That's Another Story: The Autobiography Page 5
There was an occasion once, after I’d started work, when I went out to one of Chris’s dos on a Sunday night. As a result there wasn’t time on the Monday morning before I went to work to comb out the stiff curls with their solid lacquered finish. After I had slept on it for several hours, my hair had taken on a very odd shape, completely flat on one side, whilst wildly frizzing out in all directions on the other. At the end of about twenty minutes in the toilets I felt, after much tweaking and despite its having a certain Brillo Pad quality, that my hair was in an acceptable state, so I slipped into the office at the insurance company where I worked - my first proper job on leaving school - and sat at my desk. Within minutes the boss was at my elbow, hissing in my ear: ‘You’re late! And take that silly wig off your head!’
On these nights out we frequented several different clubs: the Rum Runner, La Dolce Vita, Club Cedar, the Metro, but we would most often end up at the Locarno, a large club in the centre of Birmingham. In my memory at any rate, it was enormous and was divided, I think, into several bars and a couple of dance floors, each playing a different kind of music and so each appealing to a different age group, one of them for what we thought of as middle-aged people but who were most likely folk in their early twenties. Here the music was live and the band, usually something like a five piece, tended to play rock and roll, Elvis Presley, Frank Ifield, Tom Jones, the Beatles. No matter what, it always seemed to finish off at the end of the night with couples, some the worse for wear, draped over each other, in various stages of pre-coital foreplay, moving slowly round the room to ‘I Remember you’ by Frank Ifield and, later, ‘Hey Jude’. These were played solo by a bespectacled chap, sitting on a low stool, with a huge red-and-white electric guitar. At some point midway through the evening we would usually look in on our way to the toilets but mainly with the intention of mocking the ‘aged’ dancers.
On one of these occasions I was asked to dance by one of them, a tall, gaunt-looking Irishman with an engaging smile. After a few minutes jigging around he started to have a coughing fit and during the course of it something flew down the front of my dress. Whatever it was had gone down with complete ease of passage and had disappeared. Then I remembered the cigarette in his hand and, seeing that it was no longer there, began to jump up and down, frantically shaking the front of my dress. By this time the man was on the floor, flailing about amongst the feet of the nearby dancers. I shouted down to him not to bother about his fag, that my friend had some, but he was having none of it, eventually getting up and rudely lurching out of the room without a word. I thought no more of it. Later that night on the bus home, I reached down to adjust the handkerchief padding of my ill-fitting bra and entangled in it was a pair of false teeth on a little pink plate. The poor bloke must have gone home, his engaging smile disfigured by a big black gap in the front of his mouth, and talking with a lisp to boot.
The other room at the Locarno was presided over by a DJ and was dark and crowded. In here they played mainly Tamla Motown, the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers and the Supremes, which was our kind of music. ‘This Old Heart of Mine’ by the Isley Brothers along with ‘The Harlem Shuffle’ by Bob & Earl never fail to summon up the Locarno for me. We would throw our bags down between us and, fag in hand, coolly shift from foot to foot, our shoulders lifting and dropping to the beat in a kind of lazy shrug.
Christine was a good few inches taller than my five foot three and a half, and could easily peruse the periphery of the dance floor over the top of my head, where groups of young men lurked and perused us back. I would watch her face and await the signal that meant we were being approached by two eligible contenders; this would be an excited widening of the eyes and the hint of a smile with the tip of her tongue literally in her cheek. If, on the other hand, we were being approached by two chaps that she considered inferior in some way, she would throw me a look of horror that befitted the heroine in a silent movie, then drop her head and look to one side.
She was very conscious of her height and of the height difference between us. If, for instance, we were walking along a pavement that sloped to one side, she would drag me across to the higher side, in order to lessen the gap. However, it was guaranteed that if two blokes came over, one tall and the other short, it would be the short one that made a beeline for Chris, as if her height was a challenge, something to be scaled, like Mount Everest is to a climber. She would generally ignore them by staring imperiously into the middle distance above their heads.
On one occasion, however, a particularly small man suddenly appeared from nowhere, right in front of her, and started to cavort about in a horribly frenzied fashion. It appeared to be some sort of awful homage to Mick Jagger, with much leaping up on to the toes of one foot, bringing the other knee up and clapping his hands above his head in a completely abandoned way, and all done side on to Christine, like a matador with a bull. It was as if he were trying to show how physically liberated and virile he was, yet at the same time proving the exact opposite. ‘I am anally retentive, probably an accountant and don’t get out much,’ was writ large in neon above his head (no offence to accountants, especially mine). This, of course, we found irritatingly uncool and embarrassing, and Christine, who could blush for Britain, went purple. Then finally, having had enough, she stopped dead and stood there, staring down at him, arms folded across her chest; but to heap insult upon insult, the man didn’t notice, too wrapped up in his hip-thrusting, bottom-shaking, toe-curling dance. Finally he threw his hands up into the air above his head in order to clap them together. Christine caught hold of them with one hand and shouted directly down into his face, ‘Can’t you see I’m taller than you!’ And, in unison, we turned and left the floor, cackling cruelly as we went.
