Rita Higgins

RITA HIGGINS (Mrs Apenteng)

March 1936

When I first saw him, I thought ‘He is a ‘big head’.

It wasn’t love at first sight, Oh No, no, no, no. He was very, and probably still is, very self-assured. He was a handsome bloke, a ward doctor.

I was a Physiotherapist I had trained at Salford Royal School of Physiotherapy I worked for a number of years around the Manchester area before I went over to the West of Ireland and then to Dublin which is where I met Ado and in time I became Mrs Apenteng.

Becoming a physiotherapist was the daftest thing I ever did! I really wanted to go in to the arts, to drama school to go on to the stage, but in those days ‘nice’ young ladies who went to Grammar school, didn’t go to Drama school, they became teachers or something of that ilk, you know, something that was ‘approved of!’

It was my Mother’s prayers that did it (according to her that is) I was her first child to go to Grammar school.

My father was a Salesman from Manchester, but his family were from County Sligo. My Mother’s family were from the West of Ireland with the status of landed gentry. So, a lot was expected of the next generation and education was of prime importance. My maternal grandparents were very much caught up in The Troubles. They were thrown out of their big home and you know went through a lot of deprivation during the time of the Black and Tans .

My mother came over to England when she was sixteen. There were periods when we were small obviously when she didn’t work, but at the beginning of the war, when my Dad went off to the Air Force, she took over his job After the war, Mum went to work for Ferranti, the big electronic place For some reason I was quite a solitary child, I would like to say I was perfect, but I probably wasn’t I didn’t particularly fit in at school. My brother is three years younger than me. One of my sister’s died when she was about six months old. My other sister was ten and a half years younger, so it was far too big a gap for us to be friends. There was also Terence my adopted brother.. My Mother’s sister died when she was quite young, leaving three children. Mother adopted Terence her god child raising him as our brother. Eventually he left and worked all over the place.

We used to play out in the street in those days, and I was the only girl, if I wanted to play I had to play boy’s games.

My Mother and her brother (my Uncle), who was also living in the Manchester area took us all to Ireland for a week when Grandad died. I became really close to my cousins who were roughly my age and I was fed up working where I was. I decided it would be nice to go and live over there and join the social life. I think the town was called Ballinasloe, where I worked in the local hospital. I had been to Dublin quite a few times and I really liked it. So, on deciding I would prefer somewhere a bit more ‘towny’ I managed to get a job in Dublin and I was there for a few years and that is where I met my first husband. Ado had a really bad shoulder that needed intensive physiotherapy and our relationship sort of developed from there. The thing that really intrigued me about him was he let me drive his car open topped sports car.

There were a few raised eyebrows when it became obvious that it was quite serious, plus he was a couple of years older. There were helpful friends - saying ‘you have got to think about the children?’ To me, it honestly didn’t make any difference – maybe I was a bit naïve at the time, but the fact that he was Black, and I was white was totally immaterial, as far as I was concerned. I thought ‘we’ll cope’.

Mum and Dad were remarkably good, or if they didn’t like it they didn’t say very much. Ado could charm the birds off the trees, and he just knew how to handle my Mother, you know she thought he was wonderful, my Dad just accepted him for what he was, he wasn’t particularly bothered. Possibly it was because he was a doctor if I had brought home a Black brick layer they might not have been so enthusiastic, but I think it would have been the brick layer bit rather than his skin colour.

Ado wanted to do his fellowship exams, and he wanted to do them at the college (I can’t remember the title of the college) in London. So, we moved I had a very small flat a lovely little flat, it was tiny, but it was in Regent’s Park, rather a super address while Ado lived on campus and would commute back to me.

In Ireland the bigotry wasn’t openly expressed It would be the ‘look’ and the occasional crossing of the road sort of thing. I’ve always remembered when we went to the hospital Christmas Dinner dance and in those days, it was a full dress formal affair. I heard the remark ‘Oh If I could get a bird like that I would Black my face up’, or some sort of comment. Such talk never bothered me I just ignored it. I thought ‘if you’re thick enough to come out with those sorts of remarks I don’t want to know you’.

There were other comments like ‘Blackbird!’ I used to think well they are beautiful birds. (Laughter). Odd times when we were looking for a flat we were confronted with ‘No we don’t have Blacks here’, then to me. ‘you can come’ and I’d say ‘Sorry, we come as a pair.’ I don’t know, maybe, I wasn’t looking for it. The people that mattered accept us and that was it as far as I was concerned. Sometimes I think people can be a bit over sensitive these days, maybe that is just me. But we didn’t actually go out, ‘go

out’ if you know what I mean. We would visit friends, we did have some social life. The reality was Ado was totally fixated on medicine.

Then he got a job at Stoke Mandeville so we moved and rented a cottage at High Wycombe. No one knew I was pregnant with Kate yes, I was an awkward so and so.

Once Ado qualified he went back to Accra Ghana to sort out somewhere for us to live. For me marriage It never was important… The only reason we did was probably because of the children. I mean in those days if your parents weren’t married then you were the lowest of the low, weren’t you?

