By the time the baby was born on 15 December 1940, in St Mary’s Hospital, Prestbury, Stanley and Helen had found accommodation at 8 Heathbank Road, Cheadle Hulme. It was not home for long, as Stanley’s war obligations took the family south to Plymouth. He became a sublieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and they took up residence at 1 Townsend Villas.
Foote-Wood remembered his father telling him that he captained a destroyer, but there were no exaggerated heroics. Occasionally it would stumble across a German ship in the Channel when it was foggy and fire a few shots, but that was about as dramatic as it got.
The surprise and panic caused by Helen’s first pregnancy had understandably made the couple cautious about being caught out again. Money was tight and the upheavals caused by the war meant circumstances were not ideal for another baby. This could explain the five-year gap between Chris’s birth and Penny’s arrival at the Alexandra Home in Devonport, Plymouth, in August 1945. Although Stanley’s occupation was stated as ‘sublieutenant’ on Penny’s birth certificate, he insisted that ‘author’ was added in parentheses; writing evidently held more attraction than battle or insurance and the war allowed for some indulgence and a temporary escape from the workaday world.
The Wood’s first daughter was born at a more stable time than her brother. The war in Europe was over, and it was quickly followed by the Japanese surrender. Hostilities may have ceased but Stanley, who went on to become a divisional officer at the Royal Naval Barracks at Devonport, had to wait until he was demobbed in June 1946 before he could return to his Northern roots.
Had the family decided to stay at Townsend Villas and settle in the South it is doubtful the public would have ever heard the name Victoria Wood. Victoria herself was certain that she would not have become what she became had she not been born and raised in Lancashire. ‘I think there’s something special about coming from the North West. Most of our good comedians come from the North West,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something special about the way people talk and the attitude people have. People are very ironic there which they tend not to be in other parts of the country. I just think it’s given me a lot.’
The return to Lancashire meant a return to the world of insurance for Stanley. For some, it may have seemed a drab comedown, but Stanley, who would go on to specialise in insuring pharmaceutical chemists, derived a great deal of satisfaction from his work.
‘Why they settled in Bury, I honestly don’t know,’ said Foote-Wood. Bury is a typical East Lancashire cotton town with the motto Industry Overcomes All Things. It has the dubious honour of being Home of the Black Pudding.
The town was a coincidentally apt place for someone fresh from naval service. It was the home town of Robert Whitehead, inventor of the torpedo and the great-grandfather of the famous von Trapp children. But the town’s most famous son is Sir Robert Peel, creator of the Metropolitan Police. A tower was erected on the bleak Holcombe Hill in his honour and a statue of the former prime minister stands proudly in the town centre.
The Woods’ decision to settle in the town was most probably due to Bury Liberal Association appointing Stanley as the Liberal agent for the borough. As the agent for Bury and Radcliffe in the 1950 General Election, Stanley would need to draw on all his skills at salesmanship to persuade the electorate to share his political passion. The candidate was the Oxford-educated history master at Bury Grammar School, Colin Hindley. For once, Stanley’s persuasive charms would desert him. The Conservative candidate won with 26,485 votes, Labour polled 25,705 and Hindley received a meagre 5,662 votes – the smallest Liberal vote in Bury since 1942. Seemingly, the Bury public were more convinced by Stanley’s insurance policies than his political ones.
His reaction to the humiliating result was splashed across the front page of the Bury Times under the headline: LIBERALS DETERMINED TO MAKE A FIGHTING COMEBACK. ‘Although it has been said it was a thoughtful election,’ he said, ‘I feel we were up against a sort of cup final-cum-football pools mentality with the majority of the voters seeing it as a two-party fight.’ Stanley believed it was inevitable that in the future there would be a fairer system of distributing seats so that millions of votes would not be wasted. But his mood was buoyant and he claimed Bury’s Liberals would become more active and confirmed in their beliefs. Their attitude, he said, was: ‘When are we going to have another fight?’
