by Mia Marconi
Both children were totally dazed. It was as if they, too, were being punished for their dad’s death. That whole episode in Mum’s life was a massive trauma, one she never forgot, and it ultimately shaped the person she became.
Chapter Three
Mum and Dad had both had difficult childhoods, and they were also incredibly young to start a family; Dad was only seventeen when he married Mum, who was only sixteen herself. When my sister Rosa was born, Dad was eighteen, and only nineteen by the time I was born. He was the ripe old age of twenty-two when my brother Joe arrived, and twenty-three when Mum gave birth to Bianca.
Mum’s two older sisters, Lily and Daisy, were very successful in their own fields: Daisy in fashion, and Lily, the stunning beauty of the family, was a secretary for a big furniture company. They had got out of poverty, married quite wealthy men and had good careers. Mum was the poor one in the family and her sisters kept her financially while my nan, Hetty, helped her look after us.
Nan thought Dad was not good enough for my mum, so she continually told her, in front of my dad: ‘You are never going to have anything, because you’ve married a foreigner.’ Dad struggled to fit in as it was. He got called ‘English’ in Italy and in London they called him ‘Spaghetti’ or ‘Wop’. Wop was a derogatory term used for Italian immigrants. It was short for ‘Without Papers’, as many had come over without identity papers, and was common slang in the Sixties and Seventies. Not surprisingly, it upset Dad a lot.
It just brought home to Dad that he wasn’t really Italian and he wasn’t really English. Nan knew my dad never felt as though he fitted in and that the word ‘foreigner’ would really hurt him. It cut deep and she knew it. That’s why she said it.
Dad could never do anything right and all Mum’s family used to argue with him. If he spoke back, Nan would get up and roll up her sleeves. ‘Get outside!’ she would shout at him, and she would honestly have taken him on if he had gone with her. Instead, Dad would do the sensible thing and storm off until it all settled down. I dread to think what would have happened if they had come to blows.
Nan was a tiny grey-haired woman. She may have survived the war, but she was still deeply affected by her husband’s suicide, although she would never show it or talk about it. Since his death she had done nothing but work hard and care for her family, and every bit of softness and compassion in her had been trampled on. There was no doubt she could be a cow. If Mum brought a friend home, Nan would say: ‘Come on, clear off, she’s got things to do.’
There was only one way that Hetty showed her love and that was through control. She had to be in charge and no one messed with her – they didn’t dare. Hetty ruled the family with an iron rod and no one had better step out of line.
Although she could be terrifying at times, she was always there looking after us while Mum was at work, and I idolised her, simply because she was my nan and she was there for us.
My mum is a petite redhead with a lovely figure and a good sense of humour – if they had started making EastEnders in the 1950s, her family would have been mistaken for the cast.
You can imagine how volatile an Irish-Italian household could be, and Mum and Dad would often throw things at each other. They’d be having dinner and one of them would say something, and then, suddenly, there would be plates flying across the kitchen or saucepans being thrown at people’s heads.
Mum threw as many saucepans as my dad, but neither of them ended up in hospital. Arguments and fights became so regular in our house, we thought it was normal. We thought everyone’s parents fought all the time and threw things at each other.
It always seemed to me that my mum started the fights, but I suspect she was reacting out of frustration with my dad. Although they fought like heavyweight champions, they never gave up on each other, which is so easy to do now. I like to think that they loved and needed one another and fought to keep the family together, rather than ripping it apart. I don’t like to think that the fights had no purpose.
It is true that Dad was very violent and aggressive – not towards me, but towards my mum. As a child, I didn’t really understand why Dad was so needy, but it was because Mum could never give him as much love as he needed. I actually don’t think anyone could have, he was so damaged, so they would end up pushing each other around and me and Rosa would get in between them and try to calm them down, while Joe and Bianca sat on the sofa looking sad.
Like lots of other Italian immigrants, Dad worked at an Italian restaurant, but there was never any money. Dad was a gambler, so they had lots of money worries. He loved to bet on the horses, but he would also bet on football – anything, really – and his pockets were always full of little white gambling slips that he brought home from the bookies. He lost more often than not, but you knew when he had won, because he would come home with presents. If he had lost, he could go missing for days at a time.
Dad probably shrugged off a lot of responsibility, because my mum had her family network to support her, so why was he needed? When her family used to argue with him, I was always his ally and stuck up for him. He was never wrong in my eyes; he was never wrong until I was in my late thirties and I started to understand what kind of life my mum must have had with him.
I used to think Mum was mean and I hated her for shouting at Dad, but what I didn’t think about when I was a child was how much responsibility she had. I never understood my mother; all I knew was that my dad made me feel like I was the most special child in the world, and whatever I did wrong, he stood by me. My mum, on the other hand, had three jobs and four kids by the time she was twenty-two and she had no time to mollycoddle me. Not only that, she had a husband who gambled away his wages. If only I had taken that on board while I was growing up, I might have been able to understand the stress and strain she was under and given her an easier time. Instead, I was always angry with her for shouting at my dad. What chance did Mum have with me? She would have got more response if she had tried to reason with the cooker.
