Kitty Little
(Content warning: suicide)
It took me thirteen years after her death to gather the courage to read my mum’s diaries. I read them in fragments, over the course of a year.
She took her own life, and obviously her death was tragic and heartbreaking, full of regrets and guilt. I assumed her diaries might be difficult to read and filled with tragedy, but they aren’t. They are full of humour, intelligence and intricate detail of what life was like as a young woman in the 60s, when the morality of the 50s collided with the emerging freedom of music and politics.
There’s the blue lace stockings that she bought when she was nine months pregnant. The hitchhiking, the bands she sneaked off to see: Thin Lizzy and The Stones. The boredom of school. The arrests. The beatnik subculture.
My mum was pregnant at seventeen and was sent away to have the baby. There are four diaries that document nearly every day of the pregnancy and the horrendous way the girls in the convent were treated, their babies forced into adoption. However, my mum and the other girls give birth, smoke fags out of the windows, hide booze under their beds and flirt with the workmen. The cry and support each other when their babies are taken away, and rage at the injustice of it all.
I’m holding these pieces of social history in my hands, full of love and teenage rebellion. There’s so much here: the sexism, the struggles to survive disability and poverty, the classism, the way the medical profession and wider society treats these girls. But they find ways to fight back. Its a story of courage from working class girl, who deserved to be treated better.
A diary
1964
Name: K.I.Little
Age: 16 yrs 10 months
Address: 19 Pauntley Rd., The Scarr, Newent, Gloucestershire
Likes: Boys. Fags. Money.
Dislikes: Whisky. Getting up. Work
Born: Bristol
Date: June 24 1947
Pet hate: Miss Edwards
Aim in Life: To marry a Rolling Stone
Saturday 29th May 1964
Moses came back today. I think everyone gets a kick out of telling me. Was going to go to Cheltenham to get some shoes, but asked Eddie if she’d go to Bristol instead. We started hitching about 3.30, got a lift just past the bridge. This chap was a photographer or something, and reckoned he knew Tom Jones and John Lennon and some others. Anyway, when we were near Bristol he said would we be interested in doing some modelling? We said perhaps. Then he said it would be in the nude, probably just the bust. He said he’d have to go down some lane to look us over first. I was killing myself in the back, it was so ridiculous that he’d expect us to do that.
(Nearly a year later) 21st March 1965
I am almost sure that I am going to have a baby. What I don’t understand is why I don’t feel more worried, probably because you only worry about things you should not have done. That’s not how I feel. I have no regrets. I feel no sense of shame.
22nd November 2006
A death. An inquest. A long wait for mum’s door keys and a kind interview with the police. They explain that my my mum killed herself. I imagine the scene through her ground floor maisonette window: A crocheted bedspread. The room painted light green and terracotta over the woodchip wallpaper. Framed pictures of angels and the Birth of Venus by Botticelli, looking down at her. Scribbled affirmations to read when she was feeling anxious: ‘Illness is not God’s plan’, ‘There is no glory in suffering’, ‘A grandchild’s laughter is the greatest medicine.’ One of her four cats asleep on the bed, probably Lizzie as she was the most nervous. The suicide note, I presume, was next to the bed, but no one gave me the exact details. The note I have is a photocopy. The words are thoughtful and, as always, focused on her children, sparing our feelings.
‘Absolutely no one could have prevented this.’
I disagree. Fourteen years after your death I hold in my hands seventeen diaries, some in your fast-paced teenage handwriting, containing tributes to the Rolling Stones and real-life boyfriends. The later ones are more serious accounts of parenting us in the 70s, with unexplained illnesses creeping into the pages. The diaries just before your death contain short, frustrated sentences and patchy information.
There’s also a box of letters, some from us, your children, the rest from a wide network of friends from all across the UK who suffered in similar ways to you. There’s a photo of you holding your first baby. You are the same age as my daughter in this photo. She sneaks into the local pub and smokes cigarettes with her friends, just like you did. Just like I did.
There’s a faded article from the local Gloucester newspaper dated the 5th September 1964: ‘Illegitimacy in Gloucester Highest Since 1945.’ The end of the second world war used as a benchmark, lending a gravity and morality to the reporting. The piece laments the ‘moral backsliding’ of the ‘unmarried, expectant mothers.’
