by Maureen Lee
‘It’s mine too,’ the manager enthused. The siren went to signal an air raid had started, but both men ignored it.
‘But Judy seems more appropriate. What do you think, luv?’ he asked Mum, who was writhing in agony on the back seat and hoping they’d reach the hospital before any bombs fell.
‘Judy’s fine,’ she gasped.
‘What about if it’s a boy?’ the manager asked.
‘Clark, after Clark Gable,’ Dad replied.
‘Have you seen Gone with the Wind?’
‘Twice.’
‘Magnificent picture, wasn’t it?’
‘Superb. You enjoyed it, didn’t you, love?’
‘It was marvellous,’ Mum gulped.
Judy’s two brothers and two sisters were called Dorothy, Paulette (after Paulette Goddard), Ronnie (Ronald Colman), and Fred (Fredric March). The Smiths were a happy family. They weren’t exactly poor, but neither were they comfortably off. Dad didn’t earn much in his exceedingly dull job in an insurance office. Fortunately, Mum could do wonders with a couple of pounds of mincemeat and the younger children didn’t mind if they wore hand-me-down clothes.
Mum and Dad argued a lot, not over anything important, mainly the films with which they were obsessed: whether Ronald Colman was a better actor than Herbert Marshall; if Clark Gable was more handsome with a moustache or without; was it Jean Harlow or Rosalind Russell who had starred in China Seas – a few days later, Dad had gone round to the local picture house to ask the manager and it turned out to be both.
Judy did well at school. She had ‘a quick brain’, according to her father. All Sylvester Smith’s children had quick brains, something of which he was inordinately proud, particularly when they all passed scholarships and went to grammar schools. They’d inherited their brains from their dad, he told them frequently, and their looks from their radiantly pretty, golden-haired, peachy-skinned mother, who could well have become a film star herself had she not fallen in love with you know who. ‘Old monkey face,’ he would add. It was his way of fishing for compliments, knowing that someone would insist he bore a striking resemblance to Spencer Tracy.
‘Perhaps we should have gone to Hollywood when we first got married,’ he would ruminate aloud, his brow furrowed, just like Spencer’s. ‘I could have become a director or a producer or something. We’d be living in a white mansion with a swimming pool by now, ’stead of Penny Lane.’
‘But if Mum was busy being a film star, you wouldn’t have had us,’ Dorothy once pointed out.
‘Oh, well, given the choice …’ Dad said hastily, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging in the air so his children could only guess what the choice would have been had he been given it. Dorothy thought he’d sooner be in Hollywood and Fred thought Penny Lane. The others couldn’t make up their minds.
Anyway, their house had a little touch of Hollywood about it. Dad collected the Picturegoer from the paper shop every Friday on his way home from work and, after he and Mum had read it from cover to cover, it would be passed on to the children who devoured it just as keenly if they could read or, if they hadn’t yet learned, just looked at the photos of the stars and scenes of the films they were in.
The magazines would then be put in a box in the cupboard under the stairs where they were easy to get at for reference purposes. If there was a photo of a star he or Mum particularly liked, Dad would buy another Picturegoer and the pictures would be cut out and pinned to the walls of their bedroom.
They grew up, the Smith children, thinking that the little, unpretentious house in Penny Lane had something extra-special about it. The stars were their friends. Sylvester referred to them by their first names: Clark, Franchot, Ingrid, Humphrey. ‘I see Humph and Lauren are getting married,’ he would say looking up from the Picturegoer, irritating Mum no end because she preferred to read it for herself.
At nine, Judy wrote to the studios for a photograph of Alan Ladd, the first man with whom she fell in love. When it arrived, she burst into tears because he was so handsome, yet unattainable.
It struck her then, although in a way she could never have put into words, that her family were brushing with the softest of wings against an alien world far away across the ocean to which they didn’t belong and never would. Yet it seemed an innocent and charming thing to do, to escape from their own humdrum little world into a star-studded tinsel town in California, far better than being interested in nothing at all like most people.