He was being somewhat over-optimistic. When the next General Election was held in October 1951, confidence was so low that, for the first time in 20 years, Bury Liberals did not even have a candidate. Perhaps bruised by defeat, Stanley never stood in any elections himself. But his Liberal sympathies influenced the young Chris, who used to help him deliver campaign leaflets.
Victoria’s main memory of living at 98 Tottington Road was of sitting in bed, reading. But even at such a tender age a yearning for celebrity had already begun, and she had a feeling inside that one day she would be on stage. ‘I remember sitting in our garden on Tottington Road thinking “I want to be famous”. I can remember that from before I was five. It’s very, very clear to me,’ she said.
‘I don’t know whether it’s partly being the youngest of four and feeling sort of a bit anonymous and wanting to make my mark and feeling that I couldn’t really compete with the rest of my family – and so I had to do something different, I had to find another way through. It might be that.’ Her idea of fame meant being somebody of significance. ‘I didn’t feel important and I wanted to.’
In some families the youngest child is pampered, but that was not the case with the Woods. Victoria felt she was one of those people who was just there. Penny and Rosalind were quite happy without her company, Stanley’s spare time was taken up with writing, and Helen’s attention was focused on Chris. He had a severe bout of tuberculosis when young, and spent months in bed.
‘All I have ever wanted to do is make people laugh, probably to make people like me,’ said Victoria.
Occasionally there would be opportunities to make a mark as a youngster. Entertainment had been a part of Stanley’s childhood and it was a tradition he handed down. Chris Foote-Wood remembered having to dance, sing, recite or play the piano whenever he visited his paternal grandparents, and Victoria was also encouraged to perform.
She recalled: ‘When I was very, very little I pulled faces a lot – it was what I could do, what I was good at. They used to say, “Go in the kitchen and make up a face.” I used to go out, come back with a new expression and be very amusing to people.’
Those front room performances might have been the only concerts Victoria ever gave if one Sunday afternoon outing had ended differently.
‘I remember Victoria straying onto our land once,’ said Joan Wood (no relation) who lived four doors away at the other end of the Tottington Road terrace. ‘She was lost or misplaced. She was only a little girl when she wandered into the rough at the bottom where there were trees and rhododendrons. It was a rough patch leading down to the water. One afternoon there was a ring at the bell. It was the two elder ones and they asked could they go through to have a look because they’d lost Victoria.’
Joan’s husband, Neville, accompanied Chris and Penny down the steps and they found Victoria in the undergrowth.
‘He picked her up and twisted his knee coming back up the steps. He always joked that it was because of Victoria Wood that he had to have a cartilage operation. The cartilage used to come out but he could manoeuvre it back,’ she recalled fondly.
Joan was the only woman in the terrace who had anything in common with Helen: both women were roughly the same age and both had to contend with small children (Joan gave birth just a year before Victoria was born). But despite such apparent similarities, there was little closeness.
‘I didn’t have a lot to do with her. There was no popping into each other’s houses or exchanging Christmas cards. I used to see her pushing the pram down the road and we’d stop and talk about the children, but that was about it.’
More often th
an not Helen would be making her way to the embroidery shop at the bottom of the road. Needlework was a hobby of hers and she was a staunch member of the Costume Society, travelling all over the country to attend shows, events and exhibitions.
One of Victoria’s most outstanding talents was the ability to create finely drawn comic characters who remained believable in their absurdity. Explaining their origins, she said: ‘They’re not invented characters. They do exist. Maybe I remember them from my very early childhood when we lived in a street.’ Her immediate next-door neighbour on Tottington Road could have been the template for the crouched and senile Mrs Overall of Victoria’s celebrated soap opera, ‘Acorn Antiques’. Joan Wood had vivid memories of the occupant of number 96. ‘A very, very old lady called Mary Park lived there on her own. She was a little bent old thing with a bun. She’d been seen distressed on the doorstep. She should never have been there on her own. Her family had owned an antiques shop on Bolton Street.’
The fourth occupants of the row were two spinsters. Miss Gladys Craighill was the manageress of a leather stall in Bury indoor market, and Miss Mary Wolstenholme managed a gown shop in Bolton Street.