Among the handwritten letters, there’s a couple of standout, faux-official black and white typed letters with a US address, a stapled receipt for a large quantity of antibiotics and vitamin pills attached.
Kitty Little
Kitty Little, known as ‘Kit’ when I was a child (or, of course, mum) later changed her name by deed poll to Katy Rideout — a more grown-up variation of her first name, followed by her mother’s maiden name. A new beginning.
19th November 2006
I’m busy. Running into the house for something, my phone, or a work notebook, I forget. I’ve just dropped my four year old at her dad’s house. The phone rings as I’m racing up the stairs, so I swivel mid stair and run back down.
‘I think mum is dead. I think she’s killed herself.’
In the next twenty minutes I’m at my friend’s kitchen table, who says ‘We’ll break a house rule for once,’ and passes me a roll-up which I smoke intensely. Her boy and girl stare at me and I try to be normal in front of them. I’m not crying, but I feel blank and stunned.
The next week consists of: waving goodbye to my daughter. A four hour train journey to Gloucester. Staying at my dad’s flat while I wait for the police to release the keys to mum’s maisonette and finish whatever it is they do, and then pace, pace, pace around my dad’s living room. Waiting is painful, gritted teeth and chewed mouth, pounding the streets of Gloucester to avoid conversations that speculate about the imagined scene of my mum’s death: ‘I saw it coming. I always said this would happen. Just a matter of time. I bet it was an overdose.’
Two days later and an interview with the kind police officer who hands me the photocopied suicide note and mum’s door keys attached to plastic picture of an angel with white wings and a halo. At last, I have something to hold that has been recently touched by her hands. Sitting on a bench in Gloucester Square, prams and people and pigeons passing by, I read the note over and over and grip the keyring.
Saturday 19th June 1965 (A letter never sent)
Dear Jo,
Did you see a programme on television about unmarried mothers and adoption, on Tuesday? If you did you might be able to understand how I’m feeling just now. I seem to keep cheerful during the day, at night I break down and cry for hours, I wake up with red eyes every morning, by night time it’s gone and the next morning I look washed out like something out of a nightmare.
I suppose this is the most self-centered, sickening, self pitying letter you’ve ever received, but when I hear people moaning about their boyfriend troubles and raving about pop groups, I feel I could gladly cut their throats. In a way I suppose it’s a kind of superiority, a sort of ‘my problem is bigger than yours’ attitude, but at the moment I seem to think everyone should grow up, somehow.
At night awake in the dark I sort of play games and imagine I’m going to have my baby and I sort of watch as it’s being delivered and hear it crying. It’s always a girl, all tiny and fragile. Then later I see the nurse who delivered it and I ask her for it but she says it’s too late, that I said I didn’t want it so they’ve taken it miles and miles away where I’ll never find it. That part makes me cry terribly.
Have you ever hated someone, really hated them? I think when love turns to hate, it’s twice as bad. Moses could have seduced anyone in the world, but it shouldn’t have been me, it really shouldn’t.
Everything seems to be moving so fast now it’s frightening. I have an appointment with a welfare worker to interview me and Moses if they can get hold of him. We’ll both have to have medical examinations, so that the adopters don’t pick up anything. Then 6 weeks before the happy event I move to a jolly common-to-all home in Cheltenham where all of us unfortunates give birth to our bastard babies. Three months later I sign a document legalising everything, after that the child is no longer considered mine, I’ve no longer got legal access to it. I’d rip up this sentimental rubbish if I were you.
I just wanted someone to know how I felt under this hardworking office girl exterior. I’m paying for my abuse of sexual morals, not the baby, nor Moses. The whole bloody lot’s fallen on me.
P.S. do send me a card on Thursday. You can imagine how overjoyed I’m going to be to be 18.
Love Kitty.
1995 King Alfred’s College, Winchester
I’m studying history and I learn that the diaries of ordinary people are the gold standard of primary sources. In history you look for the motives of the author and assess the evidence against the context of the time. You even assess the analysis of other historians as a secondary source. As the narrator of this history, I’ll no doubt bring to the page my own values and biases.
