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CHAPTER 1
Early Days
Alan Harrison was the youngest of four children, and the only boy. He had been educated at Woodhouse Grove Public School in Leeds. After his mother died, his father remarried and moved to Placeville, California, where he made his money by buying and selling stocks and shares. He, however, along with many others, lost his money in the Wall Street crash of October 1929. Times were hard and money was short but, with so many people in reduced circumstances, work was not easy to find.
Alan's step-mother, Dorothy, became a nanny and was fortunate to eventually find a position with the family of Charlie Chaplin, looking after his children. Her husband was also offered a job by the film star and went to work for him as his gardener.
Before finding a permanent job and settling down himself, Alan made a trip to America to visit his father and step-mother and their daughter who was born in America and was named Angela. It was an exciting time for the good-looking young man, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Hollywood actor, Errol Flynn. He travelled around and experienced a life that most people only dream of and his visit stretched from weeks to months and then to years.
After he had been in America for six years he began to miss his homeland and decided that he did not want to remain in America for the rest of his life. He returned to England and settled back in Yorkshire, becoming a constable with the Bradford City Police.
Soon after his return he met a pretty girl called Lena Adlard at a dancing class and soon the couple started to go out together. The relationship blossomed, they became engaged and were married in 1936. Five years later they became parents for the first time when their daughter, Susan Elizabeth — Sue — was born.
By May 1945 Lena and Alan Harrison had every reason to be happy. They had survived the war, they had a lovely daughter, by then four years old, and Lena was about to give birth to their second child who was expected later that month.
Two weeks after VE Day, on 24 May, Barbara Jane Harrison was born at the family home in Kingsdale Crescent, Bradford, Yorkshire. Although her parents named her Barbara she was always known to family and friends as Jane.
Despite being English by birth, Lena was of Italian descent. Her grandmother, Josephina, was Italian born but had come to live in England at the age of three and, when she grew up and married, she chose a fellow Italian.
Lena had worked for furriers Swears and Wells before having her children but she was not in good health. She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis which sometimes left her so incapacitated that she was unable to do anything at all. The drugs she was given for her illness brought their own problems and the young mother found life with two small children very difficult. She had to rely on her own mother for help and it was she who did a lot of the housework in the Harrison household when the girls were small.
When it was time for Sue to go to school Alan and Lena enrolled her at a private school called Greystones, in Bradford; four years later Jane joined her there. Both girls were brought up as Roman Catholics, their mother's religion and, after she left Greystones, Sue went to St Josephs' College. Jane stayed at Greystones until, believing that the sea air might help his sick wife, Alan Harrison moved the family to Scarborough. Jane was enrolled at Newby County Primary School on the north-west outskirts of Scarborough, close to the family's new home and Sue went to the Convent of Ladies of Mary in Scarborough.
Despite their mother's illness the girls had a happy life with lots of playmates and family to visit. Their father's eldest sister, Jean, and her husband Giles Worthington, who lived in Ormskirk, had three sons, Patrick, Alan and Martin. The girls also had cousins Robin, Carol and Richard, the children of their Aunt Kit. They sometimes spent days out together and the family photo albums record happy times in places such as Southport, and holidays in Wales.
By the summer holidays of 1955 Lena had become very ill and the girls were sent to stay with Aunt Jean and her family. When the holidays came to an end and they returned to Scarborough they found that, during their absence, their mother had died. The drugs she had been prescribed to treat her rheumatoid arthritis had affected her kidneys causing nephritis which had made her legs swell and eventually contributed to her death at the age of forty-one. There can be nothing harder for a child to cope with than the loss of a parent so early in life. Sue was only fourteen and Jane just ten years old when Lena died and they had not even had the chance to say goodbye to her or to attend her funeral. Life would never be the same for them again.
Alan Harrison was a good father and his daughters were very fond of him but it was difficult for him to work and bring up two girls by himself. He tried to keep their routines as normal as possible but, inevitably, the girls, especially Sue, had to grow up much faster than most of their friends. When the others were outside playing or visiting each other, Sue and Jane had their household chores to do. Most of the burden of keeping the house running while their father was at work fell to Sue, as Jane had a knack of disappearing whenever it was time for her to do something that she didn't like. To minimize the amount of time that the girls — mainly Sue — had to spend in the kitchen at weekends, their father decided that they would have their traditional Sunday lunch on a Saturday and then on Sunday have the leftovers so that they had at least one day free from the need to cook.