Mrs Wood’s phrasing was vaguely recognisable in some of Victoria’s characters. ‘They live in a beautiful cottage just outside Cambridge,’ she said of her textile artist son Michael (‘He’s got a piece in Brisbane Cathedral’) and his wife. ‘They’ve no children; they have rabbits.’
It was a lonely life at Tottington Road for Victoria, who did not remember having any friends or visitors. Prior to joining Elton County Primary School she believed she was the only child in Bury, and on her very first day at school she embraced a male classmate because, according to her, she had never seen a little boy before. So isolated had she been that she had little understanding of how to behave – even claiming all lost school property as her own.
No sooner had Victoria started at the school than the Woods decided to move house. A change of school at such an early age would have been an unsettling experience for most small children, but the location of Victoria’s new home would have a more profound effect on her. Ironically, the girl who grew up to be voted the ideal neighbour, had no neighbours. Initially damaging, but ultimately forming her, the isolation ruled out any hope of a normal childhood.
‘I come from a pretty ordinary place,’ claimed Victoria, but it would have been difficult for the Woods to find a more extraordinary home than Birtle Edge House. Perched high on the moors above Bury, in its lofty position it commands a tremendous view over the Pennines and across to Manchester. But the remote location also means the house is frequently enveloped by fog. In the winter it is not unusual for it to be cut off by snow for up to two weeks at a time, and when it rains the narrow road becomes a stream.
‘Northern country. Bits of moors, bits of barns, bits of factories … It wasn’t pretty country, at all … but it was space, it had space’, was how she remembered it. The town’s elders had viewed the site more positively when they decided to build Birtle Edge House half a century earlier. They deemed its ‘bracing heights’ perfect for the new Bury Children’s Holiday Home, which would provide beneficial breaks and ‘delightful holidays’ in the country for the town’s most poverty-stricken youngsters. The Home, which was later used as an observation post during the Second World War and to house Polish war refugees, was the gift of local businessman Cuthbert Cartwright Grundy, and was officially opened on 1 August 1908. It was a great civic occasion and assembled guests witnessed Warth Prize Band lead a procession of 50 poor children from Bury Ragged School.
‘We do not pretend to have solved any great social problem, but we earnestly trust that some boy or girl who shall come here will carry away with them some thought of beauty and order, given them by some wild flower, or by a bird’s sweet song, which will help them to grow to noble manhood or pure womanhood, and enable them to fill useful places in the life and work of our town,’ said Mr H. Crabtree, the secretary of the Home, in his opening day speech. When the Woods moved in exactly 50 years later one of the first things they did was rip out the overgrown rhododendrons.
The idea of a large, sprawling house on the hillside may sound idyllic, but the building cannot escape its past. Even today, when the sunshine is glinting off the white walls, and Red Admirals flutter around those rhododendron bushes which survived Helen’s hands, there is an air of institutionalised austerity about the place.
‘Underfed and delicate children will be better for coming to this home, breathing the air of these hills and having good, nourishing food,’ Mr Crabtree had said in 1908. The Wood children, by comparison, lived more frugally according to Joan Lloyd, who often saw Helen doing her shopping at Holt’s, the corner shop at the bottom of Castle Hill Road. ‘She always used to buy a quarter of ham or tongue or corned beef for all of them; I don’t know how they didn’t starve,’ she recalled. Victoria herself said the meals Helen prepared, of which Spam curry was a speciality, were ‘horrendous’.
The framed portrait of Cuthbert Grundy was not the only thing the Woods inherited when they became the new owners of Birtle Edge House. Inadequate plumbing and the absence of electricity was the legacy of the building’s past. Electricity was quickly installed, but up until 1986, when a bore hole was finally made, Stanley Wood had to walk half a mile to pump the household water supply into a holding tank.
As Bury Children’s Holiday Home, the entrance to the building was across a quadrangle. It boasted a veranda where Sunday services were held in the summer, a large entrance hall, a dining room that seated thirty, two dormitories with enough room for twenty-eight beds, a huge kitchen, a scullery and a pantry.
