For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice.

Chapter One

Julie’s Arrival

In Middlesborough in the late 1960s it was the custom for mothers who had had one straightforward birth in hospital to deliver their babies at home after that, which is a daunting prospect for anyone, even for someone like me who prides herself on being a down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman. So many different fears and thoughts are racing through your head as your due date draws near. What if something goes wrong? What if the baby comes early, or gets stuck? When a newborn baby’s life could be at stake it is very comforting to know you have all the technology and expertise of a well-equipped hospital at your disposal, rather than one midwife, a panicking husband and a pan full of boiling water. That option, however, was not on offer to us.

My mind was buzzing with fears of imagined disasters and imminent emergency ambulance rides as the pain started to build up. My mam took my two-year-old son Gary off for a walk in his pushchair to keep him out of the way. The midwife had popped in when the contractions started in the morning but then disappeared off, breezily saying she would be back at lunchtime, leaving my husband, Charlie, plenty of time to panic as my moans increased in frequency and he started to imagine having to perform the delivery himself. No doubt the midwife had plenty of other patients to tend to; for her it was just another day’s work, even if it meant a lot more to us.

By eleven o’clock I had to go upstairs and lie down, hauling myself up on the banister, memories of just how painful the whole childbirth business is coming rushing back with every spasm. How is it that we women manage to forget all that agony almost the moment it is over? I could hear Charlie making frantic phone calls downstairs as I concentrated on the pain upstairs, lying on the bed, wanting it all to be over but not wanting the baby to come before the midwife got back.

The girl answering the phone at the doctor’s surgery must have asked Charlie if I was starting to push.

‘Are yer starting to push?’ he shouted up.

‘No,’ I yelled back.

‘Well, if the baby’s born,’ the girl told him, ‘just wrap it in a blanket, wipe its eyes and put it on the side. Don’t try to cut the cord.’

‘This is good,’ I heard him grumbling as he put the phone down. ‘I pay me National Health stamps and there’s nobody here when you need them!’

The doctor sauntered in at about twelve to take a look and immediately saw that I was ready to deliver whether the midwife was there or not.

‘I’d better go and wash my hands,’ he said, but just then the midwife bustled back in and he decided to go downstairs to keep Charlie company instead.

‘I’ll wait around in case you need stitches afterwards,’ he said.

I dare say the two men were brewing up for a cup of tea as we women got down to work in the bedroom.

The birth itself was blissful and peaceful. ‘She’s arrived like an angel!’ exclaimed the midwife, as Julie emerged into the world with her arms folded beatifically across her chest. That was the first I knew I had a girl, because of course we didn’t have scans that could tell you in those days.

I hauled myself up on my elbows to catch a glimpse of my new daughter.

‘My goodness,’ the midwife marvelled, ‘I’ve never seen a baby with so much hair.’

She was right: a thick mop of blue-black hair stretched down the back of the new baby’s neck, a clear sign of her Chinese ancestry.

‘She’ll probably lose it all over the next few weeks,’ she said, ‘before she grows it back in again.’

But she didn’t lose it. Julie’s hair just grew thicker and darker and more lustrous with every passing week. The midwife, who became a regular visitor and friend over the following years, had to cut it after a month to let some air get to her little neck, pushing a hair slide into the side to keep it out of her eyes at an age when most babies have no more than a few tufts of fluff for a mother to brush lovingly.

I needed a few stitches after the delivery so Charlie was sent back to the kitchen to boil some needles for the doctor in a pan of water that he’d been preparing to cook some vegetables in for our lunch.

It was a Wednesday, 22 February 1967. ‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe’, as the saying goes, which is what we used to say to Julie later whenever she was moaning at us about something or other. We could never have imagined how prophetic that silly little saying would turn out to be as we went about building our family life just like everyone else. None of us can ever know what lies in store for us, which is just as well.

As I lay in bed that afternoon, holding her in my arms for the first time, I never for a second would have believed that this tiny, helpless baby would die before I did, or that she would die in one of the most terrible ways possible. Such a thought would have been simply unbearable. At that moment my maternal instincts were to protect this vulnerable little bundle from everything life would throw at her – but it was an illusion because no mother can ever really hope to do that.

