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  I really looked forward to when we had family or my parents’ friends round for Sunday lunch and I got to play with their children, although, if I was enjoying myself too much, my dad would bellow, ‘Stop showing off!’ His presence and dictatorial demeanour always cast a shadow over any potential fun. Each day I’d wonder what I’d do wrong to trigger his wrath and subsequently what punitive measures he’d dream up for me. I dreaded him coming home and was thankful that he worked shifts so that I could plan my life around when he’d be away from home.

  My mum conspired with me to attempt to ameliorate the effects of his behaviour and make my life as good as she could. It was a tough call for her because she and my dad absolutely adored each other. That was one of the great things I learned from their relationship. I learned a lot about openly showing affection, touching, kissing, unashamed nakedness. My dad would chase my mum up the stairs laughing, and her giggling all the way to bed for Sunday-afternoon sex. I just didn’t understand (until much later) why my dad’s open affection didn’t extend to me and my sister. Pam never got punished because she was always good and unquestioning, scared to do anything in case it was wrong – she was all but invisible – whereas I fought to be seen and heard. I longed for some emotional rapport with my father. I realise now that his own childhood had made him incapable of that.

  On Saturday afternoons my mum took me and my sister to visit my granddad (my mum’s father). Dad never came, having made himself unwelcome to yet another member of the family. Mum was understandably very close to her father and I loved being with him. He was a very kind, softly spoken man, always well dressed with a pocket watch tucked neatly into his waistcoat. I’d play for hours with the broken silver watch chains he kept on the mantelpiece, pretending they were snakes slithering along the floor. What strikes me most, looking back, is just how uncluttered people’s homes were. Just a few ornaments and sparse functional furniture. People were thrifty, a hangover from the war, rationing having only ended in 1954.

  My dad’s family visited us a lot in the early years, before he all but banned them from our house. His mother, Olive, had expected my sister to be named after her but Mum and Dad had refused. That, and the fact that Olive regarded Mum, a widow, as second-hand goods, was the final straw – harsh, considering Olive’s own mother had also been widowed and remarried. Dad’s sister, Beryl, was my mum’s best friend for years. When I met her about ten years ago she showed me a photo she’d kept from the late 1940s of her and my mum on a day out at the coast, laughing their heads off. She told me they had been very close, that we’d played a lot at her house as children – and then my father told my mum she must never speak to Beryl again. He isolated Mum (and me) from anyone he didn’t approve of. The only friends she had were those at work and the two couples she and Dad regularly socialised with: Brian and Mavis, who lived on our street, and Marion and Jim, who lived off Holderness Road. Me and Pam babysat for Marion and Jim’s two children, Peter and Pamela, who were younger than us. My sister recently told me that Peter became my dad’s surrogate son, and Peter’s grandmother my dad’s surrogate mother. Why he created a second family baffles me. It must have made Mum feel sad and inadequate. His detachment from me and Pam was enough to provoke us both separately to ask Mum if we were actually Dad’s children. Pam thought she might be the daughter of my mum’s first husband, Donald, and I thought I might be adopted, seeing as there were only two or three photos of me as a baby.

  Before all that happened, my dad was close enough to his brother Mike for him to be our lodger and live in the third (box) bedroom. Uncle Mike was instrumental (no pun intended) in introducing me and Les to the guitar and harmonica. Whenever Mike played them I’d sit at his feet, mesmerised. He was a different generation from my dad. He was 1950s-Elvis-Presley cool. He and his girlfriend, Val (who became his first wife), sometimes babysat for us. Val was a typical attractive 1950s fun-time girl, with bleached-blonde backcombed hair. I thought she was great and wanted to be like her when I grew up. Mike’s guitar was irresistible to me and when he was at work I’d sneak into his bedroom and play it. I obviously didn’t have the sense to put things back as they should be, because one day I was summoned to a ‘trial’ in the living room. I was found guilty of tampering with Mike’s private things and my dad gave Mike permission to spank my backside. Mike still remembers it to this day. I guess being spanked was the acceptable and expected punishment for badly behaved children back then, but it’s a bit weird bestowing on someone else your ‘right’ to inflict pain on your child.

