As a teenager, Myra was a keen babysitter, and she and Pat Jepson spent many hours looking after neighbours’ children. Mrs Joan Phillips was a regular customer. ‘They were a grand pair of lasses,’ she recalled. ‘They were often round the house, drinking tea and talking about clothes and boys. They never used to take a penny for babysitting – they wouldn’t hear of it – but I used to take the two of them to the pictures now and again as a treat . . . My husband used to say he liked Myra to babysit because we could go out in peace, knowing everything would be all right if she was there. My boys loved her because she would spoil them. She used to bring them chocolate and let them stay up late, and when it was light in the evenings, she used to play football with them on the bit of wasteland near our house. In her last year at school, she and Pat Jepson used to play wag and come round to our house to hide. Myra was wonderful with our Denis. He was only a year old. She used to turn a kitchen chair on its side and put him in-between the legs to teach him to stand up and then to walk. She used to take Gordon, who was about six or seven, to see the cowboys at the children’s matinee on a Saturday at the Cosmo or the Essoldo. Often I would come in and find she’d have Gordon all scrubbed clean and in his pyjamas ready for bed – I think it was the only time he liked being washed, because she made such a game of it. She was like that, Myra, always full of fun, and if she wasn’t chattering on about boys or records, she would be singing the latest tune. You never saw her depressed.’25
Myra was only miserable when she was forced to spend time at home with her rowing parents. Once she repeated something she had picked up at school, telling her father he only had one bad habit. When he asked what it was, she replied flatly, ‘Breathing.’ The comment wounded Bob; he got up from his chair and left the house in silence. Nellie, for once, said nothing either.
Allan Grafton, who lived on Casson Street and was two years younger than Myra but got to know her during football sessions at Ryder Brow, remembers Bob Hindley in a different light: ‘I played football on a Sunday for the Steelworks Tavern and Bob Hindley was our sponsor. He was really a super guy, and what happened to his daughter later killed him. When we came back from playing football, he’d be sitting in the vault, first seat behind the door, and he used to buy all the lads a drink. Every Sunday the monks from St Francis’ Monastery would come round selling their wine – St Francis wine. The monks would get up early, tread the grapes for the wine, do the service and then three of them got on pushbikes and rode up to the Steelworks Tavern in their cassocks to sell their wine and have a few beers. Bob Hindley never let them buy their own drinks – he paid for all the monks’ booze. We’d be just getting in from football as the monks were ready for going and the landlord used to shout for us to nip out of the pub on Gorton Lane to watch these three drunken monks, cassocks flying, wobbling on their bikes back to church. Bob was smashing with them, and with us. Obviously, I only knew him as a person outside the house, but I never once saw him in a fight. He was a kind, generous man. Myra’s mother on the other hand – she was a bawler and a shouter. You’d hear her yelling every day, “Mau-reeeeen! Come in for yer tea!” She was tall and slim, and always used to walk about with her arms folded. Myra did the same, and Maureen.’26 Allan remembers Myra as ‘one of the lads. We used to practise football on Ryder Brow field and she’d hang out with us. Afterwards we’d pile into a pub just off Ryder Brow called The Haxby for pints of shandy. We were underage, but the landlord never bothered because we didn’t cause any trouble. Myra always came in with us. Because she was such a tomboy the lads never took much interest in her. She could look after herself anyway; she was good company, but she said what she thought and didn’t hold anything back.’27
When she wasn’t with her friends or sister, Myra was content to be at home with Gran. All the neighbours knew Ellen Maybury well, and liked her. One of the most frequent visitors was Hettie Rafferty. She was a similar age to Gran and had a ready laugh, though their conversation was often morbid; they liked to speculate on which of them might die first and discussed their acquaintances’ various ailments. When a penniless friend died, Gran cashed in part of her own funeral insurance to buy the man a coffin. She then ‘laid out’ his body and kept the coffin in her front room prior to burial.