Helen Wood immediately set about dividing the house with hardboard walls. One of the dormitories was converted into three bedrooms for the girls, Stanley had an office and Helen had her own name-plated room which she used for sewing. The locks installed on all the internal doors for security summed up the distinctly individual lives.
‘We lived in a very strange way. We all lived in separate rooms,’ said Victoria. ‘We weren’t the most demonstrative of families. In fact, the idea was to be on your own as much as you could. We used to get our meals and retreat to our rooms.’ The living room was rarely used, its neon lights making it look, as Victoria said, ‘like Death Row’.
There were no friends or neighbours calling in, and no family get-togethers. Helen did not believe in festivities, leaving Stanley to carve the Christmas turkey. She was even against relatives visiting and as a result Victoria never knew her aunts and uncles, and remembered only her paternal grandmother. A rented television did provide a welcome focus, but Helen always insisted on sending it back in the summer because she thought it was wrong to watch it then. The field-sized garden would have been ideal for pony or dog, but there were to be no surrogate friends to keep the lonely Victoria company. ‘We’ve never been a family to keep pets,’ said Chris Foote-Wood.
As he had left home in 1958 to study engineering at Durham University, there was no time for any real relationship to be forged between him and Victoria. The age gap, and the fact that he already had a child of his own by the age of 23 added to the situation and, although they kept in touch, they remained relatively distant.
‘When you’re a child thirteen years is a lifetime. I was five when he went away to university and I didn’t have much to do with him after that,’ said Victoria. With her sisters it was different. They were there but Victoria was made to feel like an unwelcome outsider.
‘They were horrible. All sisters are horrible. Well, mine were. Very bossy, and they treated me like a nuisance. They were very proficient at giving “young Victoria” a good quashing, telling-off and bossing-about.’
Whatever she wanted to do, they found very babyish, although they did indulge in childish sadism, using Victoria as the butt of their teasing. ‘I was cruelly sat on, sat on and tormented for many years, and made to eat putty.’
Unfortunately, Victoria’s relationship with her parents
, particularly Helen, did not make up for the rather strained state of affairs she had with her siblings. ‘My parents were not very family minded,’ she said. ‘Their interest was not in their children.’
Looking back, Victoria realised her mother had probably been severely depressed throughout most of her childhood. She attributed it largely to Helen’s inability to admit that moving from a normal, busy street to the bleak and remote Birtle Edge House had been a massive mistake. Because the family never communicated with each other about anything of real significance, it was a state of affairs that could not be remedied.
‘Indomitable’ and ‘scary’ were the words she used to describe her mother. They were qualities that did not endear Helen to those living in the Birtle area. Joan Lloyd’s memories of her as being a rather difficult and cold woman were typical of the few people who actually came into contact with her. ‘She was very aloof and snobby. You never got past first base with her. She wasn’t popular at all. She wouldn’t even look at you.’ Her memories of Stanley were more favourable and she remembered him as ‘a bit of a toff, a pleasant, well-spoken man who always gave you a smile’.
Helen’s flintiness did not mellow with age and years later, when she was the sole inhabitant of Birtle Edge House, she was still giving short shrift to outsiders. One unfortunate woman made the mistake of telephoning to see if she was okay after a particularly deep fall of snow. ‘I am perfectly capable of looking after myself,’ declared Helen loftily, before slamming the receiver down.
Distant if not dysfunctional, is probably the best way of describing life at Birtle Edge House. Victoria first publicly acknowledged the parental ambivalence in 1996 when she was the subject of The South Bank Show. In one telling segment Melvyn Bragg probed her about the effects of Helen and Stanley’s disinterest. She responded with a rueful smile, a jutting chin and a sigh as she carefully chose her words. ‘That’s just the way it was and I didn’t expect anything different really. That’s what we were used to: that we all lived in a very separate way.’ She added: ‘There was encouragement in the sense that you could do what you wanted, which was a bit scary in a sense.’
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