Ann Ming - For the Love of Julie - A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice.

I’d been invited to the restaurant that night because a friend of mine was going out with one of the waiters and wanted me to go along with her for moral support. I’d been keen to accept the invitation, wanting to have a look at him. Boyfriends were still a very new experience for both of us, objects of considerable mystery and curiosity.

The group of Chinese men who had caught my eye were sitting in the corner, at a table that was almost next to ours, and I had a good view of them from where I was seated. To my young, inexperienced eyes they all looked the same, except for Charlie. There was something about him that caught my attention, and kept drawing it back. Apart from anything else, he was very good-looking.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked my friend’s boyfriend as he hovered round the table, bringing us food and flirting a little nervously at the same time.

‘That’s Charlie,’ he told me. ‘His mother’s English and his father’s Chinese.’

‘Not a bad result when you mix them,’ I said cheerfully, and probably quite loudly, assuming that none of this foreign-looking bunch of men would be able to speak English.

‘Oh, thanks very much,’ Charlie piped up in a thick Yorkshire accent, bringing the blood rushing to my face.

‘You speak English?’ I asked, shocked.

‘I should hope so.’ He grinned at my discomfort.

From that moment I was hooked, fascinated by someone who looked so mysterious and oriental but sounded so down to earth. As I got to know him and we told one another about our families, I found out his father had been the first Chinese man to come to the Middlesborough area, having travelled over from China to Birkenhead as a ship’s steward in the days before air travel. It sounded like something from the movies, suggesting worlds beyond anything that my friends or I had ever experienced, or could even imagine. None of us had ever travelled outside our own hometowns, let alone gone abroad.

When he came ashore, Charlie’s dad met an English girl, married her and decided to stay. He set up his own Chinese laundry, something that Chinese immigrants were doing all over the world in the first part of the twentieth century. It must have been a good business to be in then, despite the heat and the steam of the working conditions, in the days before washing machines or laundrettes had been invented.

Before long-distance travel became common, people were still very ignorant about foreigners and frightened of the myths and tales they heard circulating about Chinese men. Charlie told me about customers coming to the door with their laundry, or with their tickets and their money, and refusing to step any further inside for fear of being abducted or having their throats slit.

‘You can come in,’ he would tease them once he was old enough to start working there himself. ‘We’ve not got any knives.’

He’d had a few troubles at school. He didn’t really belong to either nationality – English or Chinese – so he was always the outsider, watching and smiling patiently, learning to be philosophical about life. It was a difficult upbringing that stood him in good stead for what life held in store for all of us. Charlie never expected life to be easy and he knew that you had to stick up for yourself or other people would walk all over you.

There was an immediate spark between us that night and he asked me out on a date. Unlike boys my own age, he had a car and on that first date he drove me over to Whitby for a day out. After I’d been out with him a couple of times I didn’t think any more about his Chinese origins than I did about the age gap between us. He was just Charlie, the man for me. But other people didn’t adapt quite so quickly.

I’d been born and brought up in Billingham, which was then not much more than a village on the outskirts of Middlesborough. Nothing much happened in Billingham apart from the giant ICI chemical works, which covered several hundred acres at the side of the town. The factory had originally been built during the First World War to produce the ingredients needed for the manufacture of explosives. It grew even larger during the Second World War and even in the 1960s it still provided most of the employment in the area, giving jobs to thousands of locals.

It’s hard to imagine when you look at the wastelands around Billingham now just what a huge factory complex it once was, dominating the landscape for miles around with its gleaming towers and chimneys, belching smoke and steam, all part of the ‘white heat of technology’ that politicians liked to talk about in the 1960s. No one back then could have predicted just how much the world was going to change for all of us with the arrival of the internet, global warming and so forth.

There were still virtually no oriental faces to be seen in this traditional industrial community, so Charlie and I got our fair share of racial abuse in the street when we were out together. A lot of people couldn’t cope with the sight of a mixed-race couple and didn’t hesitate to say so as they passed by, unbothered whether we heard or not. It was as if they thought girls like my friend and me were letting them down in some way by ‘consorting with the enemy’. I can only imagine how much trouble Charlie’s mam must have gone through when she married the very first Chinaman in the area back in the 1920s. She must have had a lot of guts.

My dad was one of the many thousands of men working at the ICI plant as a research chemist, but he died very suddenly at the age of sixty-two after having a massive brain haemorrhage while coming home from work on the bus. I was only fifteen at the time – this was shortly before I met Charlie – and I was completely devastated. It was such a shock because he hadn’t been ill at all; it came right out of the blue. Dad had always pampered me and I idolized him. I was an only child and he and Mum had adopted me as a baby, but neither of them ever let me feel for a moment that I wasn’t their daughter. They were always happy to do anything I asked. Dad and I never used to argue about anything. I couldn’t even boil an egg by the time he died because he would insist on doing everything for me. Maybe that was why I was attracted to an older man like Charlie – especially one who was happy to do all the cooking.

Dad had looked after Mam well, too. She had never had a job outside the house that I could remember, had never written a cheque or paid a bill herself; he took care of everything like that. I think most men of that generation did in those days. Dad was the brainy one of the partnership.

Once he’d gone I automatically took on the role of doing all these practical things for her, even though I was still only fifteen years old, which meant I had to grow up a lot quicker than I would have done otherwise. That part of it didn’t worry me. I just got on with things, but I still missed him terribly.

I didn’t tell my mother about Charlie for a while, knowing that she was going to find it a bit difficult to get used to. It wasn’t until a few months after I first went out with him that we were spotted together in Middlesborough by a friend of the family, who gleefully reported the news back to Mam. She went just as mad when I got home as I had imagined she would.

‘You’ve been seen in Middlesborough with a Chinaman,’ she announced the moment I walked through the door. ‘Your father would turn in his grave. You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you? He’ll get you on a slow boat to China and he’ll fill you full of opium. I’ll tell you something else, they breed like rabbits and they’re full of T.B.!’

There’d been an outbreak of tuberculosis (a deadly infectious disease that attacks the lungs and central nervous system) in Hong Kong a few years before, and this had been added to all the myths and prejudices that surrounded everything to do with the Chinese. The fact that Charlie had never been outside Yorkshire in his life didn’t seem to make any difference to Mam’s fears about disease-carrying foreigners who she imagined pouring off the boats like rats. People always like to gossip and to frighten one another with shocking tales of doom and gloom, and immigrants who look and sound different are always a good source of material. Mam had never got out much, always staying at home and looking after the house, so it was easy for the outside world to worry her.