When Jane passed her 11 Plus exam she went to Scarborough Girls High School where she met the girls who would be her friends for the rest of her short life. Sheila Turton, one of those girls, recalled that when the new term started Jane was missing. She was not sure why she had not started on the same day as everyone else but said:
The teachers called her name so often she was almost a celebrity when she finally appeared. How do girls who have nothing in common but passing the eleven plus, sort themselves out so quickly after the initial shakedown? Jane was fun. She never seemed daunted by anyone. Jane made fun of everything and everybody. Nothing was sacred. We were labelled 'naughty' but compared to girls today we were paragons of virtue.
When the nuns at the Convent of Ladies of Mary heard that Sue Harrison's younger sister was now attending a secular school they were horrified and told Sue that she must tell her father to move Jane to the convent immediately. Sue was not at all comfortable with the task she had been set, feeling that it was not her place to instruct her father but did tell him what the nuns had said. Jane remained at Scarborough Girls High!
Margaret Jessop also began her secondary education at the same time as Jane and the girls became firm friends. Margaret had just lost her father and so she and Jane had something in common. As Margaret says:
With hindsight I realise how much 'easier' it is to lose a father than a mother, if you can call it easy, as I remember Jane at 11 having to take the washing to the launderette, do the shopping and generally grow up; things which I never had to do. I also remember her father once burning all her makeup for some reason; I'm sure he was worried out of his mind with the responsibility.
However despite all this, she was so much fun to be with, always had new ideas of things to do and games to play.
Kay Golightly, along with Sheila, Margaret and Jane formed a little gang. Her memories of those schooldays were that they were always together and often in trouble with their headmistress, Miss Woods. Their misdemeanours were fairly innocuous but, at a time when running in the corridors or talking while going up or down the stairs was frowned upon, the gang was considered to be rather wild and its members were frequently castigated in front of the entire school during the morning assembly.
Kay remembers one incident where Miss Woods announced:
Never before in the history of the school have the police been called to investigate two girls stealing. Kay Golightly and Jane Harrison report to me.
The crime that the police were investigating was the stealing of some ripe cherries which the pair had picked from trees along the side of the road. Their partners in crime were council gardeners who were working nearby and who helped the girls fill their berets with the fruit. Oblivious to the fact that the entire episode had been witnessed by their geography teacher, they climbed aboard the bus to go home and began munching on the cherries. The next morning came the public shaming during assembly. Luckily for Jane her father was no longer a policeman so he had not been embarrassed at work by his younger daughter's behaviour.
This situation did not last however as, after leaving the police force, Alan Harrison had become a driving examiner. One evening when the girls were supposed to be revising for their GCE 'O' levels, Kay decided to borrow her mother's moped and take Jane for a ride along the Scarborough seafront. All went well until the pair were stopped by a policeman outside the Futurist Theatre in Foreshore Road. The constable wanted to see Kay's licence and proof of insurance which he, of course, knew she did not have. The girls were given a good dressing down by him, witnessed by the 'Black and White Minstrels' who were taking a break between shows on the roof of the theatre, and were made to walk home pushing the moped — a distance of about three miles. The constable threatened to inform their headmistress and said that Kay would be fined, not only for having no licence or insurance but also for taking Jane as a passenger. Kay's parents and Jane's father were informed and the girls were grounded. It didn't improve Alan Harrison's reputation as a driving examiner to have his underage daughter, and her equally underage friend, flitting around Scarborough on a moped but it didn't harm his career either as, when he eventually retired, it was from a senior position in the Department of Transport.
Kay remembers Jane's father as being a shy but extremely nice man. He once took the girls' form teacher out for tea but made the huge mistake of taking Jane and her friends along as well. The outing was not a success with the girls giggling and prodding each other under the table, and it was not something that he chose to repeat.
Sheila also remembered Alan Harrison dating the teacher:
He was a handsome man, I realise now, and often had a girl friend (much to Jane's amusement/embarrassment) and even dated one of our teachers which Jane thought a huge joke. She was a lovely teacher and we all loved her. I think her name was Miss Verity and she taught History.
I remember Jane telling us about a visit to the Floral Hall which was a theatre hosting the old summer variety shows which, in the 50s, attracted huge stars. Some performers needed audience participation and Jane was embarrassed because her dad insisted in clapping along and shouting out. Of course the retelling was probably much funnier than the actual event.