  Uncle Mike’s musical talents, Mum’s singing and Dad’s interest in electronics, building radios etc., all fed and formed my notions of music and sound. When I was about ten years old my dad bought me and my sister a Grundig tape recorder. Everyone we knew had record players and we wanted one too – we so wanted to be like our friends and go out buying records and spinning them on our own record player at home. But the Grundig was Dad’s sensible alternative. And we weren’t allowed friends in the house anyway (unless Dad was on shift). My dad saw buying records as a waste of money when you could record the music off the radio for playback, and record yourself too.

  The recording part was what I loved most. My sister was too shy to do it but I recorded myself a lot. Maybe my dad wanted a tape machine himself and used us as an excuse. I can remember him showing me how to do it and me singing ‘Bobby’s Girl’ into the microphone. My dad’s passion for electronics meant we had one of the first televisions in our street, which took pride of place in the living room. A neat wooden cabinet with a built-in speaker and a tiny black-and-white screen. We had to wait what seemed ages for the valves to warm up before the picture came on. My dad subscribed to Electronics Weekly magazine and kept piles of them stored under the sofa. He had all kinds of projects on the go. He built a speaker into the kitchen cupboard and wired it to the living-room radio so my mum could listen while she cooked our meals. One day he plugged in the microphone and said, ‘The next song is for Winnie Newby.’ It stopped Mum in her tracks. Those special fun moments they shared were wonderful to witness.

  Dad may have had a challenging childhood, but his time in the Navy had given him a point of entry to the education that directly fed his fascination for technology. I’ve no doubt that my interest in and acceptance of unorthodox sounds is largely due to the influence of his electronic experiments and all those strange noises that echoed through our house while he tuned radios and worked on circuit boards.

  Dad and his brothers all had motorbikes. Ken used to come round to our house to visit Mike when I was about five or six years old. I loved their bikes, and would climb on and pretend to ride them. One day they took a photo of me sat on one of their bikes. When my father saw the photo he went crazy that I was in my vest and knickers. I really couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. Indecently dressed on the street? Only he was allowed to take photos? My mum and dad often went out on their motorbike wearing padded satin fur-lined jumpsuits that looked like air pilots’ uniforms. We’d regularly go to the seaside at weekends. They would go on the bike together and put us on the bus under the supervision of the bus conductor, then meet us at the other end. We were saved the trauma of the lonely bus ride when Dad bought a sidecar for the motorbike. I think that’s when I developed claustrophobia. My sister was put in the front seat, which was big enough for an adult, and I was squeezed into the tiny luggage space behind it. I could hardly move. Then Dad would close the Perspex top and clip it shut. It was like a coffin to me.

  Despite being disciplined for my numerous misdemeanours, I don’t think of myself as having been badly treated – not in comparison to some of my childhood friends, who were beaten by their parents with belts, shoes, sticks, etc. Dad had a punishment system of ‘Three strikes, then I’ll smack you.’ I always went the whole three strikes – pushing to provoke a reaction to my actions. And I certainly got one to remember when I was about nine years old. Me, Les and his sisters went hitch-hiking and I didn’t get home until aro
und 9.30 p.m. It was still a few years before the Moors murders but my mum and dad were sick with worry. As was normal in the school summer holidays, our parents would go to work and leave us to play all day, with orders for me and Pam to go to Auntie Irene for our dinner. But instead I’d hitch-hike to the beach with friends, getting back in time for our parents returning from work. But on this particular day we couldn’t get a lift back. We ended up getting on a bus and giving the bus conductor our addresses so he could collect the ticket money from our parents. It was the only way we could get the sixteen miles back to Hull. I was so scared to go home and face my dad that Les had to force me to walk down our side passageway to the back of the house. We took care not to make a noise but each footstep seemed to echo loudly off the passage walls. I stood rigid, facing the back door, not daring to make a sound that would summon the storm of my father’s anger.

  Les said, ‘You’ve got to face it sometime’, and rattled the backdoor handle. The sound reverberated through the house, then the kitchen light went on and I knew this was it. Les ran home to face his own father.