Diaries are everywhere now. Unlike the diaries of the past: personal, reflective, historic — now everyone is a pundit, a diarist. Daily habits, routines and photos scroll past us constantly, the constant updates of everyday people. Instant and fast, written for friends, colleagues and the general public. Historians, cultural theorists and anthropologists, just as with historic, paper diaries, will hopefully be trawling through the roar of personal stories searching for the missing voices, the pauses in the noise, the gaps in the evidence.
My mum’s voice is an unusual source for a historian to work with. A missing voice. A working-class girl, growing up in a market garden. Her mother was from a south Wales mining family, of the ‘Welsh Not’ generation. My nana was ambidextrous, a word I was fascinated by. Her teachers tied her left hand behind her back to force her into right-handedness. I would try, and fail, to hold my right hand behind my back to see if I could force myself into left-handedness.
My nana was in service from the age of fourteen, her bed in the basement of a large townhouse, the bed legs in pots of jam to stop the insects crawling up, so I was told. She married my grandfather when he came back from World War II, a hero, carrying a German sword and six medals — trophies that forever hung on the wall of their farmhouse.
They were busy and hardworking. Up at dawn pricking out celery and weeding leek beds on their seven acre plot. There was little time to spare for a young girl and so Kitty became resourceful at solitary play, quiet reading and as a teenager, sneaking off with friends in search of boys and bands.
At seventeen my mum became one of the one and half million teenage girls and young women who were cajoled — or more often forced — into giving up their babies during the 1960s. It’s a familiar story we now know from films like Philomena, full of tragedy, redemption and lost and found children.
My mum changed history for poor women, although she didn’t know it. She fought for the right to keep her baby — not as a campaigner — just as a person who bucked the trend. All of those people who didn’t conform helped change the trajectory of society. They are the hidden voices of history. And sometimes they pay a high price for their defiance and rebellion.
Gloucester, Longlevens Estate, 1979
My mum speaks to us in French over our cornflakes. She draws out the accent theatrically, and ends with ‘Ooooh, la la,’ pretending to smoke a cigarette. These are the French words I remember: ‘Je T’aime. Comment t’appelle tu? Bonjour mademoiselle. Excuse moi.’
My mum only went abroad once, on a school trip to Finland but she loved everything culturally European. Cheap prints of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Renoir’s blue-green ponds and Rembrandt’s dark shadows hung on the walls of our council house. In the evenings she played us Moonlight Sonata, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the Flight of the Bumblebee, and my all-time favourite: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture ‘with real cannons’. I knew that Beethoven was deaf and that Mozart wrote a whole symphony when he was a child. When we went to bed, she got out her Rolling Stones’ albums and read James Herbert’s horror stories, accompanied by a couple of barley wines and cigarettes.
Ours was a solid, white council house, with a flowering garden and a drooping, golden laburnum tree in the centre. Our street was dotted with our wider family, Irish Catholics on my dad’s side. My grandparents lived next door and two other sets of aunties, uncles and cousins a few doors away. The bleeding heart of Jesus looked down at us from their doorways, and little plastic bottles of holy water from Lourdes were passed around as a remedy for everything. We were reminded constantly and solemnly that Jesus died for our sins.
My mum wasn’t a Catholic, but she took us to mass most Sundays at St. Peter’s church, a towering monument of the 1800s. It’s still improbably beautiful amongst the increasing number of ‘Cash for Gold’ and betting shops, whose doorways now shelter Gloucester’s growing homeless population. She loved the meditation and the incense of Mass. The murmur of in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti took her away from the noise and demands of domesticity for an hour.
She never weighed much more than 7.5 stone and I barely ever nsaw her eat. Sometimes she sat with a teacup and saucer with two yellow pills next to her, at breakfast. She was always cooking for other people, though, and weekends were a merry-go-round of curry and rice, bolognese or roast dinners. Mondays to Fridays were a more austere tea of bread, jam and peanut butter, as we’d already eaten a free school dinner. This was until I was around eleven or twelve years old. After that, just after she and my dad split up, she gave up the cycle of churning out fresh cooked meals and instead stuffed the freezer with Findus Crispy Pancakes, reluctantly withdrawing from us, and spending more time in bed, trying to recover from illnesses that I didn’t understand.
Kids are different today, I hear every mother say
Cooking fresh food for your family’s just a drag
So she buys an instant cake and she burns the frozen steak
And goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper
And two help you on your way, through your busy, dying day.’
Mother’s Little Helper — The Rolling Stones
