Do you remember them?

THE missing pieces of North-East-born actress and playwright Karen Lynne Foreman’s life have so haunted her that she’s determined to create a musical play based on the 57 fascinating years – 1903 to 1960 – her family spent in Darlington.

Currently she’s asking for people to get in touch with her and her partner, Graham Howes, if they can remember the Hauxwell and Foreman families and have records and recollections of days that are now right on the edge of living memory.

Using the working title, Missing Pieces, Karen says of setting out to explore her family’s early life at 42 Lewes Road, near Bank Top Station: “A lot of the project comes from my mother Lillian Hauxwell never getting over her father Harry Hauxwell’s death in 1940. She was 12, her sister, Joyce, was 16 and her other sister, Vi, was ten. The take on the play is really from mum’s point of view. One minute her father was there and starting to lose his voice and then one day he got on his bike and said ‘see you’ and he went to the hospital and they never saw him again.”

Karen’s grandfather died of throat cancer and pneumonia and left his wife, Violet also known as Violetta (nee Wood), who was a wheelchair user, and three daughters who were well-known as the “Hauxwell girls”.

Harry was a carpenter, a member of the East End Club – Karen still has his membership card dated July 18, 1939 – belonged to a cycling club, tended an allotment and is related to the famous Hannah Hauxwell.

“I was told he was like a big kid, but he could have a bad temper.

There was an ice cream man in the Thirties who came round calling ‘ice creameo, ice creameo’ and Harry shoved his van over when the guy wouldn’t stop when he said his family was sleeping,” she says. She also recounts that once, during an argument, Violet knocked out Harry with a hammer.

Karen, who once played a young Catherine Cookson in John Miles’ North-East musical, Tom And Cath and was recently seen in Stephen Fry’s ITV series, Kingdom, is aiming to play the role of Violet herself.

In Karen and Graham’s version of the story, Violet will be a dance teacher who gradually loses the ability to dance, based on the fact that the real-life mother-of-three was a wheelchair user by the age of 24.

Graham says: “The huge irony is that the only work offered to her was in a munitions factory where she’d be making things that would injure other people.”

Karen adds: “My mum had a big thing about that. People would ask her ‘is your mum a cripple?’ and she wouldn’t let them use that word.”

The couple were inspired by 63- year-old Liverpool screenwriter Terence Davies and his recent documentary, Of Time and the City, which was premiered last year. This featured vintage newsreel footage, contemporary popular music and a narration by Davies looking back at his hometown life.

“One of the things he says in the film is ‘as you are now, we were then’ so there is a sense of continuity of struggles, with good humour, against adversity and the fact that people were singing at every conceivable opportunity in the house, pub and in the street,” Graham adds.

Ballroom dancing will play a large part in the project, as will the aspirations of the town’s people to change their lives for the better.

Karen’s mum and dad, Lillian and Jim, married at St John the Evangelist church in 1951 and used to MC at Darlington dances throughout the Fifties and Sixties. Some may recall Jim working at Moses furniture store and Cox and Faulkners while Lillian worked at Paton and Baldwins and the surgical shop in Post House Wynd.

Her grandparents on her father’s side were James and Ethel (nee Drummond) of 117 Brinkburn Road.

Jim senior was a boilersmith.

Playwrights Karen and Graham are hoping to film some contributions particularly after discovering that the East End Club, Harry’s allotments, Harrowgate Hill and Dodmire schools, which Lillian attended in the Thirties and Forties, are still in existence.

Part of the incredible and tragic family history of the Hauxwell girls is that Vi was killed in a drink-driving incident and that Joyce moved to Australia with husband, Norman Bagley. Harry also had a sister, Anne, who has a long lost son, Alan.

“We are hoping there will be people who were kids at that time who will remember Harry, Violetta and the Hauxwell girls. We think Dodmire School might still use some of the desks that Harry made,” says Graham.

Currently the couple are in negotiation with London backers for a play Karen has written about the Hollywood legend Errol Flynn.

“We’re very much hoping that Missing Pieces will be in production in a couple of years’ time, but we very much need memories now,”

says Graham.

■ If anyone has contributions or help for the Missing Pieces musical play email: karenlynne@ grahamhowes.plus.com or write to: 3 Riverside Cottages, Factory Lane, Cattawade, Manningtree, Essex, CO11 1QL