In 1985, the year Mam died, Julie and Andrew got married and moved into a council house just down the road in Billingham, 27 Grange Avenue. It was only five minutes’ drive away from us. I was very happy for them. I’d been born and brought up in the area myself and knew it well, so it felt as though Julie was staying close to her roots.
It was a lovely wedding and when I watched Julie and Andrew dancing to ‘Ave Maria’ at the reception I felt like the complete proud mum, happy to have brought up such a pretty girl and to be able to see her settling down with a nice man. ‘Ave Maria’ was her favourite song and she looked so beautiful and so joyful as they whirled around the dance floor that at that moment it didn’t seem possible they wouldn’t have a wonderful happy life together.
Even though Julie was now a married woman it often felt as though she hadn’t left home at all. We would see her every day, and there would be phone calls from her all the time. Gary had left home and started work as a bricklayer and, even though Angela was still living with us, she was very independent and had just starting her training as a dental nurse. But our Julie wouldn’t let go of the apron strings.
‘Are you in, our Mam?’ she would ring and ask at least once a day. ‘I’ll pop round then.’
She was nearly always round for her tea, because we usually had the sort of Chinese food the children had been brought up eating. Charlie had taught me how to cook it at the beginning of our marriage and we all thought of it as our staple diet. As a family we used chopsticks all the time without even thinking about it.
Sometimes she would come round for one of her daily visits, then go home and ring half an hour later, even though she didn’t have anything new to say. She just liked to chat about nothing or about anything that had come into her head in the previous few minutes. Although I would get exasperated with her sometimes if I was trying to get on with doing something else, I wouldn’t have had it any other way; I loved having her around. Even when I was at work she would be ringing all the time; the others in the operating theatre used to tease me about it every time another call came through.
‘You’ve got to stop ringing me so much at the hospital,’ I’d tell her every so often. ‘You’re going to get me into trouble.’
‘Oh, aye,’ she would reply, good-naturedly. ‘I will.’
But she never did. The moment she thought of something to tell me or ask me she would be dialling again without a second thought.
My colleagues at the hospital were used to her ways, having known her since she was little. Because I worked weekends the kids often used to come in to see us when they were little, if we weren’t busy. All the other staff knew them and they weren’t nervous about the theatre or even the god-like surgeons.
Julie came into the hospital to see me one day when she was about seven months pregnant, the year after she and Andrew were married. There were just three of us on duty that day and nothing much was happening so we were able to pay her some attention.
‘Get up on the table,’ one of the other nurses told her. ‘We’ll get the stethoscope and see if we can hear the baby’s heart beating.’
She was up on the table with her belly exposed while we tried to find the baby’s heart when one of the surgeons, Mr Clark, suddenly burst into the room.
‘What the bloody hell is going on in here?’ he wanted to know.
‘Our Julie’s pregnant and we’re trying to find the heartbeat,’ I explained nervously.
‘Oh, get out of the way,’ he barked. ‘I’ll find it.’
Julie went bright red as he took over and found the heartbeat almost immediately. This same surgeon had been very generous when Julie was married, passing on a load of furniture that he and his wife didn’t want to go in her new home. Everyone around the hospital was good to us like that, treating us like family.
When she was close to her due date both she and Andrew came to live with us for two weeks because she wanted to be at the heart of the family at such an important time. I guess maybe she still didn’t feel ready to leave the nest even though she was a married woman and soon to be a mother. Andrew never seemed bothered about anything like that, always fitting in easily wherever he was, happy to go along with whatever Julie wanted.
The birth all went smoothly and Julie instantly took to motherhood. A few weeks after little Kevin had arrived she and I popped out to the off-licence to buy some chocolate, leaving the baby with Andrew and Charlie.
‘I feel really strange,’ she said once we were away from the house. ‘This is the first time I’ve come out without Kevin since I had him.’
‘I feel like that with you,’ I told her, ‘even though you’re married now. I don’t think a mother ever feels complete without her children around her.’
‘Ah, Mam,’ she teased, ‘but I’m a woman now.’
‘Yeah, I know, but I still feel the same about you.’
When the time came to take Kevin to the mother and toddler group Julie wanted me to go too.
‘Ah, come on, our Mam,’ she wheedled when I said I didn’t think any of the other girls would be taking their mothers. ‘I don’t want to go on my own.’
She never liked to do things on her own and I never complained about being included because she was always a laugh to be with and I enjoyed her company. It was great to be invited to be such a big part of my grandson’s early life.
Charlie and I were always very happy with Andrew as a son-in-law and to start with the marriage appeared to go well, especially once they had Kevin to look after. They were both so proud of him and so anxious to do the right things. But becoming a mother seemed to bring Julie a bit more out of her shell and after a couple of years things began to go wrong between them. I think it was mostly down to them both being so young and immature – she was just eighteen and he was only twenty when they married. Julie couldn’t cook at all; the first time she put a chicken in the oven she left the plastic bag of giblets inside it. It’s hard to sustain a marriage when neither of you know anything about life. I think they both thought it was all going to be a bed of roses, which it never is once you’ve got a small child. I was young too when I married and started having babies (and I couldn’t cook either), but life was different then, people didn’t have the same expectations, and at least Charlie was older and more experienced.
Andrew liked to go out playing football and snooker, like any young lad. That would make our Julie get all possessive and grumpy and they would end up arguing about stupid things. They were each just as bad as the other. There was one time when Andrew was obsessed with getting his car mended. Julie and I had been out shopping at Asda and when we got back we found he’d swapped their microwave for a particular engine part that he needed. She was furious, but she could be just as daft herself sometimes. She’d bought a lemon and grey striped pushchair for Kevin and one time she said she wasn’t able to come out with me because his matching lemon suit wasn’t dry from the wash and his others wouldn’t have matched the pushchair’s upholstery! They were both still just a couple of kids themselves really.
Andrew had been doing some work at a pizza place in Station Road in Billingham. Bizarrely, the shop, called ‘Mr Macaroni’, was owned by an Iranian family. Some time around 1987, Julie started working there as well, driving a pizza delivery van in the evenings to earn some extra money. Looking back, I suppose she and Andrew had less time together then and they started drifting apart.
Things must have been worse between them than Charlie and I realized because in 1989, when he got the chance of a job down in London with his uncle, Andrew decided to take it. They both seemed to see it as the first step in a separation. Charlie and I were very sad about it, but at least we were close by to help her with Kevin and we never felt that Andrew was to blame any more than she was for the fact that they were drifting apart. It was just one of those things that happen in families and you have to adjust and move on.
It