Myra arrived home to find the house reeking of embalming fluid and Gran and Hettie Rafferty sitting with the coffin. Sensing her alarm, Gran suggested that Myra see for herself how peaceful the old man looked. Myra edged forward and peered in the coffin, where the old man appeared to be asleep. She reached out to touch his hand, then withdrew quickly from the feel of his cold skin. The following day the coffin had gone.
There were other reminders of mortality that winter, 1954. One afternoon Gran had a visitor whom she hadn’t seen for many years: her daughter Louie’s widower, Jim. Gran welcomed him in with a smile and invited him to stay for tea, but after he’d gone she broke down, vividly remembering the daughter who had died at such a young age. Her depression lingered, but she tried to deflect Myra’s concern by telling her she was worried about her eyesight. Myra insisted that she visit a doctor, and when Gran took her advice, she discovered that she had cataracts and needed an operation.
Myra was distraught when Gran was admitted to hospital. She was supposed to stay with her parents, but after dark she slipped out and ran back home to Gran’s, where she spent a fitful and forlorn night in the front room, wearing Gran’s old coat for comfort. Nellie told Myra that children weren’t allowed on the ward, but Myra begged her mother to sneak her in somehow. To placate her, Nellie styled Myra’s hair and put a bit of make-up on her; she passed the scrutiny of the nurses and hurried to the ward but burst into tears when she saw Gran sitting up in bed with her head swathed in bandages. Gran told her that the operation had been a success. When visiting hours were over, Myra decided to do something constructive and pressed her mother and Aunt Annie into decorating the front room. She and Gran had recently moved again, and their new home had electricity, a copper boiler in an outhouse for heating water and a bedroom that Gran could finally call her own. It was their third house in the same street, but the address was different because the street had been renamed; Myra and Gran now lived at 7 Bannock Street.28 Myra’s relief when her grandmother arrived home was palpable. Gran’s vision was better than it had been in years and her face lit up when she saw the vibrant red wallpaper in the sitting-room and the special meal Myra and Nellie had prepared.
Myra’s fear of losing her grandmother had been dispelled, but the following year she suffered a disturbing bereavement when her close friend Michael Higgins drowned. His death came out of nowhere, on a perfect summer’s day, and had a profound and lasting effect on her.
Michael Higgins was not the sort of boy Myra usually befriended. Now nearly 15, Myra was feisty and outspoken. She let it be known that she fancied the head boy at school, Ronnie Woodcock, and she had been smoking for a while, openly lighting cigarettes on the bus that chartered pupils from Ryder Brow to the public baths. Michael, in contrast, was a small and diffident 13 year old, who lived on Taylor Street and attended Catholic school. Despite their obvious differences, Michael and Myra became inseparable; she told him that because they had the same initials, they were fated to be friends and their lives destined to be entwined. ‘I felt very protective towards Michael,’ Myra told her prison therapist. ‘He was always bullied and I would stick up for him. We spent a lot of time together.’29
Michael emerged from his shell when he was with her. Myra’s sturdy presence gave him the nerve to do things he wouldn’t normally dare. They couldn’t afford to go to the Speedway at Belle Vue very often, so would sneak in without paying. Speedway was then Britain’s second most popular spectator sport and every large town had a track. Myra and Michael discovered that by scrambling over various walls and fences, and crossing the railway line, they could squeeze in at a secret spot without being noticed. Myra was bold enough for the two of them and would brag her way into the riders’ enclosure by telling secur
ity guards that she had been sent by her nana, ‘Kitty’ Hindley (Bob’s mother worked at Belle Vue, where she met the married lover whom Nellie called her ‘fancy man’). Michael was thrilled when they gained access; he and Myra begged the drivers for autographs, adding considerable value to the Speedway programmes Michael collected.
