JOAN’S EARLY LIFE
Joan, Born in Cork, Ireland, Joan was a pretty Catholic girl who grew up between the world wars in a simple thatched cottage with her mother and stepfather. In her teens, life was magical and mystical when she worked in Limerick as a fashion buyer. There, she met her future husband,
Tom Scott, an Irish Protestant, stationed in Limerick with the Royal Air Force to build an airport.
Joan lost her virginity to “Big Tom’’ in a field, became pregnant with twins, and faced the dilemma of what to do. Had she stayed in Ireland, Scott says, her babies would have been taken off her and adopted out in the UK or Canada. In 1947, one of the coldest winters on record, she moved to London to give birth to Scott and his sister, Susan, in Hammersmith Hospital. Joan bled so much that she developed septicaemia. Delirious for days, a hospital dentist pulled all her teeth out, leaving her with a mouth full of dentures.
Life in London was tough. Joan was a single mum with two babies living in a one-bedroom flat in Brixton. Eventually, she got a job as a cleaner at a Jewish primary school, taking Scott and his twin sister to work and pushing her double pram around the streets afterwards.
As maimed and crippled war veterans filled London’s streets after the war, Joan’s older half brothers stepped in to help, tracking down the father of her children as he was about to board a boat to New Zealand with the Air Force.