Gypsy Jane. Jane Lee
Although Shell and I didn’t get on as kids, we’re the best of friends now. It was just sisters being silly sisters when we were young.
It was hard for my mum. She had three jobs and three kids by the age of eighteen. She worked in a factory at night and had two cleaning jobs on the go in the daytime as well. I remember Mum coming home from her night job with loads of copper strips covered in paper and we would sit for hours taking the paper off the copper before she drove it down to the local scrap yard to cash it in.
‘It all helps, kids,’ she would say and treat us all for helping her earn a bit extra.
She didn’t just have it hard, she had it very hard and that is probably what drove her to drink. But back then us three kids just took all her hard work for granted, not realising that looking after us, holding down three jobs and keeping a home together was taking its toll. Being kids, we could only see the good stuff and not the harshness of everyday life. Mum was definitely the boss in our house. What she said was final and, if she had the hump, we all knew that we needed to keep out of her way, or else.
Mum always said I chatted away a lot like a ‘little old granny’. So, crazy as it sounds, I earned my underworld nickname of the Gran very early on in life. When I started school, everybody called me Granny too – and it’s true because I’ve always got an answer for everything. Later on in life as I developed a bit of a reputation it got shortened to the Gran.
Most people didn’t even know my real name at school. It was never mentioned and I have always been Granny or the Gran ever since I can remember. If you asked anyone if they knew who Jane Lee was, people would ask, ‘Who?’ But you if you asked about the Gran, especially later on, and everybody knew who I was.
I was a tomboy in the clothes I wore and the way I acted. I wouldn’t be playing with dolls and a pram like my sister. I’d be out making camps or playing in the factories that had closed down. And I always got on a lot better with my dad than with my mum. But there’s one thing I can say about Mum. Nobody could say anything bad about us to her. It didn’t matter what we’d done. She would back us a hundred per cent. Don’t get me wrong. When she got us home, we would be punished but, while anybody was about, she would die before she allowed anyone to put us down.
One of the neighbours once knocked on our front door and said to Mum, ‘Tell your Jane to stop playing with the ball. It has just hit my window.’
Mum was fuming. She went up to the woman’s house and took her front gate off its hinges and threw it straight through her front window. ‘Now fucking moan, you silly cow,’ Mum shouted as she stormed back home. That was my mum and the tough way I was brought up. As a kid, I found that episode hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing. But I got a good hiding when we got back home for laughing and for letting the ball hit the window.
Another time I’d beaten up two sisters for taking the mickey out of me. They called me scruffy and thought they were clever because they were together. I just battered the pair of them. I was always a bit handy like that for a girl. Not big and strong, just prepared to have a go. Anyway, around came their mum and dad and my mum put the fear of God into them. It got a bit physical and by the time they left they were terrified. Nobody ever complained about any of us again.
It didn’t matter that money was scarce because we always ate well. Every night we had a proper cooked dinner and I’ve never known what it was to be hungry. There was always plenty of food on our table. Yet Mum was turning more and more to drink and that was when things started to get difficult for me. Brandy was her tipple and she couldn’t get enough of it. To be honest, ever since I can remember she was drunk and, believe me, growing up in a house with a drunk who didn’t mind giving me a slap made life hard. Mum was a violent drunk, I think it’s fair to say. At least, that is what she became.
I was just a kid and I had a mum who was eventually drunk 24/7. She would come and beat me in the night and throw me out in the street. I’d sleep outside on the stairs in the flats opposite our house until the morning. As the years went by, I was sleeping under the flats more frequently, yet Mum was always sorry in the morning. It was tough on me. I thought Mum hated me and she was always apologetic the next day. But by dinner time she was back to being nasty and by night time she was well drunk and started getting violent again and I’d be back under the flats after getting a good hiding. Eventually, it didn’t bother me. I was thinking I’d rather be there instead of being in the house with her.
There wasn’t much Dad could do at the time about Mum’s behaviour. Dad didn’t know the half of what was going on with me and Mum. He would have killed her if he had known she was throwing me out in the night. But I couldn’t tell him and cause more rows. She wouldn’t do it until everyone was in bed. She would be sitting in the kitchen drinking until she wasn’t herself anymore. Then some nasty violent person in a drunken rage took over. She would come for me. Sometimes I was awake and made out I was asleep, hoping she would leave me alone, but the drink just wouldn’t let her.
Since Shell was her favourite and John was just John, all her bad temper and violence, was directed at me. But Mum couldn’t handle me and, boy, did I bring the nutty side out in her. I didn’t get on with my sister either. Shell was Miss prim and proper and didn’t have a hair out of place. Unlike me, she was always immaculate and I suppose she was embarrassed about the way I was. My rough-and-tumble behaviour got too much for her and she didn’t want me in her room. This was when I was eight, long before I ended up sleeping outdoors. Mum told me I had to move downstairs and sleep on the sofa. Mum said Shell needed her own room.
I didn’t like sleeping downstairs as I was afraid of the dark and, being downstairs, I felt I was all on my own. I would put my head under the covers and wait for morning. I was too afraid to even peek my head back out. I was scared to death, to be honest. I started to resent Shell and Mum. So one day, when Mum was taking a nap while her hair was in rollers, I got the scissors and I cut every roller off her head. She had a big night out with Dad planned and, when she woke up, I got the beating of my life. I denied everything, obviously, but being the only other person in the house at the time – and the only one nutty enough to do it in the first place – there was no way out. But that was one beating I took on the chin. It was worth it. Mum was a bit of a dolly bird and she had to wear a wig for three months after that. And she cried like a baby. It was a sign of just how far I was prepared to go. I didn’t have any limits and next on my list was Shell.
She had won a goldfish at the fair. She only had it a couple of days and I wasn’t even allowed to look at it because we weren’t getting on. So I waited until Mum and Shell were at the other end of the room and I grabbed it by its tail and shouted, ‘Shell!’ When her and Mum looked round at me, I lifted my head, opened my mouth and, while Shell screamed, ‘No! No!’ I swallowed it down whole in one big gulp. The goldfish went down a lot easier than the incident did with Mum. I got battered by her again but I felt it was worth it. I felt as if I’d got my own back on them both. Don’t get me wrong – I’d never usually hurt an animal and never have since. In fact, I have always felt guilty about it because it was no way to treat a goldfish. I should have done something to Shell instead.
I was so strong willed that I always got on Mum’s wrong side and Mum was more forceful than Dad. He tried to stop me and Mum from rowing but it was no good because he couldn’t control either of us. She was a mad woman and, come to think of it, maybe my gypsy blood isn’t the only thing that made me the way I am.
Mum had a babysitter called Rosie and she became my guardian angel and best friend. When she moved into the flats, I no longer had to sleep rough on the stairs. I’d just go straight to hers and she would always welcome me in her house, which became my second home.
One night, after mum turned on me, something snapped inside me and I fought back against her for the first time in my life. I grabbed her and stopped her from hitting me. I wrestled her to the ground and held her there until she calmed down. She soon stopped trying to hit me and I swore there and then that she’d never hit me again. I was so young and that was the start of living from house to house because I couldn’t be under the same roof as Mum anymore. All this wasn’t doing my schooling much good. I went to Cumberland school in Plaistow but, to be honest, I was never that