  My dad’s face was like thunder. As he dragged me into the hallway he lost control, either out of fear or relief that I was safe and not abducted or dead. He unleashed a torrent of full-hand slaps on my bare legs. The pain took my breath away. I recall gasping to get air between the strikes. They kept coming, fast and furious, as he vented his anger. I tried lifting my legs, running on the spot to avoid or at least limit the impact. My legs were burning and red-raw, and Mum was weeping at the scene being played out before her. Finally she lifted the telephone and screamed at my dad to stop or she’d call the police. It ended. He seemed to snap back to reality. I don’t know whether he regretted what he’d done but I was sent to bed sobbing uncontrollably.

  I was grounded – again – banished to my bedroom and forbidden to see Les, no pocket money or comics, barred from watching TV or going out – and as a further punishment my dad made me learn the Periodic Table of the Elements by heart, testing me when he got home from work. It was a miserable month, only mitigated by Mum sneaking me comics and sweets and letting me downstairs to watch TV when Dad was on night shift. I suppose he thought knowledge of the chemical elements would help me at high school, as he was steering me towards studying the sciences – my big Christmas present that year was a microscope. I should have been disappointed but in fact I was thrilled. I loved it. It was on a par with Les getting a build-it-yourself electronics kit, and a welcome change from always getting the blue version of my sister’s presents. I was colour-coded ‘boy’-blue: blue bike, blue hula hoop, blue umbrella, blue yo-yo, blue Cinderella shoes, and so it went on. Even a blue Cinderella watch, which I duly took apart to see how it worked and couldn’t get back together again.

  A rather fearsome family called the Mathers moved in round the corner from our house. Like some of the other families on the estate, they’d come from a rough, all-but-derelict area of town as part of the rehousing programme. Their aggressive behaviour – they were a rowdy family prone to arguing with neighbours and amongst themselves – fed the anticipation of trouble and people gave them a wide berth.

  I hooked up with Pat Mathers when she started at the local junior school. We both recognised the rebel in each other and I was drawn to people who had spirit (good or bad). We were about nine years old, sexually curious, and both our elder sisters had recently ‘come of age’. We’d heard all the talk about periods and breast development and suspected it wouldn’t be too long before we’d be entering womanhood. I suppose we were a bit impatient to get started, as we took to stuffing hankies and socks down our vests to make it look like we had big boobs, and we’d strut along the street repositioning our padding if it slipped out of place. It was the beginning of me embracing the inevitable bodily changes that I’d face.

  Up until that point, I’d just enjoyed playing sexual-exploration games with boys. I knew it would stop being fun and get serious sometime soon. When periods came, I was led to understand, it was time to be very, very careful with boys so you didn’t get pregnant before you were married. It all sounded a bit like laying down boundaries in an area that I’d relished as having none. They say kids grow up too quickly today but I was sexually adventurous at an early age. Messing about with boys under blankets in tents and playing the Nervous game, where boys put their hand up your skirt to see how far they could get before you shouted, ‘Nervous!’ Unlike the other girls, I never said ‘Nervous’ – and also unlike them, I reversed the roles and played the Nervous game on the boys. Some boys said ‘Nervous’, but I didn’t always stop. I was really into boys at junior school. I got caught in the store cupboard ‘messing about’ with two of my classmates, Brian and John. Playing sex games with boys had become my favourite pastime, especially during the summer holidays. A friend of mine had a tent in her back garden, and about six of us, boys and girls, would all play there together and draw cards as to who went with whom under the blanket in the corner of the tent. The lucky two would snuggle together, kissing and fumbling around inside each other’s clothes. It was intimately enjoyable, to say the least. But it lasted just a few summers.

  I was coming to the end of my time at junior school when America and Russia came close to nuclear war. The ensuing 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had a profound effect on me. All I knew was that nuclear bombs could destroy the world. It was a frightening, life-changing moment to be told in my junior-school assembly that we could all go home early to our families because the world might end tomorrow. As a ten-year-old, that was incomprehensible. We all set off home from school scared, yet strangely excited about what we’d all do if this really were the last day of our lives. We had carte blanche to choose anything at all. I said I’d be a boy for the day so I could have sex and see what it was like without the fear of getting pregnant. Make of that what you will. I was glad the world didn’t end but felt robbed that I wouldn’t get my wish.

