Jo’s dad, Barney Brindle, hailed from Kilkenny in southeast Ireland and had a job with the council when she was a child. ‘He had these beautiful blue eyes and he was fair-haired, this little man, and I loved him very much,’ said Jo. ‘He worked for the Corporation on various jobs; he kept the roads, maintenance jobs, everything. Later, he kept Blackburn Rovers football ground, which he was immensely proud of. He was fanatical about Blackburn Rovers. Oh, my dad and my brothers were fanatical. And I loved it. I used to play football in the street and I’ve got a scar to prove it! See that scar? I dived for the ball and slit my left hand on some glass.
‘Like the rest, my father worked extremely long hours. They had to because they had all these children. I mean, many of the families down the street had lots of children. So, the mothers were busy having the children and the men had to work to provide, and come the Friday they were worn out; they headed for the pub with the wages. It was a vicious circle.’
When Barney first met her mum, Mary Jane, in the 1930s, he was working as a quarryman and she was in her early twenties, lodging with her parents, Granddad and Grandma Harrison. Jo remembers her maternal grandparents well. They lived in Henry Street, Church, a suburb of Accrington, a town just east of Blackburn. Grandma Harrison is Grandma Fletcher in Angels Cry Sometimes – ‘bossy, cantankerous, but with a heart of gold…I remember her old mangle, sitting in the yard through all weathers until Monday morning when it came alive at the turn of a handle.’ And Jo remembers her grandpa as the one who opened her eyes to the magic of storytelling, when he sat her on his knee and told her stories of his adventures with his dog. Seventythree-year-old Jasper Hardcastle in Jo’s recent novel, The Beachcomber, ‘was partly based on my granddad Harrison, a wonderful man, very special,’ Jo admits. ‘I remember one Sunday morning when I visited my beloved grandparents, I was eight years old and asked why the pan lid was dancing up and down on the stove. My granddad, who worked in the butcher’s and used to get titbits at the end of the week, proudly lifted me up to show me a full pig’s head boiling away in the pan, with the lid bobbing up and down on its ears! I ran screaming from the house, and it took them a full hour to get me out of the backyard loo.’
Jo learned all about her parents meeting from her mum, and the story became an essential part of the background to her third novel.
‘Angels Cry Sometimes takes onboard a great deal of my mam’s life,’ Jo recently told the nation on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. ‘When she was eighteen she was married to a man [before Jo’s father] who made her life a misery. She was in love with this man. He married her. They had two little boys. And then about four years down the line the police came knocking at the door one day and they arrested him for bigamously marrying her and he was jailed for seven years.’
Readers will recognise this as the way Marcia Bendall’s marriage to Curt Ratheter breaks down in the novel, even to the number of years that Curt is sentenced to serve at Lancaster Assizes:
When Curt came to the doorway of the little parlour, the policeman close behind, what he saw in there tore his heart to shreds. Seated on that very settee where many a time he and his darling Marcia had experienced so many tender and wonderful moments, was that same woman whom he idolised…It gave Curt the deepest pain he had ever known when, at that moment, Marcia sensed his presence, for of a sudden she raised her large dark eyes to look on him. Their painfully stricken expression made him ask silently for the Lord’s forgiveness.
On seeing him there also, both the officer and Grandma Fletcher got up from their seats. He asked whether the fellow’s name was Curt Ratheter. She charged forward and angrily demanded of him, ‘Is it true what they’re saying? ‘Ave yer already a wife?’
‘My mother wouldn’t talk about it for a long, long time because it was such a stigma,’ Jo told me. ‘Suddenly she was an unmarried mother and he was in prison. It made her life a misery. I think she must have still been in love with him when he was taken away. He moved south when he came out. Then she met Dad, Barney. He was a happy-go-lucky chap, up for a laugh, charming as ever. And he loved her very much. And she grew to love him.’
With such a background to a marriage, successful as it was in one sense, with ten of Barney’s children born to Mary over the next two decades, it cannot ever have been easy for Jo’s dad to accept that it had only been made possible through a breach of the law. Did Barney know that his new wife still loved this man who had been put in prison? Did that count in the sad balance of fate that led Jo to say on BBC Radio: ‘They had lots and lots of children, and I am obviously one of them, but along the way, somewhere, they started to bring out the worst in each other’?
Whether or not it did, there are plenty of other reasons that would count against the marriage surviving, to be found in the difficult environment in which the young family was immediately thrown.
In the fiction, Barty Bendall (who is Barney Brindle, Jo’s father) begs Marcia to marry him and give her and Ratheter’s children a father. When, finally, she consents, they marry and move to Blackburn, just as in reality Barney and Mary Jane did.
Derwent Street, their first home, had been fields until the second half of the nineteenth century, when it emerged as part of the dense concentration of mill workers’ terraced rows into which Jo was born. It was a very poor area, all to be torn down a century later. Ruby Miller lives there in Jo’s novel Nobody’s Darling. Mollie and her fiancé, Alfie, try for a house there in Looking Back. In Rainbow Days, ‘the ruined house at the bottom of Derwent Street was a favourite meeting place for villains,’ and in The Woman Who Left it is the place to which Sal, Louise and Ben Hunter must return when they are stripped of beautiful Maple Farm on the outskirts of the town. Louise gives her true feelings: ‘I often stand at that front window and look down Derwent Street, and my heart sinks to me boots.’ Jo’s message is clear: you can’t fall much lower than Derwent Street.
However, for an imaginative child born in the summer of 1941, during the Second World War, a child who knew nothing of the wider world, Derwent Street was all-consuming. The street ‘was all little houses,’ Jo told me, ‘but it was a real community. The house was heated by a coal fire, if you were lucky enough to have any coal. There was a tiny scullery, no bigger than a few feet. Back parlour, front parlour, each of the parlours had a tiny fire grate.’ The scullery appears in Take This Woman – ‘a cold, forbidding place, separated from the parlour by a heavy brown curtain at the door-way. It was some eight feet square, consisting of an old gascooker, a single wooden cupboard with several shelves above it, and a deep stone sink beneath the window. Built into the corner was a brick container, housing a copper washtub and closed at the top by a large circular lid of wooden slatted design.’
To this came Barney and Mary Jane Brindle, and Mary’s two children by her first marriage, the family swelling in time to include, besides Jo, her two sisters, Winifred and Anita, and seven brothers: Sonny (so named because as a child he was always smiling), Joseph, Bernard, Richard, Billy, Harry and Alec.
Like Amy Tattersall with her brood in Looking Back, the Brindles suffered the trials of so many growing up in a cramped house:
‘Four little ‘uns and the two older girls. Six altogether.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Might as well be sixty, the way they drive me to despair.’
Horrified, and unable to take his eyes off the army of children, he asked, ‘How do you manage?’