Myra’s bravado led to another prank that could have landed them in serious trouble. Together with Eddie Hogan – whose ‘Nitty Nora’ slur had long been forgiven – she and Michael would go into local stores and, while Myra chatted away to the shopkeeper, Michael and Eddie filled their pockets with sweets. Years later Myra referred to her ‘criminal apprenticeship’ as involving a few minor acts of juvenile theft, including stealing some potatoes from a local greengrocer ‘to roast on a bonfire we had made, and on another occasion I ran off with some Christmas cards. I was waiting to pay for them, but I kept getting ignored, so I ran off. I also remember stealing some alleys (marbles) from Woolworths.’30
Creeping into Gorton Tank was a more dangerous activity. She and Michael liked to clamber about the trains in the huge railway yard, but on one occasion they were seen and chased out. As they fled, laughing, Myra felt a searing pain shoot up her leg; her ankle was caught in a steel trap and blood poured from the serrated wound. Michael raced for help and found her uncle Bert, who carried Myra home. In her autobiography, Myra recalls that while she was lying on the sofa waiting for the doctor to arrive, she asked Michael plaintively if he thought she might die. He laughed at her: ‘Course not! You’re too young.’31
Of all their escapades, swimming in the disused reservoir in Mellands Fields on the outskirts of Gorton was the most perilous. The water was fenced off, hidden behind thick trees and fertile allotments, and only the most foolhardy ventured in. Two years earlier a girl had been saved from drowning there and several people had committed suicide in its murky, weed-filled depths. Another Gorton resident recalls, ‘We were strictly forbidden from going to the res. My mam always told us, “Don’t go in, mind, cos the Jenny Green-teeth (weeds) will drag you under.”’32 But Myra and Michael went in, swimming until their limbs ached, then lying drowsily on the grassy bank in the sunlight, letting the water pearl off them.
Friday, 14 June 1957 was the day of the Whit parade. The city was in the middle of a heatwave and Myra could feel the perspiration trickling down her neck as she and Pat Jepson and Pat’s sister Barbara stood watching the procession. Michael had been given the honour of carrying one of the embroidered banners. Myra cheered as he passed them, and waved at Eddie Hogan, who marched alongside Michael. When the procession had gone by, Myra accompanied Pat and Barbara to tea at their aunt’s house in Reddish, having turned down Michael’s idea of swimming in the res. Myra and her friends were dressed in their best – new white outfits bought for Whitsun.
On the way home, they stood on the open rear platform of the bus to get some air, but the draught from the road was hot and gritty. Myra saw a boy pedalling furiously to catch up with the bus and realised it was a lad who lived near Pat and Barbara on Taylor Street. He was shouting at them. The girls jumped down as the bus slowed and the boy told them breathlessly that there had been an accident at the reservoir in Mellands Fields. Myra didn’t wait for him to finish; she turned and started running. Pat and Barbara raced to keep up with her, as she flew down the streets and headed across the playing fields to the reservoir. A huddle of people were walking slowly towards them, where the sun glittered on the water behind the trees. Someone detached themselves from the crowd and responded to Myra’s high-pitched, panic-stricken questions.
That afternoon, Michael had been swimming with Eddie Hogan and a younger boy called Walter King. After a rest on the sun-drenched bank, Michael and Walter dived back in. Walter noticed after a while that Michael appeared to be thrashing about and ‘in difficulties’ but shouted at him to stop fooling around.33 Then Michael shot out an arm and pulled Walter under the water. Walter struggled free and resurfaced, gasping for breath. He looked frantically for Michael, but there was no sign of him in the still water.
From the grassy bank, Eddie Hogan watched in disbelief; he, too, thought Michael had been ‘larking about’.34 An older boy who had seen the two lads go under realised it wasn’t a wind-up and dived into the reservoir to look for Michael. Someone else alerted the police. Within minutes, uniformed figures from the fire brigade, as well as several policemen, were wading into the dark water. The wide reservoir varied in depth from ten feet to twenty-five and could be numbingly cold, even on a hot summer’s day. Grappling lines were brought in and Michael’s parents were told that their son was missing.
At ten to seven in the evening, a Lancashire County Police frogman finally broke the surface of the reservoir with Michael’s body in his arms.
‘It was just lying on the bottom,’ he told the inquest later, ‘face downwards. The water was dark and clouded with mud. The deeper he went down, the colder it got.’35
On the bank, Laurence Jordan, who lived near Myra, watched in horror: ‘I saw them bringing out this chalk-white body. You could see the whiteness of the body against the blue uniform of the police. His arms were outstretched . . . They hurriedly put him in the mortuary van.’36 Michael’s mother stumbled into the ambulance to be with the body of her 13-year-old son.
