My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story by Helen Edwards, Jenny Lee Smith

always coughing. I had chronic bronchitis most winters, and was often sent to stand outside the classroom because I was coughing too much. One winter I fell so seriously ill with a more acute form of bronchitis that I missed a great deal of schooling and ended up having to stay down a year to catch up.
    We lived in the house my mother had bought before she married, the last house in our street. When I was small, we lived downstairs and let out the upstairs flat. Everyone knew each other. It was ‘Hello, Mrs Smith’ – always Mrs so-and-so, never first names, even though they’d known each other twenty years.
    I was six when my grandmother died and Grandpa Bill came to live with us. He was my dad’s father, medium height and quite stocky, and still quite fit when he took up residence in our front bedroom. He always wore a felt beret edged with leather when he went out. He loved the football and went with Sid to watch Newcastle play nearly every weekend through the season. Because he wasn’t very tall, he made himself a little wooden step that he took with him to stand on to get a better view.
    I can still recall the aromatic smell of his pipe tobacco – sweet and fragrant. He used to go to bed every afternoon and take a nap. Although my mother didn’t like him smoking in bed, he took no notice.
    ‘Come on, Pa,’ she would say. ‘No smoking in bed.’
    Grandpa would look suitably contrite until she’d left the room, then he’d turn and give me a wink.
    Sometimes he fell asleep with the pipe in his mouth, and occasionally it fell out and the tobacco burnt a hole in the bedding. I won’t ever forget the smell of singeing sheets.
    ‘Sorry, Con,’ he would say to my mother as she rushed in and poured a pan of water onto the smoking patch.
    Grandpa had a little penknife with an ivory handle. One minute he was peeling a Cox’s apple with it and the next he’d be clearing out his pipe. Sometimes he peeled apples for me, but I had to pick the bits of tobacco off them. When I got home from school, he read me stories sitting on his bed. We were very close and I loved him dearly. When he first came to stay and was well enough, he liked to meet me from school and walk me home with him.
    I have lovely memories of Grandpa playing with me. He was always happy to join in my games. ‘Ee, what’s it to be today, Jen?’
    One day when I came home from school, I devised a rather boisterous version of cowboys and Indians. He was lying down on his bed having a nap, so I ran in and jumped on him. It was meant to be part of the game and he, with his usual good humour, joined in. But when he got up he had a nosebleed.
    ‘Oh dear me, Pa!’ exclaimed my mother, raising her hand to her mouth. ‘Look at your nose! It’s bent.’
    At some stage of the game I must have broken his nose. I felt awful about it, but nobody told me off. When my father got home, he had to take Grandpa to hospital to have it fixed.
    After Miss Brewis’s nursery school, I had moved on to the first class of Newcastle upon Tyne Church High School for Girls – Church High as it was known locally. Or ‘The Green-Knicker Brigade’, after the thick green knickers we had to wear. The teachers used to do a regular knicker-check, just to make sure we always wore them.
    Church High was an all-through school for ages five to eighteen, and there I made friends with another girl called Jennifer. She was my only other close friend in Newcastle, besides my cousins and Joy McGill, who lived near me and walked to school with me.
    One morning, as Joy and I were hurrying to school worrying about being late, a man in a long raincoat stepped out across the pavement in our way. As we approached, he opened his raincoat and flashed us. Joy, who was a little older than me, grabbed my hand and half-dragged me along for the last part of our journey. ‘Don’t look back,’ she said.
    On arrival at school, we reported this and then went to our lessons. Halfway through the day we