Despite her high spirits which were often judged to have been misdirected, Jane's schooldays weren't entirely marred by getting into scrapes. Although she could not be described as a robust child she enjoyed sport and played rounders, hockey and netball at Scarborough Girls High School. She and Kay also played cricket for the local village ladies team as they lived close to each other, while Sheila and Margaret both lived on the same street in town. While at her primary school Jane had been a Brownie and was later a Girl Guide which, Kay believes, instilled in her, 'a strong sense of duty and a caring nature'.
When Sue Harrison was seventeen she left the convent and went to study agriculture at Bishop Burton college. Jane was thirteen at the time so, with her sister away at college and having no mother to help ease her through her teenage years, she spent a lot of time at the homes of her friends. She was often at the Golightly house where she was welcomed by Kay's mother and was regarded by Kay, herself, as a sister. Sheila's parents had a 'soft spot' for her too and her mother once made a dress for Jane when she was making one for Sheila which was a 'big event' as, according to Sheila, she 'was not the most maternal of creatures'.
Kay's mother enjoyed dressmaking and made a lot of full skirts with net petticoats for Kay and for Jane too. The girls learnt to dance at the local Dance Rooms, going primarily to get to know the boys who also attended and, although the dancing was mainly ballroom, the last session was jiving which they both enjoyed and which allowed them to show off their stylish outfits. They practised jiving at Jane's house with their school uniform ties, looped round door handles, used as 'partners'. Jane had a blue Dansette record player — a highly prized item in the 1950s and 60s — and they danced while playing her favourite records on it. Over forty years later Kay has strong memories of that time whenever she hears those favourites: Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock, Cliff Richard singing Move It r Summer Holiday, Bobby Vee's Take Good Care of my Baby, the Everly Brothers' Cathy's Clown and Be Bop A Lula, Buddy Holly's It Doesn't Matter Anymore and It's Only Make Believe by Conway Twitty.
The girls also listened to music from a jukebox while doing their homework in a local coffee bar, their books spread out next to cups of frothy coffee on the yellow Formica table tops. Even this seemingly innocent pastime was viewed with disapproval by the staff at Scarborough Girls High.
A more serious infringement of school discipline occurred when the 'gang' decided to colour their hair with the latest products obtained from the chemists shop owned by Margaret's mother. Using such colours as African Violet and Chestnut Sheen, all four girls went to school one morning each sporting a different hair colour. Jane had chosen green! This bit of harmless fun earned them all order marks and, no doubt, odd looks from passers-by.
Jane's school friends and her sister, Sue, all recalled her love of animals. While living in Scarborough she kept cats, guinea pigs and hens. Sue's friend Anne remembered that Jane was once in trouble with her father when she let her cats run around on the kitchen worktops. But despite their odd differences Jane and her father were close. He seems to have shared her liking for animals as one day when they were in Filey they found the owner of the ponies who gave rides on the beach during the summer and asked him what happened to them when the holiday season was over. Finding that they were put out to grass, they decided to bring two of them home and put them out to graze for the winter in a nearby field. Although done with the best of intentions they had to return them soon afterwards when the hungry horses had eaten every scrap of grass in the field. Sue remembered, too, the black and white family cat, and the white mice that Jane had secretly obtained and kept in a cage under her bed.
For most of her life Jane took photos which she put into her own photo album, each one carefully captioned. An outgoing, friendly girl she spent a lot of her holidays as a teenager on trips to Europe which were arranged through the World Friends group. The young people visited countries such as Holland, Germany and Austria and, by the time she left school, Jane was very well-travelled, more so than most of her contemporaries in those days. Sue recalled one trip that Jane made — she believes it was to Vienna — when instead of having a lot of fun with her friends, she was separated from them and only met up with them again a few days before returning to England. The photo album recorded many of these trips with images of the places she visited and the people she met.
In 1961 just before Jane was due to sit her 'O' level GCEs her father was transferred to Doncaster. Jane stayed on in Scarborough until her exams were over and then joined him in Doncaster where, in September, she enrolled at Doncaster High School. She again began to fill the house with animals and on a trip to Doncaster market one day bought two cats from the pet stall. They cost 7/6 and 5/- respectively and Jane named them Geoffrey Douglas and Agnes. She managed to keep them in her bedroom for three weeks before her father discovered that he had lodgers but they eventually became family fixtures, remaining with Alan Harrison after Jane had left home and only being given new homes when Alan, himself, moved down south to live in Pinner in Middlesex. Several black and white photos of Geoffrey Douglas and Agnes remain in Jane's photo album to this day.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Fire over Heathrow"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Susan Ottaway.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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