Strong Women!

 

By : Susan Moorcroft

 Queen Elizabeth II was crowned on 2nd June 1953 in Westminster Abbey, London, upon the death of her father, George VI. While those at home in England were clustered around their TV sets (or the TV sets of neighbours if they couldn’t afford their own), the army personnel of a barracks in Nee Soon, Singapore were given a day off… and my mum, then Connie Holmes, met my dad, Walter (Wally) Moorcroft. They became engaged in six weeks and married five months later. 

Until then, Dad hadn’t focused too readily on his army career and had been busted down (reduced in rank) several times for a variety of misdemeanours. Mum had no patience with ‘that kind of nonsense’ and when he received a reprimand for talking to a senior rank with his hands in his pockets (the senior rank being Mum), he reset his attitude.

My mother was a strong woman. She left a small Yorkshire village to join the British Army when seventeen and was the Women's Royal Army Corp’s youngest corporal in the Far East by age nineteen. 

However, in those days, if a woman wanted to marry and be posted along with her husband, she had to leave the army. Mum became an army wife. Dad had got back his stripe and was a corporal again, but that wasn’t sufficient rank to gain them a married quarter for some time. Mum began her life as a mother to my brother Kevan alone in basic accommodation in the south of England while Dad was posted in the north. Still, my parents were soulmates and made it work. My brother Trevor was born less than two years after Kev. Life grew easier as Dad rose through the ranks. It’s almost strange now to think of a woman being almost entirely dependent on her husband’s fortunes, but Mum was a stay-at-home mother and that was the way of the world.

 Dad was posted to Germany and Mum and my brothers soon followed. I was born right at the end of the tour and as a family we went on to Cyprus for the first part of a three-year tour. From there we travelled on Royal Air Force troop transport via El Alamein, Benghazi and Tripoli, to the Mediterranean island of Malta for the second part. A posting to the UK followed, then we returned to Malta. 

 We moved around the world with six shipping boxes and three suitcases for a family of five, and it was mainly left to Mum to pack, get us our inoculations and medicals, and, at the new posting, find us schools, sort out new uniforms, school buses etc at the same time as discovering the local shops and unpacking again. It was a glorious childhood, which instilled in me an abiding love for Malta and for travel – in fact, I gave much of my childhood to the character of Dory in Summer on a Sunny Island. Life was good, my parents’ teasing, joking relationship was solid.

 Dad’s final posting was in the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, London, Warrant Office Class I Staff Sergeant Major (a senior non-commissioned officer), and we lived in a barracks in north London. Rather than lose him at the end of his time, the army offered a commission, but it would have gone with an unaccompanied posting (no family) and Mum had had enough of being an army wife. Back in the UK, she could work again and had begun to accrue her own household items and furniture instead of army issue. She wanted her own home for the first time.

 'Civvy Street’, for us, proved to be in Northamptonshire, in the middle of England. I was horrified that we were so far from the sea. I didn’t settle for some time, struggling with new schoolmates who thought I’d invented my army childhood. I remember Mum saying, ‘We’re not in Malta now so get used to it,’ and that was pragmatism rather than lack of sympathy. I had to fit in in England, just as she fit jobs in admin and accounts around the family.

 Dad died young, in 1984 when he was 51, leaving Mum a widow at barely 50. She never really recovered, and never had another romantic relationship.

 Her spirit, however, remained uncrushed. She continued to work as head of a busy accounting section for several years after Dad died. Equality at work was law… but glass ceilings and walls were fashionable. Of the five accounting sections in her company, four were led by managers (men) and one by a supervisor (a woman – Mum). Their duties were the same, but managers received company cars and higher salaries than supervisors. Mum pointed out this inequality to her (male) line manager and was waved away. It was a busy, demanding job, and Mum wasn’t enjoying the double-standards of her line manager, so gave in her notice.

 It was one week’s notice.

 Her line manager was aghast. He said she must give a month’s notice. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Managers have to give a month’s notice, but supervisors only a week. My last day’s Friday.’ I was with her at her home one evening when her boss rang to coax her towards a solution that wouldn’t leave him in a mess. She politely refused, and she left on Friday. It was typical of her to decide on a stance and stick to it. She called it having the courage of her convictions… though if I displayed a similar trait, she was less enthusiastic.

Mum’s fighting spirit is summed up for me by her final afternoon with us in 2016, when she was 82. Kev, Trev and I were grouped around her hospital bed and the news wasn’t good. My cousin texted her best wishes to us all and I read the text aloud to Mum, and suggested a reply. She removed her oxygen mask and gasped, ‘Tell her I’m not dead yet!’ So, I did.

 A few hours later, she left us – but we still laugh about that final demonstration of her strength.

 

Sue Moorcroft is a Sunday Times bestselling author. Her books have reached the #1 spot on Kindle UK and top 100 on Kindle US. She’s won the Goldsboro Books Contemporary Romantic Novel Award, Readers’ Best Romantic Novel award and the Katie Fforde Bursary. Published by HarperCollins in the UK, US and Canada and by other publishers around the world. Her next book will be Summer at the French Café (Avon, HarperCollins) published on 12^th May in paperback, ebook and audio.