From that day on, Judy regarded her family’s fixation with Hollywood with an amused tolerance, although stayed in love with Alan Ladd until she was fourteen, keeping his photo underneath her pillow to look at before she went to sleep and first thing in the morning when she woke up.
It would seem all the children had come down to earth at some time during their young lives. Dorothy, the eldest, became a teacher, much to the disappointment of Sylvester who’d been hoping all his incredibly handsome children would go into show business. Then Ronnie chose a career in the Navy, Paulette went into nursing, and Fred took his A.M.I.Mech.E and became an engineering draughtsman. All her father’s hopes were now centred on Judy, who was to disappoint him again by getting engaged during her final year at school and marrying the following Christmas after spending a few months in an office as dull as his own.
Judy met Harry Moon in the Cavern, a jazz club that had opened in Liverpool a few years before – her father was a keen aficionado. One wintry Sunday in February, she was with a friend from school listening to Cy Laurie’s Jazz Band, when a young man appeared at the end of her row, his eyes searching for an empty seat.
‘Who does he remind me of?’ she asked herself and realized with a little thrill that it was Alan Ladd. He had the same blond hair and perfectly regular features. Someone moved up so the end seat became vacant and he nodded a ‘thank you’, and she saw he had the same smile and the same white teeth. He was smartly dressed in a grey tweed suit, woollen shirt, and check tie. The other men present were more casually attired.
During the interval, when people were milling around buying soft drinks from the bar and her friend had gone to stand in the queue for the Ladies, Judy managed to let her handkerchief fall at Alan Ladd’s feet. She was looking her best that night, in a white angora jumper Paulette had given her because it itched, a maroon pleated skirt, a hand-me-down of Dorothy’s, and high-heeled boots Mum and Dad had bought her for Christmas. She’d only recently begun to use lipstick and the pale rose on her lips was the same shade as her cheeks. Mum had set her wavy hair in a casual style very similar to Marilyn Monroe’s.
‘You’ve dropped something,’ Alan Ladd said, picking the hankie up.
‘Thanks very much, I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Do you come here often?’ he asked conversationally. She identified a spark of interest in his blue eyes and wondered if it was reflected in her own that were a slightly darker shade of blue.
‘About once a week, usually on Sunday. I’m not too keen on skiffle. I like New Orleans jazz best.’ She felt slightly disappointed. Close up, he didn’t look even faintly like Alan Ladd. His nose was a tiny bit bigger, or possibly smaller, his mouth wider, or it might have been narrower. He just wasn’t the man she’d spent five years of her life madly in love with. She quickly got over her disappointment: despite the differences, he was just as handsome.
‘What do you do for a living?’ he enquired in a friendly tone.
‘I’m still at school. In May, I’ll be eighteen and I’ll be leaving in July. What do you do? For a living that is.’
‘I’m a photographer,’ he said modestly, though she could tell he was rather proud of the fact. ‘My dad’s got his own shop in Menlove Avenue.’
‘That’s not far from us. We live in Penny Lane.’
‘We might bump into each other sometime. Look, we’d better sit down.’ People were returning to their seats. ‘The Blue Genes Skiffle Group is on next.’
She wanted to spit, thinking that she’d lost him, but when the music e
nded and everyone was filing out, she felt a hand on her arm and turned to find Alan Ladd regarding her with slightly more interest than before.
‘Will you be here next Sunday?’
‘I expect so,’ Judy said casually, although she wouldn’t have missed next Sunday for the world.
‘See you next week then. What’s your name?’
‘Judy Smith.’
‘I’m Harry Moon.’
Within a month they were in love. They got engaged on her birthday and were married at Christmas. The youngest Smith, Judy was the first to marry. There was a flat over the photographer’s shop, which the present tenants were about to vacate, where they could live at a nominal rent.
‘Dad said we could have it for nothing, but that wouldn’t be right. I insisted we pay something.’
Harry was twenty-two, a cautious, honourable man, easy-going to a fault. Judy loved him for it. Always careful to do what he considered was right, he gave back change if he’d been given too much and, if they were on a bus or tram and the conductor was on the top deck and he hadn’t paid the fare when it was time to get off, he would run upstairs and pay, even if he sometimes nearly missed his stop – Judy and almost every other person she knew would have jumped off and considered themselves lucky. And kept any overpaid change.
