MY INNOCENT YEARS
A MOTHER at 16 in 1941

Betty is now a great Grandmother.

At the age of fifteen I was very innocent. It's quite strange looking back but I didn't really know how babies were made. I came from a very strict family and in those days there was no sex education. My parents never spoke about it so I had to learn the hard way.

I left school at the age of fourteen and went to work in a mill in Lancashire. I worked in a weaving shed. It was a big mill but it only did weaving, winding and warping. We worked from half past seven to nine o'clock and we got an hour for dinner. Sometimes the work was very hard, especially if you got a bad beam. When you first went in the mill you only went on one loom. This was to help you get into the ropes. After two or three months you went on two looms, then three looms and four would be the most. It could be very hard work. There were lots of fourteen year olds working in the mill. In those days there was no such thing as staying at school, you had to get out to work and bring the money back home to your families.

My father worked outside digging up roads and was involved in landscapes. My mother never worked, she stayed at home to look after my brothers and sisters. When I look at a fourteen-year-old today I realise they are far more advanced than I ever was. They are more educated, they wear designer clothes, they are very confident, they seem to know it all. In my day it was a lot different. I would have to get up every morning very early and spend the whole day working in the mill with no prospects for the future, with no opportunities to go to college or university. Reality was work, work, work. Looking back I was probably good at maths. I had to face the fact that the mill was the only way forward for me.

I met this boy at the age of thirteen and we fell in love. At the age of fifteen a child was conceived. I didn't realise that I was pregnant. That's how naive and innocent I was. I was eight months pregnant without realising it. This woman spoke to my mother and said, "I am sure your Betty is pregnant". When I came home from work that night my mother and father jumped on me, they went berserk, they were really mad at me. They went across and fetched the boy's mother. She wanted us to get married. My mother and father didn't want me to marry because they said I was too young. After a while they did calm down, they didn't throw me out. I know some girls in those days were thrown out or sent away, at least I could stay at home. I felt my parents did accept what was happening.

My auntie took me to the anti-natal clinic and I couldn't believe in a month's time I would be having a child and that for eight months there was a child inside me and I didn't know.

My child was born, I had a boy, and he is now fifty-eight years old. I married his father when I was twenty-one. He was the only man I had ever been with. Even though our relationship began at thirteen, it could never be said that I was a girl who slept around, or went with all different kinds of men. He was the only man in my life.

It is strange looking at young people these days, at the age of twenty-one, a girl could have slept with several men and still not have an authentic relationship.