When your children are small you keep an eye on them most of the time, although even then accidents can still happen or terrible luck can befall them. But once they have grown up and left the nest you can do nothing but have faith that they will be all right, that they will not take too many risks or make too many bad judgements. And then all you can do is be there for them if things go wrong. But no matter how grown up and capable they become, I don’t think a mother ever loses that initial instinct to guard her babies and fight for their safety and their rights against the rest of the world. Thankfully, not many have to do it in such horrific circumstances as I would have to.

Chapter Two

Meeting Charlie Ming

Ifirst spotted Charlie Ming in 1962, sitting with a group of other men in a Chinese restaurant in Middlesborough called The Red Sun. I was just sixteen but had been out of school for a year and was more than ready for a bit of life. It was an exciting place for a young girl to be because there weren’t many Chinese restaurants around in those days, not like today when there are fast-food outlets of every nationality on every street corner. In fact most people didn’t eat out much at all; we didn’t have anything like the amount of disposable money they have today.

Everything going on around me seemed exotic and foreign, including the men at the nearby table and especially Charlie. I couldn’t tell how old he was, but it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me that he was twenty years older than me. I’m not sure I gave the question any thought at all. I’d never met a Chinese man before – not many people in our area had. They were still a rarity and viewed by most people with considerable suspicion. These were the days before any of us knew anything about race relations acts or the rules of political correctness; people still clung to their comforting prejudices and spoke their minds to the point of rudeness.

It all seems a bit like ancient history now, even though it was only forty-six years ago. This was the year when a young Nelson Mandela had only just been arrested and imprisoned in South Africa and when Marilyn Monroe was found dead under suspicious circumstances in her Hollywood apartment. It had also just become the Chinese year of the Tiger, traditionally said to be a volatile year in which there is likely to be massive change. There certainly was for me!

I’d been invited to the restaurant that night because a friend of mine was going out with one of the waiters and wanted me to go along with her for moral support. I’d been keen to accept the invitation, wanting to have a look at him. Boyfriends were still a very new experience for both of us, objects of considerable mystery and curiosity.

The group of Chinese men who had caught my eye were sitting in the corner, at a table that was almost next to ours, and I had a good view of them from where I was seated. To my young, inexperienced eyes they all looked the same, except for Charlie. There was something about him that caught my attention, and kept drawing it back. Apart from anything else, he was very good-looking.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked my friend’s boyfriend as he hovered round the table, bringing us food and flirting a little nervously at the same time.

‘That’s Charlie,’ he told me. ‘His mother’s English and his father’s Chinese.’

‘Not a bad result when you mix them,’ I said cheerfully, and probably quite loudly, assuming that none of this foreign-looking bunch of men would be able to speak English.

‘Oh, thanks very much,’ Charlie piped up in a thick Yorkshire accent, bringing the blood rushing to my face.

‘You speak English?’ I asked, shocked.

‘I should hope so.’ He grinned at my discomfort.

From that moment I was hooked, fascinated by someone who looked so mysterious and oriental but sounded so down to earth. As I got to know him and we told one another about our families, I found out his father had been the first Chinese man to come to the Middlesborough area, having travelled over from China to Birkenhead as a ship’s steward in the days before air travel. It sounded like something from the movies, suggesting worlds beyond anything that my friends or I had ever experienced, or could even imagine. None of us had ever travelled outside our own hometowns, let alone gone abroad.

When he came ashore, Charlie’s dad met an English girl, married her and decided to stay. He set up his own Chinese laundry, something that Chinese immigrants were doing all over the world in the first part of the twentieth century. It must have been a good business to be in then, despite the heat and the steam of the working conditions, in the days before washing machines or laundrettes had been invented.

Before long-distance travel became common, people were still very ignorant about foreigners and frightened of the myths and tales they heard circulating about Chinese men. Charlie told me about customers coming to the door with their laundry, or with their tickets and their money, and refusing to step any further inside for fear of being abducted or having their throats slit.

‘You can come in,’ he would tease them once he was old enough to start working there himself. ‘We’ve not got any knives.’

