Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking
A tale of Catherine Cookson-esque tragedy and Northern grit, Pauline Prescott's life story will shock and amaze.A mother and a faithful friend, Pauline is not your typical politician's wife. She is immensely proud of her role as a housewife and over the near-forty years she has been in the public eye she has remained discreet, dignified and deeply loyal.The daughter of a bricklayer, who died when she was young, Pauline came from humble backgrounds. At 15 she found herself pregnant by a married US serviceman. Resisting all attempts to give her son up for adoption, she struggled on for three years, until she was finally persuaded it was for his own good. She never expected to see him again.She trained as a hairdresser and got a good job at a salon in Chester. Soon afterwards she met John, a dashing waiter who whisked her off her feet and married her. John's dreams of becoming a union activist meant that he spent the next eight years in university. It was Pauline's wages that paid for everything. She never complained.John quickly rose through the ranks and suddenly, it seemed, he was the Deputy Prime Minister. Pauline went almost overnight from a Hull hairdresser to a key participant at political events. Always immaculate, she quickly became known for her fashion, style and stunning hats.But Pauline's world was turned upside down when, more than forty years after she put her son up for adoption, John received a call to say the press had tracked him down. The decision to give up her son had been heart-rending. All these years later, Pauline was overjoyed to be reunited with the child she had pined for for so long, finally getting the happy ending she had dreamed of for years.Throughout John's career, Pauline has had to cope with the lack of privacy his position has afforded their family. Through it all she has emerged a figure of admiration.Loyal, sharp, good humoured and articulate, Pauline has entranced the nation. Now tells us her story in her own words. Warm, moving and at times painfully sad, Pauline's autobiography is an honest account of a fascinating life.
Читать Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking онлайн беплатно
Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking
Pauline Prescott
with Wendy Holden
This book is dedicated to John, the memory of my parents, and for my three wonderful boys: Paul, Johnathan, and David; and for my beautiful granddaughter Ava Grace
Smile, though your heart is aching
Smile, even though it’s breaking
When there are clouds in the sky
You’ll get by
If you smile
Through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You’ll see the sun come shining through
For you
Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That’s the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what’s the use of crying
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just smile
(John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons)
Table of Contents
I LAY ON MY NARROW METAL-FRAMED BED, HANDS ACROSS MY TUMMY, AND felt the life inside me stir. Relishing the silence of the dawn, I knew that Sister Joan Augustine would burst into the dormitory any minute, clanging her bell to get us up and bathed for morning prayers.
It was 25 December 1955. Enjoying a few more seconds’ peace, I allowed my mind to drift back to the fifteen Christmases I’d already known or at least those I could remember. Each year, my mum and dad would roll the carpet back and dance across the living room to the songs of Fats Waller or the Ink Spots playing on the gramophone. Under dangling paper chains Dad would waltz me laughingly around on his feet, clinging to the back of his legs until I was giddy.
The best part was when my brother Peter and I were allowed to open the presents my parents had placed either side of the fireplace for us. Apart from the usual apple, orange and banana, there would always be some special gift they’d saved especially hard for – like my brother’s bicycle or the sleeping baby doll I’d coveted ever since I’d spotted it in Garner’s Toy Shop window. When the doll was replaced by another just before the school holidays, I cried all the way home. To my astonishment, there she was on Christmas morning, batting her long eyelashes at me. From Mum’s wages as a part-time cleaner and my father’s as a bricklayer a little money had been put into a savings club until there was enough.
Now aged sixteen, I was about to give birth to my own baby doll, the one I prayed would bring back its airman father from wherever he’d returned to in America. I’d written and told him about our child but he hadn’t replied yet. Maybe once the baby was born, he’d divorce his wife and send for me to marry him as he’d always promised he would.
I thought back to Christmas two years earlier, the first that Mum, Peter and I had faced a few months after we’d watched Dad’s coffin being lowered into the ground. That Christmas, I was invited to a party at the local American airbase for children who’d been orphaned or bereaved. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, I’d stepped nervously into that mess hall and thought I’d been transported to Hollywood. The scene was like something in the movies that transfixed me every Saturday afternoon at the Regal Cinema in Foregate Street, Chester. The hall was filled with clowns, balloons and entertainers. A trestle table groaned under oversized platters of exotic food. There was cream and frosted icing, the likes of which I’d never known because of rationing. Smiling shyly at the handsome men in uniform who reminded me of Rock Hudson or Clark Gable as they handed out gifts, I was star-struck.
Had that Christmas party only been two years earlier? Before my brother got sick? Before my widowed mother had her accident? Before I met the father of my baby? It seemed like a lifetime ago. The words of my favourite song, ‘Unchained Melody’, sprang unbidden into my head.
Oh my love, my darling,
I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time. And time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. Are you still mine?
I need your love…God speed your love to me.
The bell ringing in Sister Joan Augustine’s hand snapped me from my reverie. Her long black habit making her seem taller than she really was, she stood in the doorway of our dormitory as she had every morning for the three months that I’d been a resident at St Bridget’s House of Mercy, a home for unwed mothers in Lache Park. Apart from Mother Superior, whose office I’d tremblingly approached with my suitcase that first day, Sister Joan Augustine was the nun I feared the most.
‘Come along now, girls!’ she cried, clapping her hands together impatiently. ‘Stop dawdling.’ Dutifully, and in various stages of pregnancy, we twelve teenagers heaved ourselves upright, grabbed our wash bags and formed an orderly queue for the bathroom. With one bath shared between each dorm, we were only allowed a few minutes each before we had to dress and troop down to the chapel.
Because it was Christmas, the nuns had decorated a small tree in the room where we’d be permitted to greet family and friends later that afternoon. Its sparsely decorated branches were a bittersweet reminder of happier festivities beyond the former convent’s walls. There would be no traditional gatherings by the family hearth for any of us that year. No pile of presents. No oranges or cute baby dolls. Instead, we’d quietly eat our breakfast cereal in the refectory, each lost in memories of Christmases past. Then we’d fall in for normal duties: peeling potatoes in the kitchen, working in the laundry or scrubbing the cloisters’ floor. We were young, some the victims of sexual abuse, others (like me) too innocent to understand the consequences of what we’d done. All of us were waiting for babies we were expected to take home or hand over uncomplainingly for adoption.