Myra was hysterical. Pat recalled: ‘It was the only time I ever saw Myra cry.’37 Pat and Barbara took her home with them, but Myra couldn’t stop sobbing and kept repeating that she should have been with him, that if she’d gone with him that afternoon he would still be alive. Mrs Jepson told Myra not to blame herself – there was nothing anyone could have done. ‘If I’d been there, I might have saved him’ became Myra’s refrain, one she still repeated forty years later.38
Her other friends who had witnessed the accident congregated in a cafe nearby. ‘It went round like wildfire,’ Allan Grafton remembers. ‘We all went to the sarsaparilla bar on Gorton Lane. We used to go there a lot. They had pumps, seats and a bar as you went in, but it was all soft drinks and you could get pints of sarsaparilla, dandelion and burdock, that sort of thing. We sat there talking about it until the place shut, unable to take it in. His death that summer was absolutely shattering for the neighbourhood.’39
Myra dreamed of Michael that night, of trying to swim under the dark, reedy water to save him. She pestered her mother to make a black armband and wore it as she traipsed from door to door collecting money for a funeral wreath. Touched by her distress, Mrs Higgins gave Myra a few of Michael’s belongings – his Speedway programmes and a comb – but to everyone else there was something eerie about the intensity of Myra’s grief. Her face took on a white, pinched look.
Mrs Higgins worried about the effect of her son’s death on the girl and asked her to visit the house when the coffin was brought in before the funeral, thinking that might bring her some peace. Years later, Myra remembered seeing Michael in his coffin: the sliver of light under his eyelids, and his mother gently sliding the rosary from his fingers to give to her. Allan Grafton also went along: ‘His mother and father invited the kids in, all of us who’d known Michael, to see him in the coffin in the front room. I went in and came straight out again – I couldn’t do it. I thought I’d be all right, but I looked at the faces of my friends who had already been in and I thought, no, this isn’t for me. I went to his funeral, though. Quite a few of us went.’40
A requiem Mass was said for Michael at St Francis’ Monastery. Every pew was filled to capacity, but Myra’s name was not on the list of mourners published in the Gorton & Openshaw Reporter on 21 June 1957. She explained later, ‘I couldn’t go to his funeral because I was frightened. His death was hard to come to terms with. It made me realise how final death is. He was the first person who had gone from my life for good.’41 She waited at a distance during the internment at Gorton cemetery, back turned to the mourners, while Pat described what was happening.
The local newspaper reported that the inquest into Michael’s death found that he had drow
ned after getting cramp from the cold water. The verdict of accidental death was no comfort to Myra: ‘My faith was being seriously tested by this. I wanted some kind of sign to tell me it wasn’t just the end of everything.’42 She told her prison therapist that her grief was profound but had no pernicious influence on her otherwise, and she was revolted by ‘fools [who] said that Michael’s death made me start to hate the world we live in, to hate society. Those cretins just need to find one reason for my crimes.’43 She conceded only that it ‘brought about a drastic change in my personal beliefs and really it has never left me’.44
Day after day, she sat alone at his grave, bringing flowers she had picked from hedgerows and gardens. She prayed with Michael’s mother at church but ‘cried openly and was inconsolable for weeks after his death, until I was told there was something wrong with me; I was abnormal, I’d be ill, I had to pull myself together, I’d become “soft in the head”. Well-meaning words, no doubt, but they only served my need and ability to bury my emotions as deep as I could.’45
In her autobiography, she recalls being at the Jepsons’ house on Taylor Street and watching the rain trickle in silver lines down the windows. The rain appeared to shimmer and when she looked beyond it, to the opposite side of the street and the ‘Bug Hut’ Plaza cinema, she saw Michael standing hunched in the shadow of the fire escape. He wore his black overcoat and stared straight at her. Myra leapt up and wrenched open the front door; cars splashed past and people walked quickly by with umbrellas, but the gap beneath the fire escape was empty. Michael had gone.
One of Your Own Page 5