Dad should have been the main breadwinner, but the responsibility for putting food on the table was down to Mum. She was exhausted half the time, because when she wasn’t at home looking after us she was working shifts in the local pub or in the café, and when she wasn’t doing that she cleaned the local school.
Somehow, their relationship survived, but Mum got no sympathy from Nan. It didn’t matter how many plates got broken or how many saucepans got dented, how often she saw my mum sobbing her heart out or how often my dad went missing; Nan’s response was always the same: ‘You’ve made your bed, you lie on it.’
Was she right? I would say she was, because although it seemed harsh, she kept the family unit together.
We lived in Bermondsey at the time in a two-up, two-down. We had no boiler and no hot water upstairs, so we attached a hosepipe to the downstairs tap, threaded it out of the kitchen window and threw it up at the bathroom window until somebody caught it and we could fill the bath. The big problem was that by the time the bath was full, the water was lukewarm. The bathroom was freezing anyway, because you had to have the window open, so we sat and shivered as we washed ourselves clean. Even now, I can bath myself in two minutes flat.
I went to a Catholic school, obviously – being from an Irish-Italian background I would not have gone anywhere else – but I hated the nuns. I remember when I was about six, walking along the corridor to a class and because I started talking I was dragged out of the line. I had no idea I was doing anything wrong, but the next minute I remember getting the cane on my hand in the head teacher’s office. Four times she hit me with full force. She didn’t care that I was little; she held nothing back. The head teacher was a nun, and she was so terrifying I remember wetting myself, and then getting the cane again for wetting myself. I got no sympathy when I started crying; I was simply given a clean pair of knickers, told not to cry and sent back to class.
I know this sounds strange, but the nuns must have done something right because I loved school. We lived in a
damp old Victorian house and one day, when my sisters, my brother and I were all in bed because we had really bad chest infections, Mum said: ‘You’re not going to school today, kids. Stay under your blankets, it’s snowing outside.’ Most kids love it when they get to stay home, but for some reason I didn’t, so I got up, put my uniform on, walked out of the house without saying anything to anyone and went to school.
I went on to a Catholic secondary school. I left aged sixteen and my lovely Auntie Daisy got me a job at a magazine, working as a fashion assistant and earning £40 a week. I laughed when I saw the film The Devil Wears Prada, because my boss was just like that editor. She was incredibly elegant, with lots of blonde hair, big fur coats and high heels, and the whole office was scared of her. I was in awe of her because she was so inspirational and dynamic. People used to shake when she came into the room, but she just liked me. I don’t know what it was – maybe all those years dealing with my difficult grandmothers made it easy for me to cope with ‘big characters’.
I absolutely loved my job. It meant going to fashion shows and choosing models for fashion shoots that nine times out of ten were in exotic locations. It also meant I always had the latest clothes. I never wore anything more than twice. My local charity shop absolutely loved it when I walked through the door with my arms full of carrier bags. They knew everything in them was nearly new.
It was the Seventies, so I permed my long, dark hair, wore platform shoes and was given the first pair of designer jeans. No one had designer jeans in those days – they didn’t really go mainstream until the Eighties – so I felt like a real trendsetter.
One night, when I was eighteen and out with mates in a pub in Chiswick, I met my partner Martin, a trainee black-cab driver. He had just turned twenty-one. I can honestly say it was not love at first sight, but I thought he had lovely blue eyes and he loved my dark Italian looks.
We fell in love and knew we were a perfect fit, but we never did get round to getting married – we kept meaning to, and then something would come up and we would put it off. I was working long hours, he was working long hours … Forty-odd years later, we are still wondering when we might have time to fit in a wedding.
We decided to move in together a couple of years after we met and bought our first house in Bermondsey. Martin’s car was a gorgeous red MG and it was his pride and joy, but he happily sold it to get the deposit. The house was two-up, two-down and it cost £18,000. When we moved in it was totally derelict; everything needed doing, from the wiring to the plumbing. We weren’t worried; we were young and unafraid of hard work, so every spare minute we had we spent on doing up that house.
Martin and my dad rewired, replastered and replaced all the plumbing while I did the fun bit, choosing the décor. Being the Seventies, everything was orange and brown, with floral curtains and wallpaper. A wicker chair hung from the ceiling and, of course, every room was fitted with a shag-pile carpet. When I talk about it now it sounds awful but then it was the height of fashion, and by the time we had finished I could not have been any happier if we had moved into Buckingham Palace.
We carried on with our busy lives, with me flying off every couple of months and Martin – who by now had completed ‘the Knowledge’ – driving his cab round the West End. We had no real routine, but we made sure we went out to eat at least once a week. We loved a good Italian restaurant, obviously, and afterwards we would go for long walks along the Embankment. We spent time getting to know each other, but we never lived in each other’s pockets. It was not that intense love that can be so destructive, where you cannot be without each other for a minute. We loved being with each other, but we were both busy, we had our own friends and we are both close to our families, so there were not that many spare moments in the day. The love I felt for Martin was the kind of love that I knew was going to last. We trusted each other. I knew he was the man for me and he knew I was the woman for him.
