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they had these conversations until she was able to see things from his point of view

they both followed the news about the civil rights protests, Slim said the Negro needed Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

when they were assassinated within three years of each other

he disappeared into the hills for a few days

Hattie saw that neither of her children liked being coloured and she didn’t know what to do about it

Ada Mae painted herself as a white child in her drawings, and from the age of twelve Sonny never wanted to be seen with his father beyond the village, hated having to go to the cattle fairs with him as a teenager and he begged her not to bring his father to school events

she overheard Sonny telling a boy whose father dropped him home one day that Slim, who was leading sheep out to pasture, was a hired labourer

Slim would have given his life for his children.

3

When Ada Mae and Sonny were sixteen and seventeen, they announced out of the blue one breakfast that they were leaving home

we’re going today and you can’t stop us, Sonny said, spreading his legs wide like he was a grown man, shoulders back, daring his parents to challenge him

we’re not going to spend another day in the back of beyond baling hay, ploughing fields, milking cows and mucking out animal dung

for the rest of our lives

Hattie remembers it so clearly

Ada Mae wore her new orange mini-dress with a high neck she’d ordered though the Biba catalogue, white patent leather boots that rode up to her knees, hair sculpted into a beehive, false lashes, black pencil around her eyes making them appear huge

she was beautiful then, of course she didn’t think so

it’s only now, when they look at old family photos together that Ada Mae exclaims, with more than a touch of sadness, look at me, Ma, I was quite lovely, wasn’t I?

Sonny was bone-thin in those days, in the way of teenage boys before they become men, his legs gangly and uncoordinated, he’d grown too quickly to the height of his father

he wore his purple velvet flare suit, his hair was trimmed almost to the bone back then, to hide its kinks, she suspected

with a side-parting that looked absurd

neither were dressed for the long ride to London

they left on Sonny’s seventeenth birthday present – the Honda motorbike he’d begged them to buy him

said he needed it to come and go more freely

it cost them two bullhorns

Ada Mae sat pillion, Sonny revved the bike and the pair of them roared off out of the yard, down the hill, through the village and towards the glamorous streets that awaited them in London

Ada Mae was to become a secretary to a pop star, Sonny a rich businessman

they roared noisily out of their parents’ lives leaving a plume of smoke and fumes

leaving her and Slim marooned on eight hundred acres of farmland

it took time to adjust to not hearing Ada Mae playing Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and Cilla Black records on the record player in the Long Room, where she danced in the modern way

if one of them made the mistake of entering, she shouted at them to bloody well leave her alone for once

Sonny pretended to play the guitar in there, while listening to the Rolling Stones

they used to peep through the windows to amuse themselves

Hattie and Slim found it strange sitting down to meals for two instead of four, washing one set of sheets instead of three, to not taking the temperature of teenage moods when their kids were sloping about at home

they never stopped worrying about them being so far away in the capital city

where anything could happen to them

London didn’t last, they didn’t even make it to three whole months (lightweights!)

Sonny worked in a boutique in Carnaby Street that didn’t pay enough to live on, Ada Mae washed dishes in the kitchen of the Regent Palace Hotel

it was impossible to get accommodation other than in a run-down house with coloured immigrants in a slum area called Notting Hill

the immigrants scornfully accused them of being like white people

Hattie wanted to say she thought they’d see that as a compliment and contemplated how her bairns had gone from the Scottish Borders to London, only to discover it was an alien country down there

she was happy when they settled in Newcastle, only seventy miles from the farm

instead of over three hundred

Ada Mae married Tommy, the first man who asked, grateful anyone would

she didn’t exactly have suitors lining up in Newcastle wanting to proudly introduce their black girlfriend to their parents in the nineteen-sixties

Tommy was on the ugly side, a face like a garden gnome, her and Slim joked, none too bright, either

Hattie suspected the lad didn’t have too many choices himself

a coalminer from young, he was apprenticed as a welder when the mines were shut down

he proved to be a good husband and really did love Ada Mae, in spite of her colour

as he told Hattie and Slim when he came to ask for her hand

lucky that Slim didn’t lay him out

there and then

Sonny’s experience was somewhat different, according to Ada Mae who reported back that women queued up round the block for him

they thought he was the next best thing to dating Johnny Mathis

he married Janet, a barmaid, whose parents objected

and told her to choose.

4

When she first saw him, Slim Jackson reminded Hattie of the Masai warriors she’d seen in the National Geographic magazine Pa had ordered monthly from America in her childhood

they’d pore over the photographs together on Sunday afternoons after church and explore the pictures and stories of places and people beyond the farm, village and surrounding towns

Pa had travelled across Europe in the army, he’d been to Egypt and Gallipoli, developed an appetite for things foreign

Hattie met Slim in 1945 at an afternoon dance in Newcastle for demobbed American Negro regiments who were due to be sent home

it was her first dance in the big city, her parents sat outside in the farm truck, praying she’d meet someone

she’d had no luck so far

Hattie was astonished at the number of other coloured Englishwomen there, who’d travelled from as far afield as Cardiff, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, London

they were all kinds of mixtures, most with a white mother, which came out when they got chatting in the powder room

Hattie felt instantly comfortable among these girls, who all looked like versions of herself, she’d never felt so welcomed

they were surprised she worked on a farm, felt sorry for her as they re-applied lipstick and powdered their faces in the mirror, posing like they were all beauty queens whereas she looked plain, wore no make-up, which really won’t do, one of the girls said, and set to brightening up features Hattie had thought of as plain

the women cooed over her and said now you look pretty, Hattie

when she looked at the red on her cheeks and her lips in the mirror, she agreed

the other girls wore glamorous taffeta dresses which showed off their waists, and long white gloves, and stilettos

Hattie felt embarrassed by the dowdy dress Ma had made her from Woman’s Weekly

inside the hall the band played swing music, the dance floor was a swirl of girls in dresses as colourful as butterflies and smart green soldiers’ uniforms, everyone pairing up, none of the girls were left as wallflowers, which had been Hattie’s fate at local barn dances

only her father would take her for a spin

the girls agreed that most Englishmen wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole, other than to expect easy sex, and African or West Indian men were few and far between

every one of them was a belle of the ball at this dance, as the soldiers made quite clear, in thrall to such high-class, light-skinned ladies