Rainbows Have Echoes

1. Wasps

I had met my husband-to-be at a dance at the Floral Hall in Bradford, now a mosque. He was an athletic man who resembled Richard Todd of the Robin Hood films. He had trodden on the back of my sandals and broken the strap by following me too closely up the stairs to the balcony. We had laughed together after I’d given him a bash with my handbag and then I’d danced the rest of the evening on my one bare foot with him. He was sporty, sexy, witty and obviously keen to be with me. He took me home in his old Ford Popular with a running board and instructions not to step on it.

I had also discovered he was really randy - so he met all my requirements for a suitable husband.

We were married the week after being questioned by my trusted friend in the George and Dragon pub garden, but not before I had inadvertently damaged his confidence in matters sexual. My wrong choice of words, I am certain, made him lose the confidence to believe in his own capacity to make love. Had I realised at the time that my choice of words would have such a profound impact on a sensitive and insecure man I might have explained myself immediately, but it is only on reflection that I can pinpoint the moment he lost his confidence.

2. Rainbows

After leaving college, my first school was Barkarend Road Primary in the slum-clearance area of Bradford, West Yorkshire. In those days probationary teachers had to work for at least a year in the city which had provided them with a grant. In those days grants covered the cost of tuition, accommodation, food and transport. We were allotted schools and no preferences were taken into account, so I suspect they placed young newly qualified teachers in the most challenging areas. It was a kind of survival-of-the-fittest test, but I loved my school.

Many, many Sikh families were arriving from the Punjab and given temporary accommodation in homes about to be demolished. The indigenous children who already lived in the area were also disturbed by seeing neighbours’ houses torn down by council demolition workers and suffered from the anxiety which that provoked.

This school’s anxious inhabitants were very needy. They clung to what appeared to be stable. Each morning we would sell penny and halfpenny biscuits and again at break time. Most were dependent on free school meals, which arrived by van in huge metal containers.

One little girl, during a severe Yorkshire winter, arrived early wearing unsuitable clothes for the bleak northern weather.

The children were allowed to take shelter in the cloakroom and the outer door was opened by the caretaker at about eight o’clock. Along one wall were huge boiler pipes, which started to give off heat about the same time. This little girl, in an effort to obtain some warmth, cradled the pipe with her arms. At the start of the heating process, when the pipes were giving out a tiny amount of warmth, this small girl, called Shirley, waited for more warmth. By the time staff arrived Shirley was screaming. The pipe had expanded and trapped her arm between itself and the wall. I can still hear her screams. An ambulance was called. Firemen using crowbars prised the pipe away from the wall sufficiently to enable her arm to be released. Skin grafts were the order of the day, and she was many months in hospital because her skin had become fused with the pipes and remained there.

But the school was a good place, and it was there that my interest began in teaching English to non-English speakers - a passionate interest which remains to this day. The needier the child, the harder I worked to provide some respite from their harsh living conditions. I felt lucky to be there and the work was rewarding.

Each Saturday morning a contingent of my pupils arrived at my family home. My mum would give them juice and chocolate biscuits on a tray with a pristine white tray-cloth. Those children were impressed and thought us ‘dead posh’ even though we lived in a council house on a large estate. The children and I would walk down to the canal and we began to believe that life could be good.

3. Wasps

The wrong choice of words in a sensitive situation can have disastrous consequences. Several months before our marriage we were in my future husband’s home in Otley. His parents were out and he was making sexual advances, in which I was usually more than ready to play my part - but it was the wrong time of the month for me and I said, "No - you can’t instead of No - you mustn’t." Neil, my husband-to-be, must have taken it that I was doubting his capabilities and sexual prowess. From that moment on he became tentative and totally unsure of himself, and his sexual expectations and demands became so diminished they became almost non-existent. I became increasingly petulant. In fact, on our three-day honeymoon in London we stayed physically apart, with me taking long walks alone in the West End of London wearing my Russian-style fur hat and my long astrakhan honeymoon coat, feeling very low indeed and unattractive and totally undesirable. After the honeymoon, we returned to the cottage at Nab Wood near Keighley, a rented bungalow which we had kitted out with a lot of help from Neil’s parents. We had the bare essentials for a lovely life with my continuing work in the slums of Bradford and Neil working as a physiotherapist at Pudsey Hospital.

With the physical side of our marriage almost zero, we would often stand at the bus stop waiting for the bus to take us into Bradford to work, without speaking. I believed myself now to be an unattractive married woman, so I brought a dog home for company and took to taking long walks along the canal banks a stone’s throw from our first home. I threw myself into my schoolwork totally and wholeheartedly.

4. Rainbows with Sharp Edges

I gained a reputation for my energy and commitment, and for reaching the troubled children in my care and making them smile. The satisfaction I gained from my work made up somehow for my unsatisfactory and unhappy home life.

Because so many children in my class arrived with no knowledge of the English language I was at a loss to know where to begin. I realised that they absorbed spoken English relatively quickly, but was also quick to realise I had very few ideas regarding the teaching of literacy skills. The headmistress, Miss Stewart, told me to assess their levels of English (reading and writing) by administering two tests: the Burt Word Recognition Test and the Schonell Reading Test. These I duly administered and said, But what do I do now?