She got married in her mother’s carefully preserved wedding gown that she’d made herself: cream crêpe, full-length, with a boat-shaped neckline edged with pearls and otherwise completely plain apart from the leg-of-mutton sleeves.
‘You look just as beautiful as your mum did on our wedding day,’ Dad said emotionally in the car on the way to the church. ‘Harry’s a lucky chap. I’m glad you’re marrying into an artistic family, Jude. Did you know his dad belongs to a film group? They actually make short films. He’s invited me to join.’
The Moons and the Smiths got on extraordinarily well. The two sets of parents had already become good friends and it turned out that Harry’s sister, Eve, was a teacher and already knew Judy’s sister, Dorothy.
Life, it seemed, was perfect. The wedding was perfect. Living in the flat over the shop was perfect, particularly making love with Harry. They continued to go to the Cavern where rock ‘n’ roll had taken over from jazz and scruffy young men who would eventually become world famous played their wild, raucous music, sending the crowds into a delirium of excitement.
Judy gave up her office job to look after the shop while Mr Moon was in the studio taking photographs that flattered the sitters no end. Harry did all the outside jobs: the weddings, christenings, parties, and family portraits.
They’d been married six months when Judy discovered she was expecting a baby and Joe was born in the spring of 1961. By this time, they’d already moved into their own house: a large, comfortable semi-detached in Heathfield Road, no distance from the shop, Judy’s mum and dad, and her in-laws. Harry was a partner in the business and could easily afford the mortgage. Their second son, Sam, arrived a year later, only missing his mother’s twenty-first birthday by a day.
Judy felt as if she had been uniquely blessed, moving seamlessly from a supremely happy childhood to a blissfully happy marriage, now with the addition of two beautiful, healthy sons: Joe, with his delicate skin and golden curls took after her, whereas the more robust Sam had dark hair and navy-blue eyes and took after no one they could think of.
Her sisters hadn’t been so lucky. Dorothy, who had married the year after her, was having trouble with a husband who drank too much and had already had one affair – ‘That I know of,’ Dorothy said darkly. Paulette, now twenty-five, longed to get married, but so far hadn’t met a man with whom she felt inclined to spend the next fifty or sixty years.
Despite her state of utter contentment, Judy couldn’t help but worry that it might not last. Life was so unexpected. No matter how good things were, you could never tell what was waiting around the next corner. Look at her father, for instance! He’d been seriously depressed when nearly all the cinemas in Liverpool had closed down and were converted into Bingo halls, used for storage, or just left to rot. It was the last thing he’d imagined happening. And who would have thought that the day would come when the Picturegoer would publish its final issue, as it did in April 1960? Dad felt as if his world was falling apart. His idols were either dead or retired and had been replaced by actors who hadn’t the charisma of Clark or Humphrey, Rosalind or Rita, apart from Marilyn Monroe whom he worshipped. He was gradually sinking into a decline when his children clubbed together and bought him a television and he was able to watch old films in the comfort of his own home, although it didn’t have the magic of a real picture house.
Judy and Harry suffered the usual traumas of parents, nursing the children through chickenpox, measles, coughs and colds that hinted of something far more deadly, but turned out to be nothing of the sort. When Joe was eleven, he broke his arm playing football, and Sam acquired a squint at the same age and had to have an operation to put it right – Harry sat with him in the hospital throughout his first night, much to the irritation of the staff.
The shared agony of these incidents brought them even closer. These two wonderful human beings were the results of their love for each other. Harry adored them and talked of little else, boasting to all and sundry of his sons’ achievements at school or on the football or cricket pitch, boring his listeners silly and showing not even the slightest interest in their children.
‘People will start avoiding you,’ Judy warned.
He grinned. ‘I don’t care. If I run out of people, I’ll talk to myself in the mirror.’
