MY MOTHER – a free-spirited woman

Had she still been around, my mother Josephine (Josie) would have celebrated International Women’s Day enthusiastically. From an urban mining family in the North East, but married to a Yorkshire farm labourer, she constantly rebelled against the constrictions she met with in rural estate and village life. This often meant being precipitately kicked out of the tied cottages that came with my Dad’s job, regularly remonstrating with surly farmers about the appalling conditions she was obliged to live in: no running water, no bathroom or inside lavatory, no electricity, no hope of improvements or repairs. Her running battles meant that we made a peripatetic progress around Yorkshire, and I went to three primary schools in five years.

Mum’s readiness to defy authority, regardless of the consequences, is best illustrated during the second world war, when our local village life was more than a little disrupted by a variety of incomers, including land girls, conscientious objectors, and prisoners of war. The latter two groups were treated with unremitting hostility by most village people, but not by my firmly socialist and internationally minded parents. Conscientious objectors were welcomed into our house, as was their penchant for radical political talk, and continued these friendships after the war was over.

But the real clash with authority came because of the friendliness shown to prisoners of war. Mum and Dad made firm friends with some of the Italian PoWs, especially a downed pilot, Rosario Pistritto, in civilian life an artist. This was made known to Dad’s employer, Sir Benjamin Dawson, by a local woman widely known as ‘the Ministry of Information’ because of her readiness to tell these kinds of tales. The whole estate staff were lined up in front of Sir Benjamin and the local British camp commander, and told that such fraternisation was unpatriotic and would henceforth be punished.  Dad was more circumspect after this, not wanting to lose his job and home; but my mother didn’t waver, secretly smuggling packets of woodbines to Rosario and his fellow prisoners, while encouraging me and my sister Maureen to continue our own form of fraternisation with these cheerful and lively companions.

The Italian PoWs were repatriated in 1944, when Italy dropped out of the war. Soon after, we received from Rosario Pistritto, now in Messina, Sicily, a letter enclosing pencil portraits of my sister and mother (see above); the letter ‘in grateful remembrance of a friendship which will last eternalli’ and ‘con amore a chi Josie’, (with love to dear Josie). Whatever the constraints of war, Mum had defiantly done her bit for good international relations and humanity. For a fuller account, see Chapter Four: A Child’s War.