  Then, in 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. I was totally shocked. Scenes like that had never been televised before.

  *

  High school was the beginning of a disconnect between me and Les. He went to Eastmount School on Longhill Estate and I went to Estcourt High School for Girls. Like everyone of our age, we had a fear of the unknown and of being separated from friends. I was lucky that my closest two girl friends came with me. I’d passed the mandatory eleven-plus exam and scored high enough marks to be given my first choice of school. I had no idea what I wanted to do after high school but I never saw myself as following the usual pattern for women upon leaving school: working, getting engaged then married and having children. I wanted to make my own decisions about the future, an attitude no doubt fostered largely in reaction to my dad’s oppressive, controlling manner.

  As me and Pam entered the high-school period of our education, we had to learn to play the piano. By order of Dad. It was his idea of giving us the opportunities he’d never had. He bought a dark-brown upright piano and positioned it in the dining room, where we were expected to practise each day. We were sent for piano lessons once a week after school. I hated it. I was set specific pieces to practise, but I preferred to play with the piano, crashing the keys and delving inside and plucking the strings like a harp to see what sounds I could get out of it. Little soundtracks to imaginary scenarios. Maybe I inadvertently adopted my dad’s interest in the mechanics of things. I’m glad to say that I’ve forgotten most of the music theory and practice, so much so that I can’t write music and feel constrained by traditional music practice.

  I marked my first day at high school by getting a detention for wolf-whistling at one of the only two male teachers. What a way to start. We were assigned house teams, all named after distinguished people from Hull: Andrew Marvell, William de la Pole, Thomas Ferens and William Wilberforce. I was put into Ferens, which, in hindsight, seems very appropriate. The philanthropist Thomas Ferens not only founded and gave his name to the only art gallery in Hull but he also, among many acts of benevole
nce, championed women’s rights and supported suffrage. I was allocated to Form 1i, my form mistress was Miss Kirton, and our classroom was new and purpose-built for art studies. I couldn’t have landed under a better person’s supervision if I’d planned it myself.

  Our building was separated from the main school, which meant it was ‘off-piste’ from the headmistress’s regular inspection patrols, so we could make a hell of a lot of noise. At times it was more like scenes from the St Trinian’s films. Miss Kirton was quite unorthodox in both her dress and her approach to teaching and discipline. She’d also suffered from polio, which had noticeably affected her gait; she was slightly hunched over and her (always) bare legs were pale and very thin. She wore striking, fashionable clothes and white stiletto heels, and would tell us stories of her time at art college and life-drawing classes, including one of a man who always insisted on wearing a ‘flower bag’ (condom) when he posed nude. I still can’t figure that one out. She encouraged me to explore beyond any imposed boundaries, seeing potential in me and tolerating my anarchic behaviour and high spirits. I gave her such a hard time, yet she never punished or reported me. She was the first person to instil in me the confidence to embrace openness and self-expression.

  Considering how sexually active I’d been in junior school, my going to an all-girls high school probably saved me from getting pregnant in my early teens. There were quite a few who left prematurely for that very reason. Girls in my first-year class were already having sex. I wasn’t shocked; I was fascinated. But eleven or twelve is very young to lose your virginity.

  Along with a more grown-up curiosity about boys, I’d started to get interested in make-up and fashion, and me and my friends would meet up in the town centre on a Saturday afternoon, all dressed up. I remember one particular Saturday, stepping outside my front door proudly wearing my tartan mini-kilt, black Beatles-logo polo neck, Beatles stockings and red-and-black patent-leather kitten-heel shoes. I felt so trendy and grown-up. Then I saw Mick Ronson (who later became David Bowie’s lead guitarist) with his blonde hair, looking tanned and gorgeous, stripped to the waist, mowing the grass verge outside my house. He stopped and looked at me and wolf-whistled. I squirmed with embarrassment and nearly tripped up as I scuttled off to catch the bus to town.