The Woman of Substance: The Life and Work of Barbara Taylor Bradford. Piers Dudgeon
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and I used to go and see her there. She used to let me serve a customer now and then. She lived in this house at twenty-one Cecil Grove, just the other side of the Stanningley Road, by Armley Park.
‘We would go on picnics together. She always took her knitting. On one occasion, so the story goes, I nearly drowned. Olive suddenly looked up and said to Uncle Harry, “Where’s Barbara?” They couldn’t see me. Then, far out in the river, they saw my dress caught on a dead branch, they saw me actually bob up and go under the water again and I was flailing around because I couldn’t swim. But the branch had hooked into my dress and was holding me up. Today I have a terrible fear of the sea where I can’t put my feet on the bottom. I panic, which I think must go back to that. They got me out in the end, soaked and crying, and dried the dress in the sun, but you know the English sun! They took me home to their house and Auntie Olive ironed the dress and got me back home looking like the starched child that I was.
‘So, Daddy had three sisters, and they spoiled me to death, of course, because two of them didn’t have children. Their brothers were Winston – my father – Jack, Bill, and Don, the youngest, who sadly died just recently. He and his wife, Jean, my one surviving aunt, had a daughter, Vivienne, my only cousin.
‘Jack and Bill Taylor lived at home with my grandmother and never married. I didn’t know them very well. Jack was in the army during the war, I think, and Bill was in minesweepers off the coast of Russia and places like that. Afterwards they came home and lived with my grandma, and then when she died they continued to live in that house – two bachelors, very straight, but very dour. I used to go and see my grandmother, and they would be sitting in their chairs and nobody spoke. I hated it. I wasn’t scared of them, I paid not a blind bit of notice because my focus was somewhere else.
Barbara says she owes her good looks to her father, and that ‘he was very good-looking, dark-haired, green-eyed. My father in particular was always very well dressed and very well groomed, and even today I can’t stand ungroomed men. Any man that I ever went out with before I knew my husband was always good-looking, always well dressed and well groomed. I loved my father. He would have charmed you.’ In Act of Will, Vincent, Winston’s fictional persona, boasts an almost feminine beauty, though ‘there never was any question about his virility’. Barbara describes him in fact and fiction as a natural star, charismatic, one who drew others (especially women) to him by force of personality, dashing looks and more than his fair share of beguiling charm . . . plus he had ‘the gift of the gab’.
Family legend boosted his reputation further with the adventurous story that at fourteen he ran away to sea and signed up in the Royal Navy, forging his father’s signature on the application form. Barbara gives the story to Emma Harte’s brother Winston in A Woman of Substance. It is not too far from the truth. The real Winston did join the Navy, but not until shortly before his sixteenth birthday. His naval record shows that he signed on as Boy (Class II) on 20th May 1916 in Leeds, that he had previously worked as a factory lad, and that he was at this stage quite small – height 5 ft 1 in, chest 31.5 ins. His first attachment was to HMS Ganges, a second-rate, 2284 ton, 84-gun ship with a ship’s company of 800, built of teak in 1816 at the Bombay Dockyard under master shipbuilder Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia. By the time Winston joined it, Ganges was a shore-bound training establishment for boys at Shotley Gate. He remained in the Navy until 16th July 1924, when he was invalided out with a serious condition, which could have led to septicaemia and may have been the reason why he subsequently had one leg amputated.
They took him to what was then a naval hospital, Chapel Allerton in Leeds. Today there is still a specialist limb unit there. Barbara recalls that when he was lying in hospital, ‘He said to his mother, “I don’t want to have it off because I won’t be able to dance.” His mother said, “Winston, forget dancing. If you don’t have the leg off, you won’t live.” Gangrene was travelling so rapidly that it had got to the knee. That was why it was taken off very high up. And so he couldn’t dance, but he did go swimming. You can swim with one leg and two arms. He went swimming in Armley Baths.’
One can only speculate on the impact the loss would have had on one so sociable, though Barbara marks him out as pragmatic: ‘I think I take after my father in that way. He didn’t really give a damn what people thought, it was take it or leave me.’ Yet, however brave Winston was, losing a leg would have been a huge thing; it would have taken tremendous determination to lead a normal life. Barbara agreed: ‘He had to prove himself constantly, I think. I didn’t know that when I was growing up.’
The artificial leg he was given was the best available and made of holed aluminium, which according to the specialist at Chapel Allerton would have been light and possibly easy enough to manoeuvre to allow Winston to engage in his favourite pastime, though perhaps not the jitterbug, which was sweeping the country in the years leading up to the war. Some years before rock ’n’ roll, the jitterbug involved the disgraceful practice of leaving hold of your partner and improvising fairly frantic steps on your own. In Act of Will, when Audra meets Vincent at a dance, it is the less demanding waltz that brings them together:
Audra had almost given up hope that he would make an appearance again when he came barrelling through the door, looking slightly flushed and out of breath, and stood at the far side of the hall, glancing about. At the exact moment that the band leader announced the last waltz he spotted her. His eyes lit up, and he walked directly across the floor to her and, with a faint smile, he asked her if she would care to dance.
Gripped by a sudden internal shaking, unable to speak, Audra nodded and rose.
He was taller than she had realised, at least five feet nine, perhaps six feet, with long legs; lean and slenderly built though he was, he had broad shoulders. There was an easy, natural way about him that communicated itself to her instantly, and he moved with great confidence and panache. He led her on to the floor, took her in his arms masterfully, and swept her away as the band struck up ‘The Blue Danube’.
During the course of the dance he made several casual remarks, but Audra, tongue-tied, remained mute, knowing she was unable to respond coherently. He said, at one moment, ‘What’s up then, cat got your tongue?’
She managed to whisper, ‘No.’
Barbara’s parents married on 14th August 1929. Winston was living at 26 Webster Row, Wortley, at the time, and described himself on their marriage certificate as a general labourer, while Freda, of 1 Winker Green, Armley, described herself as a domestic servant even though she had been working as a nurse. ‘I don’t actually know where they met,’ admitted Barbara. ‘Probably at a dance. If my father couldn’t really dance any more because of the leg, perhaps he went just to listen to the music. I actually do think he met her at a dance; they used to have church dances and church-hall dances.’
Although Barbara adored her father, when she was a child there was little openly expressed of the love they shared. ‘He didn’t verbalise it perhaps in the way that Mummy did,’ but the depth of it was expressed in a touching scene one day, which had to do with his artificial leg, symbol of the man’s vulnerability.
It had been snowing and Barbara was walking with her father in Tower Lane when he fell and couldn’t get up because of the slippery snow. ‘He was down on his back, and there was nobody around, and he told me what to do. He said, “Go and find some stones and pile them up in the snow, near my foot.” He was able to wedge his artificial leg against the stones in order to lever himself up. I got him sitting up, I couldn’t lift him. I was six or seven years old. But he managed to heave himself to his feet eventually.’
But at least she had helped him, as she had always longed to do, and now he realised what a practical, efficient doer of a little girl he had fathered. The leg brought him close to her again when he died in 1981. ‘My mother said, “Your father wanted his leg taken back to the hospital.” So my Uncle Don drove me there with it, and three spare legs, and when I handed them over I just broke down in floods of tears. It was like giving away part of him and myself. I was very close to Mummy, but I was close to my father in a different way.’
After Barbara was born in 1933,