ELLEN FORRESTER December 1952
I grew up mostly in Oldham. It was a dump of a house that we lived in. We had a shop; it had a living part, a kitchen and two bedrooms upstairs. There were seven of us kids and a mother and a father. Now, where were you going to put us all? It was horrendous. There were really eight kids. My eldest brother, Frank, was raised by my maternal grand-mother and great grand-mother. I don’t know what went on there, because Mother never said. What she did say was that if she ever took Frank Junior away, my great grand-mother would do something to herself! I always thought to myself ‘oh my God that is ridiculous. How can someone just walk away with her child?’ So, there must have been more to it than that, but we never got to know the truth. I absolutely adored my Dad he was everything to me. Frank, my Dad, was a painter and decorator and a master sign-writer. He was good at what he did, but the trouble was that he liked women and drink too much. Soon the business and the shop went bust. He ended up doing what he could to survive and get money for himself, but we were left with practically no money most of the time. My Mother was a spiteful old bitch. I know it’s awful for me to say, but she would take her misery out on all of us. She was a horrendous woman, horrendous until the day she died. I swear to God, and that is not something nice to say about your own mother. She would cause trouble in an empty house, her. Her philosophy in life, because there were so many of us growing up, was to divide and conquer, turn one against the other, ‘you said this’, ‘she said that’, and that is how it went on for years, until none of us were talking to each other.
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