“She said that she’d had a relationship, quite a long standing relationship with a woman and that her parents had written her a letter saying that if there was any form of relationship going on, that they didn’t approve and that it wasn’t an appropriate way to live a life.”Įllen kept her mum’s secret for nearly 20 years. She feels like she’s finally able to talk about it. “I’ve been able to have a career, have a family, and still be gay. My mum was technically denied the one thing she wanted, which was to be with probably the woman she loved. Now whether that was a relationship that would have continued, for the rest of her life, I don’t know. “If you look at a lot of oral history about gay people, it tends to still predominantly focus around men. How didn’t I know for the whole of my life?” There are hundreds of women who did exactly what my mum did all through history. “I grew up with my mum and dad, we lived in a flat. We weren’t encouraged to speak to neighbours. “I didn’t understand why but that’s how it was. It was only as I got older that I realised that not everybody was like that.”Ĭhristine knew that her parents weren’t married and that the family had a difficult relationship with her mother’s sister, Jean. Even her own mother didn’t like her very much. “She had eight children by different men. My mum was her main support, financially.
