then and the highlight of the holiday for her was buying herself a white leather suit that she wore almost constantly once we got back. It looked terrific on her.
We used to go out as a family in the summer afternoons too, once Charlie had finished his shifts and the kids were home from school. I would ring Mam up and she would catch a bus over and join us for a run over the moors. All of us would pile into our old blue and white van, Mam sitting in state in the front with Charlie and the rest of us rattling around in the back with no seats. We even used to have the pram in with us when we still needed it. We took Mam everywhere we went because otherwise she would just have been sat at home on her own.
When the kids were in their teens, Charlie and I took the opportunity to travel to China with a couple of friends, leaving the kids with my mam. We spent a month in Hong Kong and then a week in Canton, where Charlie’s dad had originally come from all those years before. In Hong Kong we stayed with Charlie’s aunt in a village in the New Territories called Fan Ling, where I was the only European face to be seen in any direction and no one spoke any English. The streets bristled with life as people went about their daily business on bicycles and carts, and mah jong was being played on every corner.
Then we travelled to a village called Sha Tau Kok on the border with China, where a friend of ours lived. We had to get police permission in Hong Kong to get that close to the border. I