Her reply was "Administer the same tests in a few months’ time and see if they have made progress.’’

These instructions seemed ludicrous to me. My common sense told me that this did not entail any actual teaching, so I said, Those two tests both indicate that some words are actually easier to learn than others. There is an obvious incline of difficulty in those chosen words in the test.

Her reply was Obviously.

I said, If there is a sequence and a pattern to the English language, then I will find it and teach those words and their meanings methodically.

She replied, Impossible!

So began my journey, which took over my life for the next twenty-two years, logging every word hurdle, every mistake, on a grid system which filled notebook after notebook and totally absorbed me. Sometimes my spirit flagged, but never my interest and never believing for one thousandth of a second that the mission was impossible.

I moved words around, deleted some and highlighted others until I had a range of word lists with a common factor - in all 161 lists of words which ranged from basic, much used and familiar words to obscure, irregular and unfamiliar ones.

Using my lists I compiled my own ‘book box scheme’ so I had something for each child to read regardless of the strength of their English-language literacy skills.

I found that the children enjoyed the progression and appeared to hunger for the next pattern of words. This delighted me.

5. More Wasps

Because my school holidays did not coincide with my husband’s own hospital holidays, Neil’s lack of interest in his work came to the surface. He would decide to stay at home if I was not at school and I would be asked to go to a neighbour’s home (we had no phone) and ring the physio department and say he was too unwell to go to work. I objected more and more each time and the neighbour became suspicious of the calls. When I was asked, Is your husband at home because you are on holiday? I became really uneasy. So began my capacity to lie convincingly, and I decided to convince my husband to use his knowledge of the world of medicine in another field of work.

Physiotherapy was not his forte, nor his interest; nor had he any ambition to further his study or his skills. Physiotherapy was not his choice. Pushed into the closest training to medicine because his mother’s drive for her son was for him to become a doctor like his best friend, Tom, he managed to survive the medical school in the field of physiotherapy. It was apparent to me that he was endeavouring to live his powerful mother’s dream.

Had his parents bought him a garage and allowed his passion to mend any kind of machinery I think he would probably not have become the flawed personality he did become. I say to all parents allow your children their own dreams and aspirations. Encourage them to pursue their own interests with loving words and gestures.

Neil was interviewed for a job with British Drug Houses and managed to obtain work as a representative in the Lincolnshire area. We moved to Lincoln and bought a new Wimpey house on a huge housing estate at North Hykeham. For a short space of time life seemed more settled, and surprisingly we managed to produce two wonderfully perfect children: Linda, now fifty-two, artistic, articulate, pretty and compliant, and Christopher, now fifty-one, intelligent, observant, athletic and strong.

Because I was on maternity leave I was at home and dependent on Neil to keep his job going and pay the mortgage. He had a firm’s car and a good salary dependent largely on orders for the new drugs he was promoting. Sadly and alarmingly, one month before my son was born, Neil was sacked from BDH. I knew it had been a likelihood because of Neil’s impatient nature and his inability to perform the American-style ‘hard sell’. On visiting doctors he would see a waiting room full of patients and leave samples of new products without actually seeing a doctor. It felt as if he was returning home before he even set off. He would often burn off petrol whilst the car was stationary in the driveway at home in order to convince any BDH inspector that he had been out on the road clocking up mileage on behalf of the drug firm and visiting doctors.

6. A Little Rainbow

Before the arrival of my two children, and at the start of life in Lincoln, I was appointed to Mount Street Girls’ School, whose catchment was mainly the daughters of RAF personnel at bases around Lincoln.

Again I could see the instability and insecurity which arises from the nomadic nature of moving from RAF base to RAF base. I became even more aware of the need to teach with a certainty. To adopt the demeanour of a well-prepared teacher who had planned out the detail of each lesson, which would then accommodate each and every pupil regardless of ability and make them feel not just valuable but also worthy of every scrap of my attention.

7. Wasps Together with Rainbows

The feeling of hopelessness and helplessness wrapped itself round my being. I could not obtain work myself as my second baby was about to be born. Neil had no job and I couldn’t teach.

The rep’s car had to be returned. We had no money and all there was in my cupboard was a tin of Ajax and a tin of custard powder. We were without food, I had nothing to give my eighteen-month-old daughter and I was about to produce another child.

Neil decided to ride up to Yorkshire to borrow money from his parents. He had bought a second-hand motorbike on hire purchase, and he set off leaving me in a house we couldn’t afford with a prenatal doctor’s appointment at two o’clock that day.

I shook the crumbs left in my empty biscuit tin into Linda’s hand and she ate them, and just as we were about to set off for the doctor’s appointment there was a knock on the door. Two men stood there demanding money due on the motorbike. I told them I had no money to pay the due instalments, so they said that they had to take the bike as no money had been paid since the deposit. As Neil was away on the bike I had to send them away. I think they felt quite sorry for me, and said they would return another day when my husband was at home.

I took my tear-stained face to the doctor’s, where my blood pressure was pronounced high. I knew it would be hours before Neil