Anyway, I was a career girl, one of the first, and I appreciated that my mother’s generation had fought really hard to make sure that there were more options open to us than teacher, secretary or cleaner. We were the first generation of women who were really expected to go out and get full-time careers, and we did.
I worked hard and played hard, and children were not part of my plan. I had no desire to fall pregnant but Martin felt differently, and in the early days he gently tried to talk to me round, saying that he wanted to start a family. He soon gave up being subtle and resorted to nagging me whenever he saw a little baby tucked up in a pram, but I avoided the subject as much as I could. I loved my life as it was, being suited and booted and having a lot of responsibility. I had no intention of giving that up.
Despite our differences in wanting a family, our relationship was romantic and we were happy. We carried on like that for about four years. Then one morning, I woke up feeling sick as a dog. I thought I had food poisoning, as we’d been out for dinner the night before, but the next day was the same, and the next, and the next. I did not need Einstein to tell me I was pregnant.
There was no question I would keep the baby, even though having a child was not something I had really planned. Let’s face it: if I had really, truly not wanted a child, I would have been a bit more careful, so let’s just say my heart got the better of my head.
It was the middle of winter when Francesca was born, during the worst thunderstorm for twenty years. Then nine months later I got pregnant with my second daughter, Ruby. It was like having twins!
I had to give up work, of course. There was no such thing as a job share then, and my lifestyle meant that I would have needed a full-time nanny if I were to carry on. What would be the point? Anyway, I would not have wanted that.
I know people struggle financially when they have children, but my attitude is: change your lifestyle for a few years. I believe the first year of a child’s life is really important. Children are children for such a short period, why would you leave them? And anyway, I was twenty-nine, I had been to every type of party you can imagine and I had enjoyed my career. I did not feel that I had to cling onto that; I felt I was moving into a new phase of my life. I wasn’t going to put my kids in childcare; I wanted to do the caring myself.
Motherhood changes everyone’s lives and mine was no exception, but if I am honest I missed the challenge of work. I loved being a mum, but I knew that I could take on more. Call it a sixth sense if you like, but I knew that a different path would present itself to me. I had no idea what, where or when, but I knew something would change. What I had no idea of then was just how much my life would change and how huge the challenge would be. What I took on next was a hundred times harder than organising a fashion shoot with a bunch of stroppy models used to getting anything they wanted. In fact, a few months down the line, I was often wishing I had it that easy.
Chapter Four
I am a great believer that nothing happens by chance, and a shopping trip with my best friend Jane would change my life forever. I had known Jane most of my life, as I had grown up around her family and she had grown up around mine, and then, aged five, we started primary school together. I remember how our first day was full of excitement, anxiety and fear. We stood there wide-eyed in our straw boaters, our green-and-navy ties that we hadn’t yet mastered the art of tying and our navy pinafores, which were a couple of sizes too big so that we didn’t grow out of them too soon. We were little orphan Annies, and we looked at each other and smiled. I was not a pretty sight when I grinned, as I had no front teeth, which for some reason Jane found incredibly amusing.
Now she was getting married, but tragically her mother and father had both died. ‘I’d love you to come and look for a wedding dress with me,’ she said, and of course I wanted to be there for her. I could combine my two favourite pastimes: shopping for something special, and being with my best friend. So off we went with Francesca and Ruby in their double buggy. They must have been only one and two years old at the time.
Jane tried on loads of dresses, but
nothing looked quite right. They were all either too flouncy, too plain, too low-cut or too high-cut, so by the end of the day she had no dress. I said: ‘There’s one thing we can do on the way home; we’ll go to the shop in Bermondsey where my mum bought her wedding dress.’ We arrived just before closing time, and she found the perfect one – ivory satin with a straight skirt, short train and tiny pearls embroidered round the neckline. We looked at each other across the room and both burst into tears. I was thinking how beautiful she looked, but I was so sad because her parents would not be there to see her on the happiest and the most important day of her life. She didn’t need me to tell her what I was thinking; she just knew. That made us cry even harder. How we never ruined that dress with our salty tears I will never know.
We were both exhausted and starving hungry because we had been out all day. There was an Italian restaurant over the road and I knew the family who ran it. So we went in and grabbed a table. Sitting at the table next to us was a young woman with about seven children round her. She could not have been older than her late twenties, and her oldest child looked about ten and the youngest just a few months. My brain was working overtime trying to do the maths, working out what age she must have been when she became a mother. Then, just as their pizzas arrived, one of the little ones decided she wanted to go to the toilet. The poor woman was really struggling, but because I talk to everybody and anybody I said, ‘Don’t worry, you go to the toilet and I’ll watch the kids.’