Then the day came that sixteen-year-old Joe brought home his first girlfriend, Shirley. Harry waited until they’d gone then, to Judy’s utter astonishment, he said in a tone of voice she’d never heard him use before, a mixture of outrage and anger, ‘She was nothing but a cheap little tart. All that eye make-up! And I suspect her hair was dyed.’
‘She seemed quite nice to me.’ Shirley had undoubtedly gone to town with the eyeliner, but Judy didn’t see that it mattered. ‘She’s only fifteen. Her and Joe aren’t likely to get married.’
‘I didn’t like her.’
‘She probably didn’t like you, either, the way you glowered at her. I just hope Joe didn’t notice. Really, Harry,’ she chided, ‘you’re going to have to be more tolerant. If Joe senses you don’t like Shirley, it’ll only make him want to go out with her more. Let him give her up in his own time – or she in hers.’
‘Our Joe would never go out with a girl I disapproved of,’ Harry said incredulously.
‘Oh, yes, he would,’ she assured him. ‘Would you have given me up if your father had disapproved?’
‘But you were perfect!’
‘Joe might think Shirley’s perfect – for the moment.’
Harry managed not to glower when Joe turned up with a succession of girlfriends, although always found something wrong with them. Judy began to wonder if there was a woman on earth good enough for his son.
‘At least our Sam’s got a sensible head on his shoulders,’ he muttered. ‘He’s more interested in enjoying himself than bothering with women at his age.’ Sam hung around with a crowd of young people of both sexes and appeared to be having a whale of a time.
‘He will eventually.’ For the first time, Harry was getting on her nerves. He was too possessive by a mile, too – she tried to think of a more appropriate word – too involved in his children’s lives, not accepting that they had to be left to go their own way, choose their own wives.
Joe was twenty-one and obviously smitten when he came home with Donna Nelson, four years older than him, a severe looking woman with a permanent frown. Her jet-black hair was brushed smoothly back from a face that might have looked pretty had she ever smiled. Even Judy was faintly shocked when it emerged that Donna was divorced and had a two-year-old son.
‘I trust you won’t be going out with her again,’ Harry exploded the minute he had his son on his own.
Joe looked taken
aback. ‘I’m sorry, Dad, but I don’t think that’s any of your business,’ he stammered. ‘I’ll go out with whomever I like.’
‘But she’s been married before: she’s actually got a child.’ Harry could hardly contain his anger.
‘Ashley’s a really great kid. You’ll like him.’
‘Ashley!’ Harry almost spat the word out. ‘What sort of name is that?’
‘Harry,’ Judy said warningly. An old memory surfaced and she recalled Leslie Howard’s character in Gone with the Wind had been called Ashley. She hadn’t liked Donna much herself. The girl was too abrupt, too surly, almost rude when she’d tried to be friendly. But if she was Joe’s choice …
It seemed that she was because not long afterwards, Joe announced that he and Donna were getting married.
Donna had a married sister with two children in their teens. Her parents were dead. At first, she rebuffed all Judy’s offers to help with the register office wedding and pay for a hotel so they could have a proper reception with rather more guests than the handful Donna envisaged. With great reluctance, she conceded it would be unfair not to invite Joe’s grandparents, his aunts, uncles, cousins, and a few of his friends, so Judy booked a room big enough for forty at a hotel in Woolton.
‘I had a big wedding last time,’ Donna said sullenly, ‘and look at the way that turned out.’
Judy didn’t ask the reason why she’d got divorced. As long as Joe knew and was satisfied, she didn’t care.
It was a while since both families had gathered together for a big occasion. Judy’s heart swelled with a mixture of love and pride when, in March 1983, she sat in the front row of the register office and watched Sam, the best man, hand the ring to his brother. Joe was the taller of the two, over six feet, lithe and graceful. He always looked a touch aristocratic with his long, thin nose and high cheekbones. At twenty, Sam was still very boyish, solidly built, with a lovely open face that always seemed to be set in a grin. She’d never had a favourite, but Sam had always seemed more vulnerable and easily hurt than his brother and she worried about him more. These two young, handsome men were her sons and her love for them was absolute.
