‘I loved the streetlamps and the cobbles,’ Jo remembers of her earliest childhood. ‘Many was the time I counted the cobbles in our street. When I had counted them from one end to the other, I counted the fanlights, the stained glass, on the way back. I had Queenie doing that.’
There were one hundred and four houses – Queenie had counted them all with loving precision. And there were one thousand and forty flagstones; Queenie had hopscotched every single one. She hadn’t finished counting the road-cobbles yet, but up to Widow Hargreaves at No. 16, there were nine hundred and ten; that was counting across the road to the opposite houses. When she’d finished them, she would start on the stained glasses in the fanlight above the doors. Queenie meant to learn all there was to know about Parkinson Street because the more she knew, the more it was hers.
Stretching her neck, now, Queenie attempted to identify the dark figure approaching against the flickering gas-lamps. The tottering speck grew and grew, until it shaped itself into the towering frame of George Kenney. On recognising it, Queenie involuntarily backed away…
Though Derwent Street is gone, Parkinson Street, the imaginative theatre of Jo’s real childhood joys and fears, still exists today and sparks characterful childhood memories of its own, Mill Hill being where some members of Jo’s family settled after Jo’s mum moved out in 1955. ‘We had relatives there: Auntie Margaret lived up there and we’d go and see her. My brother, Bernard, lived for many years in Stephen Street. And another brother, Richard, lived on Parkinson Street, so we were always up there. I love that area of old Mill Hill, and I have set a lot of my stories there. It has changed now obviously – you’ve got the Indian takeaway and all that; they weren’t there, it was just little shops and little houses and cobbled streets, and I loved it.’
Mill Hill, to the southwest of the town centre, developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century around Cardwell and Albert mills between the railway and the canal, together with another worker colony around Waterfall Mill in this same area, close to Parkinson Street.
The area may have seen change since Jo’s childhood, but it is easy enough even today to catch a glimpse of how it was. The Navigation pub is still to be found by the bridge over the canal where Emma Grady’s daughter, Molly, escapes from a prison van in Alley Urchin, although it has recently undergone a makeover. ‘It’s so old,’ agrees Jo, ‘and it’s got the wooden benches around the wall and the real old characters, and my God you pick up some tales.’
She reminds me that the Navigation became her dad’s haunt, and it is of course also George Kenney’s local in Her Father’s Sins, and in the Outcast trilogy (Outcast, Alley Urchin and Vagabonds), set in the second half of the nineteenth century, the pub is a haven for pickpockets and ruffians, and the place where Sal Tanner mistakes the attentions of a fellow in a spotted scarf for an invitation to bed.
‘’Ere…d’yer have a fancy for me?’ Sal said in a low, excited voice. ‘Got an urge ter tek me ter bed, have yer?’ It was ages since any man had laid her down, and the thought of a tumble had her all excited. ‘It’ll cost yer a bit more than one gill though, me darlin’,’ she finished with a chuckle and a suggestive wink.
‘Don’t be so bloody daft, woman!’ The poor fellow was shocked. ‘I’m offering you a drink…Whatever gave you the idea that I’d want to take an old soak like you to bed?’
Old Sal, a legend in the area, ‘a limping, bedraggled woman with thin, tousled hair and a kindly face that was ravaged by a rough life and a particular love for “a drop o’ the ol’ stuff”’, was modelled on a woman who used to live down on the banks of the canal in a shed, an old hut between the pub and a vicarage. ‘All the kids used to go and see her,’ Jo told me.
The hut which was now home to Sal and Molly was situated at the widest area of grassy bank, and was half hidden in the undergrowth. There was a tall stone wall immediately behind, and directly behind that, the vicarage. This fact had given old Sal a great deal of pleasure as she told one and all: ‘What more could a body want, eh?…I’ve got the ale house down one end, and the vicar at the other. If I’m tekken bad after a jolly night out, I have only ter whistle and the vicar’ll come a’runnin’ with his Bible. He’ll get me ter the gates o’ Heaven right enough. Drunk or sober, the good Lord won’t turn me away, I’m thinking!’
When they had first come across the dilapidated workmen’s hut, there were chinks between the weathered boarding ‘wide enough ter drive a horse and cart through’, as Sal had complained. Now, however, the chinks were stuffed with moss which Molly had painstakingly gathered, and the wind couldn’t force its way in so easily. On a hot day like today, though, the air inside the cramped hut was stifling. ‘Bloody hell, lass…prop that door open with some’at!’ instructed Sal as she fell on to the narrow bed, this being a scrounged mattress set on four orange-boxes, the whole length of which swayed and creaked beneath Sal’s sudden weight.
‘You’d walk to the pub with her and she’d sit you on the step. And you’d hear all this noise going on in the pub and I used to stand on tiptoes and look through the window, and there was Sal on the counter, dancing, drunk as a lord, showing her knickers to all and sundry. She was wonderful!’ Jo put the scene in Outcast:
Not daring to set foot in such a place, Emma stood on tiptoe in order to look through the windows. Her vision was impaired by the frosted pattern on the glass and the large words which read ‘Public Bar’ on the first window and ‘Snug’ on the second. Peering through a small corner below, where there was an area of clear glass, Emma’s view was still frustrated by the thick smoke screen and the wall of bodies inside…Suddenly a cackle of laughter erupted from within and as Emma peered through the haze in search of her husband, the unmistakable figure of Sal Tanner rose before her. The next moment, the laughing figure was hoisted on to one of the tables by a bevy of reaching, grasping hands. The music took on a more urgent note and the hands all began clapping as Sal Tanner executed a frenzied dance – showing her pink, grinning gums at one end and her pink, dimpled thighs at the other.
Soon after meeting Jo it became apparent just how completely the novels are based on her own personal experiences – not just the places, but the people, too, though this may be subtly done, so that, for example, Jo’s real Auntie Biddy, who lived in Bedfordshire, was a quite different character to the one portrayed as the mother figure in Her Father’s Sins. Only her name is used. Biddy’s fictional character is in fact that of the author’s mother, Mary Jane, who was the fulcrum of Jo’s existence as a child, and in a sense remains so to this day: ‘My mother was a lovely person. She was shy, but a very lovely looking lady – long dark hair, big dark eyes. She was ever so warm, you could never fall out with her.’
It was Jo’s mum who encouraged her to realise her ambition to become a writer, when the prospect seemed absurd. ‘Sadly I didn’t have success with the novels when she was alive, but she’s up there, she knows…She is Marcia in Angels Cry Sometimes, and I keep her alive in each new novel. She’s always there, sometimes she’s an old woman, sometimes a young man…I had to keep her alive, you see. Molly Davidson was also my mother [Cradle of Thorns]. Marcia is most like her, but she appears in every novel. She could be an old man, a young woman, a little boy – the persona, the soul of that character is my mother. My readers are beginning to guess: “That is your mother!” In fact, reading the book I am writing now [The Woman Who Left], they might think that the female character, Georgie, is my mother, but they’ll be fooled if they do, because it is someone who comes into the story later on…’
When I ask Jo what she particularly remembers about her mum, it is the simple things, how well they got on, the special, private, one-to-one moments of spontaneous laughter. Any one of the stories she tells me is typical: ‘I remember