He’d had a few troubles at school. He didn’t really belong to either nationality – English or Chinese – so he was always the outsider, watching and smiling patiently, learning to be philosophical about life. It was a difficult upbringing that stood him in good stead for what life held in store for all of us. Charlie never expected life to be easy and he knew that you had to stick up for yourself or other people would walk all over you.

There was an immediate spark between us that night and he asked me out on a date. Unlike boys my own age, he had a car and on that first date he drove me over to Whitby for a day out. After I’d been out with him a couple of times I didn’t think any more about his Chinese origins than I did about the age gap between us. He was just Charlie, the man for me. But other people didn’t adapt quite so quickly.

I’d been born and brought up in Billingham, which was then not much more than a village on the outskirts of Middlesborough. Nothing much happened in Billingham apart from the giant ICI chemical works, which covered several hundred acres at the side of the town. The factory had originally been built during the First World War to produce the ingredients needed for the manufacture of explosives. It grew even larger during the Second World War and even in the 1960s it still provided most of the employment in the area, giving jobs to thousands of locals.

It’s hard to imagine when you look at the wastelands around Billingham now just what a huge factory complex it once was, dominating the landscape for miles around with its gleaming towers and chimneys, belching smoke and steam, all part of the ‘white heat of technology’ that politicians liked to talk about in the 1960s. No one back then could have predicted just how much the world was going to change for all of us with the arrival of the internet, global warming and so forth.

There were still virtually no oriental faces to be seen in this traditional industrial community, so Charlie and I got our fair share of racial abuse in the street when we were out together. A lot of people couldn’t cope with the sight of a mixed-race couple and didn’t hesitate to say so as they passed by, unbothered whether we heard or not. It was as if they thought girls like my friend and me were letting them down in some way by ‘consorting with the enemy’. I can only imagine how much trouble Charlie’s mam must have gone through when she married the very first Chinaman in the area back in the 1920s. She must have had a lot of guts.

My dad was one of the many thousands of men working at the ICI plant as a research chemist, but he died very suddenly at the age of sixty-two after having a massive brain haemorrhage while coming home from work on the bus. I was only fifteen at the time – this was shortly before I met Charlie – and I was completely devastated. It was such a shock because he hadn’t been ill at all; it came right out of the blue. Dad had always pampered me and I idolized him. I was an only child and he and Mum had adopted me as a baby, but neither of them ever let me feel for a moment that I wasn’t their daughter. They were always happy to do anything I asked. Dad and I never used to argue about anything. I couldn’t even boil an egg by the time he died because he would insist on doing everything for me. Maybe that was why I was attracted to an older man like Charlie – especially one who was happy to do all the cooking.

Dad had looked after Mam well, too. She had never had a job outside the house that I could remember, had never written a cheque or paid a bill herself; he took care of everything like that. I think most men of that generation did in those days. Dad was the brainy one of the partnership.

Once he’d gone I automatically took on the role of doing all these practical things for her, even though I was still only fifteen years old, which meant I had to grow up a lot quicker than I would have done otherwise. That part of it didn’t worry me. I just got on with things, but I still missed him terribly.

I didn’t tell my mother about Charlie for a while, knowing that she was going to find it a bit difficult to get used to. It wasn’t until a few months after I first went out with him that we were spotted together in Middlesborough by a friend of the family, who gleefully reported the news back to Mam. She went just as mad when I got home as I had imagined she would.

‘You’ve been seen in Middlesborough with a Chinaman,’ she announced the moment I walked through the door. ‘Your father would turn in his grave. You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you? He’ll get you on a slow boat to China and he’ll fill you full of opium. I’ll tell you something else, they breed like rabbits and they’re full of T.B.!’

There’d been an outbreak of tuberculosis (a deadly infectious disease that attacks the lungs and central nervous system) in Hong Kong a few years before, and this had been added to all the myths and prejudices that surrounded everything to do with the Chinese. The fact that Charlie had never been outside Yorkshire in his life didn’t seem to make any difference to Mam’s fears about disease-carrying foreigners who she imagined pouring off the boats like rats. People always like to gossip and to frighten one another with shocking tales of doom and gloom, and immigrants who look and sound different are always a good source of material. Mam had never got out much, always staying at home and looking after the house, so it was easy for the outside world to worry her.

