insisted she saw a doctor and about six months into her pregnancy Mum attended antenatal classes at Guy’s Hospital.
In the end Grandad heard the news in the worst possible way. Word must have got round because one night in the pub great-Uncle Dick (Grandad’s brother) asked, ‘Has our Val had the baby yet?’
Grandad went ballistic, not just because she was pregnant but because he’d been kept in the dark. He stormed home from the pub. Mum was cowering under the sheets while he shouted and swore and banged on the bedroom door. He called her a slag and worse, then yelled: ‘Why didn’t nobody tell me? We could have done something. Now it’s too late!’ It was the worst rage any of them could remember hearing from him, and Mum was sobbing, clutching her pillow over her head to drown out the noise. I think the whole of Stephenson House knew about it that night.
Meanwhile, Nan was trying to soothe him. He’d never laid a finger on her or any of the children, but he was very strict and absolutely furious, so it could have been a whole lot worse. As it was, it was all shouting and swearing. The next day, when things had calmed down a bit, Nan said to Mum: ‘We’re going up to Johnny Murphy’s to sort this out. Can we have his address?’
By this point John had left his wife and was living back home in Streatham. Mum had already visited him there a couple of months earlier, after his wife (also pregnant at the same time) had confronted her. ‘Are you Val Maxwell?’ she asked. ‘I’m not here to cause trouble – Johnny has left me and gone back to his mother’s. Will you come there with me? I want to front up to him with this business that you and me are both pregnant.’ Mum had heard that John was a real player, but she was so desperate to be with him that she naively went along with it, hoping she might convince him to choose her.
Anyway, after they found out, Nan and Grandad went to see John at his mum’s house and he looked very uncomfortable, so they arranged for him to come round to their flat the next day, but when they saw him again all he said was: ‘I can’t do anything – I’m married. But I’ll help out financially.’ Mum felt she didn’t want his money, but at least it was finally clear to her.
Mum says Grandad was kind to her after that, but I’m not sure she’s telling the whole truth. I think he gave her a hard time, because years later, when she was very drunk one Christmas, she started to knock him: she said he may have been a good grandfather to me but he wasn’t a good father. I was very upset at the time because my memories of him were good and I felt she was taking that away from me, but I didn’t have any idea of what she went through. Grandad felt the shame bitterly and I’m sure he let Mum know on every occasion he could.
I was born three weeks early. Mum was washing and setting Nan’s hair (she always did this every Saturday, like clockwork) when the labour began. I was born three minutes after 8 p.m. on Sunday, 24 November 1963, two days after President Kennedy was shot. Mum has often told me she remembers hearing about the assassination just before she went into hospital.
I weighed 5lb 13oz, small but not worryingly so, and had jaundice. Mum stayed in hospital for 10 days, like they did in those days. She admits she had no idea what having a baby entailed – all the sleepless nights, endless washing and feeding – she thought she would just get on with her life. She also hoped that when John Murphy saw me he’d want to be with her, but once again she had her head in the clouds and he never saw his new baby daughter.
Looking back, Mum says she never doubted she did the right thing in keeping me – women who give their babies up for adoption are often tortured souls. But that’s not to say it was easy. In those days the damage was also profound for those who went through with keeping an illegitimate baby, and she would not be free of the shame of my birth for many years, if ever. In reality this was just the beginning: the beginning of my life and the beginning of a struggle that would exist between us for the next 40 years.
When we came back home from hospital, Nan was in charge. Mum liked dressing me up, but Nan did most of the other stuff – the bottles and the nappy changing. Apparently Grandad said to Mum at one stage: ‘It’s about time you did something for your baby – it’s yours, not hers.’ Mum says she regrets not doing more but at the time she was more than happy to hand me over. Whatever he felt about the way I was conceived, from the moment I arrived home Grandad adored me, though. I won him over straight away and any doubts he might have had before I was born were gone: I was the apple of his eye.
It has made my life very awkward having three parents: Mum, Nan and Grandad. I’ve always had to be careful – I could never say how much I loved Nan for fear of upsetting Mum. It was a strange upbringing in that way. And now, with hindsight, Mum thinks it was a mistake to stay at home with her parents all her life and she should have found a place for the two of us. But living at home meant she could go back to work after 10 months off on maternity benefit. ‘I don’t mind looking after her all week, but at the weekends you have to stay in,’ Nan told her. She and Grandad liked to go down the pub every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
For Mum, living at home with her parents meant that she never found out about running a home. She never had to cook because Nan did it all, but she did her share of the washing, putting my terry nappies in the old boiler in the washhouse next door to the flat. Because Nan was always there, Mum didn’t have the confidence to break out on her own. She tried to take responsibility for me – ‘She’s my daughter,’ I remember her saying to Nan. ‘Well, stop fucking having a go at her then!’ Nan would say.
Now I can see that Nan was undermining Mum, but as a child I thought she was just taking care of me. Nan was a strong personality and you’d need a hell of a backbone to go against her wishes. Mum never could, and I can see why not: she was formidable. Both had big mouths and big voices, and they’d go at it hammer and tongs – lots of door slamming, lots of swearing. But Nan always had the last word and it was always the women making the noise: Grandad never took part.
He also made it difficult for Mum to be a normal mother to me. She remembers he was always telling her off for nagging me because as far as he was concerned I could do no wrong. Mum couldn’t stand up to him because she felt obliged to her parents for letting us live there. Looking back, I can see it was very hard for her.
I do remember Mum was usually there to put me to bed. She’d do the rhyme about the little piggies – ‘This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home …’ playing with my toes. And she would hold my hand and recite, ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddybear …’ Both ended with me being tickled, which I loved.
Having a social life was difficult for Mum, and not just because I was hell bent on stopping her. As she says, in those days a woman with a baby was not a good proposition. She had a couple of chances: at one stage she got engaged to a guy called Johnny who she’d been seeing for about a year (somehow Nan must have persuaded me he was all right). Auntie Shirley even found a flat for Mum, him and me to move into. A mate of Grandad’s brought some rings to the pub and Mum chose one. They were discussing wedding dates and she was over the moon: at last she would have the respectability she craved. I was about five at the time and he got on well with me, lying on the floor with me doing puzzles. Finally, Mum’s life was taking shape.
When Johnny’s mother found out, she told him: ‘If you marry that girl, I want nothing more to do with you.’ It seemed he cared more for her than he did for Mum because he sent round a letter:
Dear Val, I won’t be there tonight. My mum and dad are going down to Cornwall and I’m going with them. I think it’s time we called it a day.
Mum left me with Grandad and rushed to where Johnny worked, but he’d already gone and she never saw him again. It was so cruel, and once again she was devastated. Every time she went out with a man she dreaded telling him she had a kid because she knew he wouldn’t want to see her again, she says. Although she didn’t tell me the story of my father until many years later when I had a family of my own, at the time she told me that no one wanted her because of me.
CHAPTER 2
Early Days at the Elephant
From the moment Nan and Grandad accepted me into their home, nothing was too good for