Oh, I loved Ghana, absolutely adored it. It is a lovely place and a beautiful country. The people are amazing and as for me being white Umm, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. Both his parents were alive at time and his sister lived at home. His three older brothers were considerably older than him and two had already died so it was a small family wedding. In Ghana, we were quite sociable in that we had a circle of friends and we would have dinner parties and they would have dinner parties and so on and so forth. We had staff so for the dinner parties the cook prepared the meals. I did learn to cook Ghanaian food because I liked it. I learned from the house boy. When I can get the ingredients I still cook now. I keep saying to Dominic every time he goes back, ‘bring me some kenkey ’. ‘But you can get it over here’. I say, ‘But Dominic, I can’t, I have searched’. I loved the Ghanaian food, Grace his sister was a good cook. His Mum was a very traditional cook, you know with the big pot outside in the courtyard, I used to love her food. I did learn, but around our house most of the big stuff, we had people to do everything. I used to brag to friends when I got back to England, laughing I would say, ‘I used to have a cook and houseboy, and a gardener, and a watchman and a nanny and’, sounds good!! Being a cleaner doesn’t mean that you are something inferior and if you get a good cleaner then you treat them like gold. We lived there for about two years, I think, until I was expecting Dominic. Ado wanted to come back he hadn’t quite finished the fellowship, he had got so far with the exam and then he got his job at Stoke Mandeville.

Also, I had had a lot of problems when I had Kate. Fortunately, I was in Queen Charlottes in London, otherwise I don’t think either of us would still be around. So, we thought it would be better to be back here in case anything went wrong during Dominic’s birth. Again, Ado had to move into the college in London, so we thought the easiest thing would be for me to move up to Manchester where my parent were and buy a house. We thought about buying in London but even then, prices in London were ridiculous.

You know how light begins to dawn. I thought ‘he has no bloody intention of moving back up here’. I kept finding houses and there was always something he would find wrong with them. If he was going anywhere I wasn’t going to be the ‘little wife at home’ Not until I was actually on my own, In the end, I said ‘look I want to know exactly what is happening. I am going buy myself a house and if that is what you want, then that is fine’. Eventually, I brought a nice a terraced house in Newton Heath not too far from my parents. And I got a job, locally at Ancoats Hospital . But what really galled me more than anything is that I had to get his signature on the mortgage application –and that really, really annoyed me. I insisted that he paid for the children’s’ schooling.

Kate was extremely bright and by the time she was three she was reading. I would have been quite happy for her to go to the local school but in those days, you had to be five and I thought having to wait two years she would be going barmy. There was a really good private prep school, not far away, so I got Kate in there.

Dominic was about two, two and a half at the time, fortunately the hospital I was working at had a

creche, so I used to take him with me and drop him off. He was very clever too and as soon as he was old enough, he joined Kate at the Prep school.

That was the beginning of the end of the marriage.

Once I brought the house he used to come up at weekends to see the kids and I would drive them down to London. But as they got older they didn’t want to be wasting their weekends, as they saw it, because they had friends from school and as they saw it more interesting things to do with their time. I don’t think they were bothered particularly about the separation. (If they had, they never showed it.). Dominic was two when all this happened, Kate had more contact with her father when she was a lot younger, but I think she was still too young for it to have any great impact. I think that Ado thought that divorce would suit him financially, because that is all that he was remotely concerned about, it didn’t make any difference to me.

This particular summer Terence my adopted cousin had come home so my Mother decided she would have a party for him and my brother Michael inviting all their old friends, you know so Terence could spend time with everybody.

As it happened, my Terry, and a whole gang of them used to hang around together. Terry was in the throes of a divorce and had come back from where he was living in Abu Dhabi, for a month to make sure the Decree Nisi was finalised. As he happened to be at home that weekend he was invited to the party for Terence. I have known him since we were ‘that big’. But He walked in to the room that night and (click) that was it, bang, crash wallop thump.

As far as I know Ado hasn’t married again. He has I think, a niece who lives in and looks after him, I think he is quite erm, not exactly disabled, but he is not very mobile, he doesn’t get around very much both Kate and Dominic feel that he doesn’t try very hard. He is very much the patriarch who sits back and lets the ladies of the family run around like scalded hens and as for Kate doing the same, he has picked a ‘wrong un’ I’m afraid.

Ado feels that Kate should be the traditional, dutiful African daughter. But Kate doesn’t agree. Kate doesn’t see that at all, Kate doesn’t do dutiful. No, she is quite happy to help out, if the need arises. But she certainly has no intentions of sort of handing her life over to look after her father. Kate goes over periodically to do her ‘visit’, but she seems to spend all her time trying to tell him what he should be doing and pointing out the error of his ways, and he is not doing this, and he should be doing that. I think Dominic is quite happily totally split down the middle. He is one of those people who can change his persona, his vocabulary, his voice, depending on who he is talking to. So, he could talk to the Queen perfectly happily in perceived English or what you call it, or to a gang of kids in the way kids talk these days.

In some ways he is a charmer like his father. He is also a very, very, caring person. He genuinely cares about people and I think that is probably the way he feels about his father. I don’t know if there is a lot of fraternal or paternal love there, because I think Dominic has seen what has gone on over the years and understands how life really was.

He sends me cards on Father’s Day. He sent me quite a long beautiful poem about a bloke who was doing a spelling test and was asked to spell the word father and he said MOTHER and then explained why. There are occasions when Dominic’s has made the point that I was both their Father as well as their Mother, sort of thing. I never thought that was my duty it is just how life went.

Do I regret my marriage? I mean obviously I regret that it didn’t go the way it should have done, but I got two beautiful children out of it. Rita and (her) Terry will celebrate 33 years of marriage in 2018.

FAMILY Kate Apenteng Dominic Apenteng Dr Ado Apenteng March 1931 Ghana - July 2018 Ghana