Free My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story by Helen Edwards, Jenny Lee Smith Page A

found it in the kitchen. As soon as I’d taken in the golden fluid, I started to choke and retch by turns. In panic I tried to catch my breath.
    My mother sent the neighbour to call the doctor, who rushed over. I remember he poured copious amounts of salt water down my throat to make me vomit. It worked, with dramatic speed – up came all the varnish, along with my tea. The only other thing I remember is the misery of being sick, continually, throughout Christmas Day, while my parents danced from room to room to the music of Glenn Miller, giggling like teenagers.
    I don’t think I ever did get my ginger wine that Christmas. My parents carried on in their usual way, frivolity and combat, turn by turn. Maybe it didn’t seem like an important incident to them. ‘Ah well, Mercia, wrong train again,’ my mother smirked. ‘Better go and have a bit more shuggy on the grate.’ It’s what she always said when something didn’t turn out right.
    It might have been trivial to her, but the memory still shocks me now. It’s an example of their carelessness, isn’t it? Their indifference to the dangers they exposed me to every day.
    I do remember the doctor giving my mother a very strong telling off. ‘Helen could have died, you know.’
    But she shrugged it off when he’d gone. It was Christmas. She wanted to be pampered and enjoy herself. She wasn’t going to let me spoil it.

CHAPTER 7
    Helen
    Talking to the Cows
    When I was six, my parents had to move. Either my father’s job changed, or they fell out with the family, or maybe Auntie Minnie needed the house for someone else. I suppose they had nowhere to go, nowhere that they could afford, anyway. My mother took a job as part-time domestic help in a farmhouse, working every morning, because it came with a tied cottage, rent-free, in Murton Village. I don’t remember the day of the move, but I do recall how far that five miles seemed from all I knew in Seghill and the sanctuary of my extended family. There seemed to be a chasm between us now.
    There was no easy bus ride between the two places and we rarely saw the aunties, uncles and cousins. Or Grandma. We went over to her house for tea a couple of times when we first lived at Murton, and I remember the lovely baking smell as we went in and saw the table laid for tea with scones, jam and her delicious Victoria sandwich – my favourite. My father also picked her up to bring her to tea at our house two or three times. I was so surprised when she took her coat off and I saw she wasn’t wearing a pinny! I’d never seen her without one. On one visit my father persuaded her to sing some old Northumbrian songs and recorded them with his Grundig tape recorder. I have no idea what happened to that tape. I wish I had it now.
    Though we rarely saw her, Grandma used to write a letter every week to my mother, asking when she was going to come and see her, and giving her the family news. I don’t think my mother often wrote back and I don’t remember her going over to Seghill on her own, though she might have done. In with her weekly letter, Grandma always put a silver sixpence for me. That was the only pocket money I ever had as a child. Thanks to my Grandma, I could buy sweets and other treats at a shop near the school.
    At least we had a nice house. It was in a tiny hamlet, which was made up of just the farm and a few cottages and was surrounded by fields and hedgerows, not a pit or a slagheap in sight. The view was clear to the horizon, the air clean and bright. I can still picture the farmer, Mr Potts, and his wife – both large, jovial bodies with rosy cheeks and friendly, smiling faces, in contrast to my parents.
    There was friction from the beginning. My mother did not want this job, but she had no choice. She railed against it every day.
    ‘This is no life. I’ve been put out to work so that we can have a house to live in. I’m nothing but a skivvy here. Work, work, work! Just when I’ve finished at the farmhouse, I