When Mum got back from her holiday in Wales with Granny Betty and Grandpa Graham in the Spring of 1986, there was indeed a huge pile of letters waiting for her behind the door, but not one of them contained good news.
Instead there were nine rejected stories – all from magazines that usually bought at least half of the stories she sent to them. And there was worse to come as the neighbour who always kept an eye on the house when there was no one home arrived with two parcels that the postman had left with her.
Mum had to pretend to be glad to see them and thanked the neighbour for taking them in, but she was crying inside as she knew what the parcels contained – the typescripts of the two novels she’d written over the previous twelve months which had both been rejected in the same week by the two publishers she’d sent them to.
She’d done all that work and not earned so much as a penny – and then things got even worse…
First of all the woman whose job Mum had been doing at the fish merchant’s for the last eighteen months decided to move back to Morley and wanted her job back, so Mum lost her most reliable source of income…
Then Grandpa Graham decided to wash Mum’s car – and discovered the start of some serious rust patches under the paintwork. Though it would probably last a few more months, it certainly wouldn’t get through its MOT in the autumn without a lot of work – and, as it was 8 years old by that time, the repairs would cost more than the car was worth…
If Mum wanted to stay mobile, there was only one thing she could do and that was get another car.
When she looked at her bank balance, however, she realised that that was going to be easier said than done. Though her savings still looked quite healthy, most of what was there was money she’d put aside to pay her next two income tax bills and so couldn’t be touched. All she had left in there for herself was £15 and a few pence (about £45 today).
After tipping out old purses and handbags, she found another £6 in small change, while a thorough search through coat pockets revealed another £1.50 that she’d forgotten about. But that was it. She’d scarcely enough to buy a toy car, let alone a real one, and for once poor Mum just didn’t know which way turn.
Her journalist friend wasn’t having any luck getting publishers interested in the three chapters she’d ghost-written for him – and the reason that so many of her short stories had been rejected at once was that the magazines she’d sent them to were either merging with others or giving up altogether.
She started applying for jobs – any jobs – but with the official unemployment figure at well over 3 million, she didn’t have much chance and never got so much as an interview.
Then out of the blue she saw an advert for what seemed like the ideal job – an elderly but wealthy American businessman who spent a lot of his time in the UK wanted someone to ghost-write his life story.
Mum applied and, to her delight, he asked her to meet him in Leeds where he would tell her more about the job and conduct an interview over lunch.
As he didn’t know Leeds well, she arranged to meet him at the station and from there they went to the Hotel Metropole which is at most a five minute walk from the station.
Unfortunately it only took this amount of time for Mum to realise that the man seemed as mad as a box of frogs and their politics were exact opposites.
Desperate as she was to earn some money, she knew there was no way she could work for him – and it was only the fact that she was more than ready for lunch that made her go through with the interview and keep her opinions to herself.
Then two things happened at once. Seeing how hard she was trying to earn more money, Granny Betty and Grandpa Graham offered to lend Mum the money to get another car. They couldn’t afford enough for a brand-new one, but they did lend her enough to buy a low-mileage, second-hand Metro in a dark shade of brown…
And then she got an interview for a four-month, short-term contract job with British Telecom in Leeds. It was basically putting things in alphabetical order and then filing them away – something that Mum was very good at.
She didn’t really want the job, but instead of being at least £3000 better off (as she would have been if the stories and novels had sold earlier in the year), she was now £3000 in debt (That would be nearly £9000 today!). And, though the debt was to the Bank of Granny Betty and Grandpa Graham and there was no time-limit on the repayment, it would still have to be repaid eventually – and Mum still needed money to live on.
So she put on her smartest suit and her highest heels and did her best at the interview, despite some of the stupid questions she was asked. Then she had to go home and wait for their reply…
I’ll tell you what it was in my next post about Mum, but until then please take care and stay safe – and look out for more tales from me soon!
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18/03/21
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 