On these nights we would most likely get home somewhere between midnight and one o’clock. My parents, having gone to bed at about ten-thirty, assumed, because it is what they were told, that we had got in not long after that and that, after a night spent listening to records at Chris’s, she had walked me home and stayed the night. On many occasions when they had forgotten to leave the key out I scaled that wall up on to the roof and in through the bedroom window in evening clothes and high heels, having downed several rum and blacks. My mother never questioned why I had got so dressed up, just to stay in. I still don’t know whether she thought it was innocently done for the sheer pleasure of dressing up, as little girls do, or whether she secretly guessed but didn’t want to know. I suspect an exhausted mixture of the two.
Across the yard from the back place was a double garage, built by my father, that opened by way of a set of yellow sliding doors on to Wigorn Road. It housed my dad’s car and that of Reg Wood, his sometime partner who lived up the road. There was a poignant little echo when, twenty years later, I teamed up with Victoria for the Granada television series, Wood and Walters. As well as the cars, the garage was home to the guinea pig, which after much thought and debate was imaginatively named Guinea.
Guinea lived in an open cage; that is, with no front on it. This meant he was free to wander wherever he pleased. He pottered around the garden and grazed on the lawn during the day, going back into the garage at night, usually when my dad came home from work. Indeed, my dad missed him after he died because Guinea always ran out and watched as my father drove his car in, returning to his cage when the parking was complete. My father said that had Guinea lived much longer, he would have started shouting, ‘That’s it! Left hand down a bit! You’ve gorrit!’ For six years he led an uneventful, peaceful life until we introduced him to a female guinea pig called Janet. He went berserk, making a hitherto unheard-of noise, chasing and trying to mount this poor creature in a very agitated fashion. After only a few hours during which I left them, thinking that things would calm down in due course, I went in to check on them, only to find Guinea stone dead and Janet lying exhausted and spent in the corner. (My father said there was a lesson in that for all of us, so that when he died in 1971 of a heart attack whilst in bed, purportedly chattin
g to my mother, I did wonder whether he had quite taken that lesson on board.) However, it was a good long life - the guinea pig’s, that is, not my father’s - and goodness alone knows how long it would have gone on for, had it not been cut short by Guinea’s frenzied lust for Janet.
Many years later my daughter had a couple of guinea pigs of her own, a large grey male called Robin, named after the decorator, and a tiny chestnut one called Rosette. Remembering my own experience of Guinea’s right-to-roam lifestyle, I suggested that Robin and Rosette should also roam free and graze to their hearts’ content, on the little lawn at the back of our house. It seemed to make sense, as Robin wasn’t a sex pest as Guinea had been. They got on fine for at least half an hour, whereupon Maisie came screaming into the house, ‘They’re dead! They’re dead!’ I ran out into the garden, expecting them both to be prostrate from shagging, only to find that Plato, our big, gentle, black-and-white tomcat, had savagely attacked them, having Rosette for first course and Robin, which he couldn’t quite manage all of, for second. Of course I was wholly responsible for this and suffered many years of ‘You saids’ from Maisie, but I honestly thought all would be well. It remains a mystery to this day how Guinea survived all those years unmolested when he was surrounded by a neighbourhood full of cats, not to mention our own formidable Nelly.
The garage was also the venue for my first theatrical triumphs. These were shows, for want of a better word, put on by my brother Tommy with me very much in a supporting role. We bullied local children into getting threepence and some sweets from their mothers, then proceeded to lock them in while we terrorised them with our made-up dramas, mainly inspired by some television play or other and involving a lot of my mother’s old lipstick and a couple of her cast-off dresses.
It all came to a stop during one of my brother’s magic acts. He would stand there, in a magician’s cape and hat that he had been given for Christmas that year, and tell the audience that he was going to make me disappear by putting me in the special cabinet. This he had made himself out of bits of old wood that were stored in the corner of the garage. We had rehearsed and rehearsed, and all that I was required to do was to step into this cabinet. Whilst waving his wand about, Tommy would declaim in a high, moany sort of voice some mysterious incantation, which generally involved the words hocus pocus and abracadabra. Then touching the top and sides of the cupboard with the tip of his magic wand, he would close the door. After this there would be more incantation and magic-speak, rising in speed and volume to increase the dramatic tension. Meanwhile inside the cabinet I was simply meant to slip behind a bit of old red blanket that was hanging down at the back, so that when my brother at last opened the door I would have ‘disappeared’. The blanket was supposedly there as decoration, but of course its real function was to conceal a secret chamber or, in lay person’s language, a gap between it and the back wall of the cupboard.
