For Jo, family relationships are her priority. The loss of her own father and brothers after her family split becomes a driving force in her novels, perhaps explaining why abuse of the most blessed of relationships – family relationships – possesses her still.
It seems incredible that almost all the relationships in Jo’s thirty-four novels are based on her own experience or the experience of someone close to her. ‘Incest is to do with the fact that people did live so close together,’ she agrees. ‘I never had any experience of it, but somehow you knew things like that were going on…There was a man who used to sell newspapers on Blackburn Boulevard and he had a daughter who was a little bit mentally retarded, and she had a baby and soon after that his wife left him and took the daughter and her baby with her, and there was talk. I heard the women talk.’
The women who figured in Jo’s childhood were generally confined by unwritten laws to unrewarding domesticity in ‘the old narrow houses with their steep unhygienic backyards, pot-sinks and outside lavvies. They experienced few luxuries, accepting hard work and domineering husbands as part of their unenviable lot,’ she wrote in Her Father’s Sins. Few even allowed themselves the luxury of self-pity or ‘foolish dreams of what could never be’.
Into this forbidding picture the author introduces light brush-strokes of character that humanise and transform the community into one where Beth Ward (in Don’t Cry Alone) finds ‘another kind of love, a deep sense of belonging’. All-embracing mother figures abound. In Somewhere, Someday we have the warm, ebullient Lancashire landlady, Fran Docherty – ‘a big, bustling mound of a woman, she had a soft, squashy smile that reminded Kelly of a newly stuffed eiderdown,’ and in Her Father’s Sins, besides Auntie Biddy, who is based on the author’s own mother, Jo gives us Katy, who ‘became the mother Queenie had never known but always craved.’
Jo was an unusually imaginative child. She has described herself as ‘a people watcher’ from the age of four. She needed the sanctuary of her imagination simply to survive, and always loved sharing her stories, even copping the odd pennies for the gas meter by telling made-up stories to friends amidst the rubble of bombed-out Blackburn town. The novels are littered with examples of imaginative observation – like Mr Eddie’s long-johns ‘squirming half in half out’ of Biddy’s mangle, or like Mrs Aspen’s box, used to stand on so that she can gossip with Biddy across the backyard wall.
The working-class community in Blackburn comes to us as a woven tapestry of relationships which represents every emotional facet of human life, the idiosyncratic ways of Jo’s characters so often proving them true. We have tradesmen like old Dubber Butterfield who’d sit ‘on his three-legged stool amidst the hundreds of boots, shoes and clogs which hung from the walls and ceilings’, and Teddy, a ‘twisted dwarf figure with huge pink eyes and a bald head’, who runs a milk bar offering everything from a cure for toe-ache to a glass of sarsaparilla. Tales of schooldays and truancy bring us old Snake-tongue Jackson of St Mary’s, and elsewhere in Her Father’s Sins the old world is fingered in characters like Miss Tilly and Fancy Carruthers.
Then there is Maisie Thorogood, loose with the Yanks during the war and a rag-a-bone lady now, uproarious, louche, but, like Queenie’s Aunt Biddy, at one with her environment. There is, indeed, no distinction – Maisie is her environment (as indeed are all Jo’s characters): ‘She’d always been part of it, like the gas-lamps and the shiny worn cobblestones.’ Character, it seems, is not forged in response to the regime of life, it is one aspect of the environmental bedrock.
In her teens, when Jo’s parents separated she moved south to Bedfordshire with her mother and sisters. At fifteen years of age she met her future husband, Ken, and they were married a year later. Her father, who had decried her efforts at writing and would be amazed to discover that she is the bestselling British women’s author writing today, cut his daughter to the heart by refusing to give her away. By the time she came to write her first novel (published in 1987) she had long been an exile from her native Blackburn.
Her writing brought her back to her roots. It shocks us with its descriptions of poverty and fears of alcohol-induced violence, but at the same time it puts us in touch with the sense of belonging that underscored everything Jo held true in her childhood, a sense largely missing today in a world where community is too often merely a function of the Internet.
Both sides of Jo’s childhood experience – the dark and the light – can be seen to be rooted in the extraordinary revolution that was enacted in Blackburn from the late eighteenth century, while the traumatic nature of her uprooting from the town in 1955 ensured that everything that has happened since continues to find imaginative reference in it.
‘Everything I have touched in my life figures in my books. Every single book I write has something that has happened to me or my family or to my friends.’
‘I was born in Derwent Street in Blackburn, Lancashire, during the Second World War, and my earliest memories are of sitting on the front doorstep, watching the world being created in that street. I would see kids playing, men fighting, sweethearts having a tiff and then making up, and I’d just sit and stare at them, soaking it all in. If I close my eyes now I can still see it, just as if I were that five-year-old again. All the stories I have ever written have come from those people.’
The street was long, but straight like the lines of a railway track, lit by the tall blue-framed gas-lamps, which winked and sparkled at regular intervals on either side. From No. 2, which was right at the neck of the street, a body could look along the continuous row of tightly packed houses and experience the same sensation as if standing at the mouth of a long meandering tunnel.
The world that met Josephine Cox’s curious stare from the doorstep of her house in the working-class Blackburn community of the 1940s was, as she noted in her first novel, Her Father’s Sins (quoted above) – ‘the old Lancashire, steeped in a tradition of cotton and ale’:
A Lancashire unwelcoming and unresponsive to the gentle nudging wind of change…Change would come, of that there could be no doubt. The old narrow houses with their steep unhygienic backyards, pot-sinks and outside lavvies, they wouldn’t escape…But for now, Auntie Biddy’s Blackburn remained relatively intact and contented and fiercely defended by every man, woman and child, who had never experienced any other way. They delighted in the open-topped rattling trams, the muffin-man’s familiar shout, as he pushed his deep wicker basket along the uneven cobbles, and the screech of the cotton-mill siren, starting another day. As long as one and all were left alone to make their own way, they bothered nobody and asked no favours. The children spilled out to all the streets, played with their skipping-ropes, hula-hoops and spinning tops, their laughter no less spontaneous because of inherent poverty…
Her Father’s Sins is about the way things were: the good times, the bad times. It is richly autobiographical. Queenie is the name of the little girl who experiences so many of the joys and traumas of Jo’s early life on the streets of Blackburn. Although her home is transferred from Derwent Street to Parkinson Street in the novel, they are, with reference to Jo’s early life, interchangeable.
Lying in the half-dark, Queenie found it hard to settle. She sensed something was wrong. But what? After a while she dismissed the notion, and turned over to warm Auntie Biddy’s side of the bed. But the uneasiness within her persisted. And slipping out from underneath the persuasive warmth of the eiderdown, she crossed to the window. For a change Parkinson Street was all quiet, save for the pitiful mewing of a frustrated torn cat, and the occasional dustbinlid clattering to the flagstones beneath some scampering cat’s