MADGE ABBEY (Mrs Marjorie Adama) January 1934 with daughter MARIA
I came to Manchester with my friend, I can’t remember the year, for work. There was no work in Barrow in Furness where I was born in 1934. My Dad worked in the Ship Yard and my Mum was a cleaner there. I was about eighteen leaving behind my two brothers. My sister lived in Stretford Manchester, she was married to an Irish man. We both moved in with her and got a job in Trafford Park at the Carborundum. I didn’t go out a lot, but my friend was a bit more adventurous so one weekend when we were fed up, she said, ‘Oh Let’s go down Moss Side’ and off we went! We went to the Big Alex , had a few ciders then we said ‘Let’s go in one of the clubs’, so we went in the Reno . It was good, yeah, really good. You had to go down some stairs, and of course it was all Black people. I had never met any Black people before then. We just went in, got a drink and started dancing and that was it really. Lots of the men kept coming up to us and asking us to dance, asking to take us home and all that. We were the only two white girls there at the time. But we never went home with anybody. Possibly because we had to get back to Stretford, to my sister’s. When we told my sister she wasn’t very happy, she wasn’t very happy at all, but she was the type who didn’t say a lot, but I could tell she wasn’t very happy. It didn’t stop us though, we had enjoyed ourselves, got a buzz out of it, so we went back the next week (laughter). I was in the Reno when they filmed it for the TV. Me and my friend went in and they told us they were filming. A friend of mine asked me to dance. We were jiving and the next minute we found out that
20