Although I got on well with Mam and Dad, I became a bit of a rebel when I reached my teens, and I knew my own mind right from the start. I was never too bothered about conforming to other people’s ideas of what I should or shouldn’t do if it didn’t suit me. When it came to choosing the man I wanted to be with I certainly wasn’t going to take any notice of anyone else’s prejudices. By the time Mam found out about us I already knew Charlie was a good catch and I wasn’t going to give him up just to please her and a few neighbours who might disapprove of a mixed marriage. I didn’t argue with her all that much; I just took no notice of her dire warnings and carried on with my life as if she hadn’t said a thing.

‘Well, you might as well bring him home then,’ she huffed eventually, once she realized I wasn’t going to change my mind no matter how black a picture she painted of the future I was choosing, or how often she pointed out the danger I was putting myself in by consorting with a ‘foreign devil’.

Of course, the moment she met him Charlie worked the same gruff, twinkly charm on her that he had on me and a year later we got married, by which time Charlie was looking on her as a second mother and she couldn’t praise him highly enough. He was always happy to do any odd jobs she needed doing, he’d include her without being asked when we were going on holiday or for a day out somewhere, and I’d sometimes arrive at her house to find he’d popped in for a coffee and a chat with her.

‘I couldn’t wish for a better son-in-law,’ she would tell her friends at every opportunity, cutting off their prejudices before they could even leave their lips.

If I ever grumbled to her about anything Charlie had said or done she would immediately jump to his defence, making it clear she believed I was lucky to have landed such a good catch and that I should be grateful. Although it sometimes felt as though they were ganging up on me, I was relieved that we all got on well because if you can’t keep your immediate family together around you, what hope do you have of leading a truly happy life? I’ve always believed that immediate family is the most important thing for anyone. Perhaps knowing that I was adopted and feeling lucky at being taken in by two such loving parents had a big effect on my thinking, making me more appreciative than other people who might take such things for granted.

It was Charlie who wanted to get married and start a family quickly because he was already in his late thirties. He wanted to have children while he was still young enough to enjoy them and I was quite happy to go along with him, thinking there would be plenty of time for me to work and have a life of my own later, once the children were off at school and didn’t need me to be at home with them all the time.

We only had about twelve people at the wedding, which made it feel more like the Last Supper, because none of my other relatives were speaking to me, even though they knew Mam was now perfectly happy about the match. I wasn’t too bothered. If they felt like that I didn’t want anything to do with them anyway.

It wasn’t just the family who didn’t like the idea of a mixed marriage. When we bought our first house in Acklam, a nice area outside Middlesbrough, the next-door neighbour almost immediately got together a petition to persuade us to move straight back out again. The first I knew of it was when she turned up on the doorstep with a letter that she had persuaded five of the other neighbours to sign. It was a shock because I’d thought we were all getting on very well whenever we talked face to face.

‘I’ve noticed,’ she said, sounding a bit surprised, ‘how clean you are. We don’t mind you, but it’s when your husband’s friends come to visit that it lowers the tone of the area.’

Shocked, since I had always found Charlie’s friends very pleasant, I told Charlie I thought we should move after that, not wanting to live somewhere there was an atmosphere and where we weren’t wanted, but he wasn’t having any of it.

‘No.’ He was adamant. ‘We’re staying here.’

When I thought about it I realized he was right. Who was to say the next set of neighbours wouldn’t be even more hostile? We couldn’t allow them to bully us like that so we took the petition to show to a solicitor and asked his advice. He wrote to all the neighbours who had signed it, pointing out the error of their ways. I guess they hadn’t had their hearts in it – maybe they had just done it to please the woman next door – because they all apologized after that, even her. Perhaps they hadn’t expected us to respond in that way, assuming we would just pack up and scurry off into the night. Ordinary people were still easily intimidated by official-looking letters from lawyers. Like all potential bullies, their resolve crumbled as soon as they saw we were going to fight back and not simply do as they told us. So Charlie was right to stand up for himself because everything settled down after that and we went back to being normal neighbours.