However, one summer holiday after a long and successful run of the magic show, the act did not go to plan. We had gone through the usual procedure of my brother talking up the sensational nature of the act, then introducing me as his assistant, whereupon I would leap out and parade about with much waving of arms, dramatically indicating the various facets of the ‘amazing magic box’ and, at the same time, hopping from foot to foot and pointing my toes. Of course I wasn’t allowed to speak and was given a good whack once when I had offered - for just a few extra pence or, if people were short, sweets would do - to tell them where I had actually gone during the period of my magical disappearance. On this particular day, I dutifully got into the cabinet as usual. Whether my brother was rushing matters too much and I simply didn’t have time, or whether I was feeling mutinous, as the whacking incident had rankled, I don’t know, but I suspect I was simply bored and the thought of pricking the bubble of my brother’s theatrical pomposity as he preened and strutted about the ‘stage’ was terrifying, exciting and, above all, funny.
The door was duly whisked open with a grand flourish, Tommy announcing with great assurance that, as everyone could see, I had vanished. He didn’t notice for what seemed like an age that I was still standing there, rigid, in the same stiff pose as I had held when he had closed the door. It was only when the children began to titter and point that he cottoned on. He wheeled round on the spot and I can still see his face to this day: the shock in his little brown eyes, somehow made more vivid by the bright-red hieroglyphics painted on his cheeks and forehead with my mother’s lipstick. I can still feel that sublime surge of power as I watched him. Then the look of shock changed briefly to one of hurt, followed, in a second, by a flash of anger as almost in slow motion he came towards me. I jumped out of the box and ran, cutting a swathe through the audience, children falling off boxes this way and that, out across the yard and into the back place, where I locked myself in the dreaded, spider-ridden Lah Pom.
After the children had been dismissed, my brother came to find me and having been given several assurances that he would not hit me I opened the door. He was still wearing the red lipstick but the hieroglyphics had smudged into a vague, greasy redness, which, whether he was or not, made him look very angry indeed. He said, ‘It’s all right.’ And I could see that he wasn’t in fact angry at all. ‘Why did you do it?’ His expression was one of bafflement. I had betrayed him and I guess it could be said that this was an early lesson in stage trust, but there was something else and I think it was a little touch of respect. I had rebelled and he had caught a glimpse of the future actor in me, creating the drama and grabbing the limelight.
A year or so after our flurry of garage performances a man knocked on the middle door with a script in his hand. He was from our parish church, St Gregory’s, and having told my mother that they were doing a play at the church hall, he asked whether I would like a part in it. He gave me the script, retired with my mother to the sitting room, and I scurried off upstairs to the bedroom, like a dog with a bone, to read it. I have little memory of it, except that my character had quite a few lines in the form of a single speech and the play was vaguely religious in that it was a bible story of some sort. My mother made this man a cup of tea, and by the time he had drunk it, I was downstairs again, performing my part, the script held behind my back, the speech having gone effortlessly in, purely from the thrill of acting it alone upstairs and the thought of acting it on a stage in front of an audience. When I did come to perform it, it was my brother Tommy who rushed backstage to congratulate me and to tell me, with wonder in his voice, that not only was I really good but that I was the best! It is something he has done ever since.
In between the garage and the back place was the yard, with a high wall that separated us from next door at one side and a little strip of garden running down the other. It was crossed at wonky angles by a couple of washing lines and until about 1960, when we acquired a washing machine, up against the garage was the mangle. There were many gory tales regarding mangles, mostly, I suspect, coming from my mother’s imagination, in order to keep us away from it, stories of squashed fingers and, in one blood-soaked saga, the painful loss of an entire digit. This had to be tested out and obviously the use of my own finger in such an experiment was out of the question. So with the help of a wodge of plasticine, I constructed the nearest thing to my own forefinger as was possible and put it through the mangle. The sight of it coming through the other side completely flat made my stomach give a little lurch. I hadn’t allowed for the fact that there are bones in a finger, of course, but the totally flattened strip of plasticine furnished my imagination for many years to come with a graphic image of my bloody, mutilated and, naturally, flat forefinger, which actually made the said finger throb.
3
‘Don’t Go Out Too Far’ - Holidays
It was in the back yard that I got my first suntan during a heatwave in 1966 when I was preparing for my GCEs. I sat out on a kitchen chair, head back, eyes closed, revising for my geography exam, the only subject that I ever really revised for. When after a couple of hours I
went back into the house, I found, on looking in the mirror, that my face had turned a bright, not unattractive, brownish pink. And there began an addiction, which I still have, albeit in a less desperate form, today. It made everything look better. My hair, which was still vaguely blonde, looked blonder; my eyes looked browner, and my skin looked even in tone, brighter and healthier, with a tight, warm glow, but above all I looked as if I had been somewhere exciting and exotic. It was in the sixties that people started to take holidays to Spain and so gradually suntans, which were very rare after a holiday in an English seaside resort, began to be something of a status symbol. In our own street, the first people to go abroad on a regular basis were a family at the bottom end of Long Hyde Road. They were an attractive lot, in a flashy, television-advert sort of way, living in a largish corner house with a big, yellow Ford Consul parked outside, a pretty blonde mother and daughter and a darkly handsome father and son. But what set them aside from the rest of us was that at least once a year they would go off somewhere, looking similar to everyone else, and return a couple of weeks later as another species: bronzed, relaxed, transformed into world travellers.