Pauline Prescott - Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

Peter, at sixteen, was now the head of our household. Still just a boy but trying to be a man, he took his responsibilities very seriously. My father had always teased him that he was ‘the brainy one’ and would never end up getting his hands dirty. Once Dad died though, Peter left school and went to work at the same factory, albeit behind a desk as a trainee in the sales department. The personnel welfare officer who’d offered him the job had been one of those who’d come to the house to pay his respects when Dad died.

Within just a few months of starting his first job, though, Peter started to lose weight and became quite poorly. He went to the doctor on several occasions but, as with Dad, no one seemed able to help. By the time he finally went to see a specialist, it was discovered that he had pleurisy and his lungs were filling with fluid. He was rushed to hospital and ended up in the same ward Dad had been in. My poor mother must have feared the worst. Peter’s pleurisy then developed into tuberculosis and the doctors warned my mother that he’d ‘outgrown his strength’.

Peter was sent away to the three-hundred-bed Cheshire Joint Sanatorium at Loggerheads in Staffordshire, where he remained on a ‘fresh air and rest’ cure for the next eighteen months. Every Sunday, Mum and I would take the bus all the way out to beyond Market Drayton to take him magazines, fruit and a fresh pair of pyjamas. He was very poorly, and so pale. TB was a killer in those days and was treated very seriously. The nurses gave Peter enormous pills to swallow, as big as an old penny. Only one visitor was allowed into his room at a time, so Mum and I would take turns. Later, the nurses would wheel his bed out into the fresh air to help improve his breathing. All wrapped up in blankets over his striped pyjamas and dressing gown, he virtually had to sleep in the grounds overnight, so convinced were they of the benefits of oxygen. Mum and I would stay for an hour or so before making the long journey home to a house that felt emptier still.

I knew the day was looming when I’d have to leave school too and decide how to earn my keep. Because I was good with my hands I often made my own clothes. Dad had bought me a sewing machine a year or so before, although when he tried to mend his overalls on it once he’d broken it. Maybe I could become a dressmaker or work in a ladies’ wear shop? My interest in fashion probably came from all the classic films I’d watched as a child. My parents had both been dapper and I loved dressing up in Mum’s clothes, especially her hats.

There was a wonderful hat shop in Chester run by a lady called Mary Jordan. It was in the Rows, a sort of medieval shopping mall that I used to skip down as a child. The Hollywood actress Margaret Lockwood, star of The Wicked Lady, used to go there to have hats specially made for her. That really impressed me: a big star like her coming to our town. I dreamed of working in Mary Jordan’s, making hats for film stars like Joan Collins, Audrey Hepburn or Jean Simmons. When I learned that the shop was offering an apprenticeship I wanted it with all my heart but another girl from my school was offered it so my chance was lost.

Disappointed, I heard from a school friend called Norma Hignett that a big new development was about to open in Chester as part of the Lewis group, which owned the famous Bon Marché department store in Liverpool. There’d be a shop, a restaurant, a jazz club, a bar, dance floor and a hairdressing salon, all under the name Quaintways.

‘They’ve got vacancies for trainee hairdressers,’ Norma told me. ‘You don’t need any experience; I’ve been taken on already. The salon opens in a week. If you like, I’ll see if I can get you in.’

Hairdressing, I concluded bravely, was fashion too. After all, film stars had to have good hair as well as fancy clothes. With Norma’s help, I applied for a job at Quaintways and was signed up for a three-year apprenticeship with a starting salary of three pounds a week. I’d begin as a trainee learning how to wash hair and give manicures before moving up to the position of ‘improver’. By the end of five years, I’d be a fully qualified hairdresser and manicurist with my own clients and the chance to make up my income with tips. Aged fifteen, I left school on the Friday afternoon and started work when Quaintways opened the following Monday morning. I could tell my mother was relieved. Although our house was like a new pin and she always kept a good table, she was undoubtedly struggling without my father’s weekly pay packet and mine, though small, would make a difference.

On my first day at work I wore a skirt I’d made myself from a favourite Vogue pattern. Conscious of being so thin, I’d added layers of petticoats underneath to make it a dirndl skirt, which I hoped would make me look shapelier than I really was. To hide my overly long neck, I wore a high-necked polo sweater. The whole look was finished off with a little waspie belt and flat shoes. Oh, and a matching umbrella cover: I made one for all my outfits and they became my trademark.

I arrived at the salon on opening day with the ten other juniors who’d been taken on. We were all given pink overalls to wear and I slipped mine on. Because my skirt stuck out so much, the overall rode up and didn’t cover anything. Miss Jones, the manageress of the salon, laughed. ‘You’ll never get near the wash basin,’ she told me. ‘You’ll have to take off your skirt.’ I was horrified. I knew that wearing the skimpy overall on its own would make me look thinner still but I had no choice. The next day I made sure to wear a less bulky outfit.

Try as I might, I couldn’t gain weight. The film stars I most admired had curves in all the right places, none of which I possessed, although I did at least have a bust. Mum had already taken me to see the doctor about it. After examining me, he asked how much I ate. ‘Like a horse,’ my mother replied, which was true.

‘Please, doctor,’ I asked him, ‘how can I get bigger?’

‘Take more exercise,’ was his reply. Mum and I looked at each other in disbelief I had never stopped dancing and even after I’d had to give up my classes I kept practising at home. When my mother told the doctor this, he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Being skinny must be in her genes,’ was all he could suggest. It was just as I feared; I was a hopeless case.

Not long after I joined Quaintways, something happened that completely took my mind off gaining weight. I was told I had a telephone call at the salon, which shocked me. We’d never had a telephone at home and I’d hardly ever used one. Taking the unfamiliar receiver I listened as a woman from the Ideal Laundry told me that my mother had been taken to hospital after an accident at work. I threw off my overall and hurried across town to the same Chester City Hospital where my father had died and where Peter had first been admitted for pleurisy.

My mother’s left hand was heavily bandaged and she was in a great deal of pain. She’d been working on the double press, smoothing down the sheets and tablecloths while another woman stood by operating the floor pedal which brought the hot iron thumping down. On this particular day, her colleague wasn’t paying attention and she accidentally hit the pedal while Mum’s hand was still smoothing under the iron. When they managed to extricate her hand from the machinery, her wedding and engagement rings were so flattened and embedded into her flesh that they had to be cut off. Her fingers were horribly disfigured and burned down to the bone. She was told that she’d have to endure a series of grafting operations, using skin taken from her thigh.

My great-aunt Mabel and my cousin Rita, who lived next door, helped look after me while Mum underwent her operations. Rita took me shopping or to the pictures, but I still remember feeling terribly lonely. My father was dead; Peter and my mother were both in and out of hospital. I couldn’t help but feel abandoned.