At school, my crowd was made up of two Amandas, two Lucys and two Clares. Without doubt, I was the gobbiest of us all, but a close second was my friend Amanda, whose mum and dad were best friends with my parents. She was known as ‘Fig’. (We’re still in touch and I still always want to call her Fig.) We wore luminous socks and Frankie Goes to Hollywood T-shirts and Mum called us ‘The Jam Tarts’. It was because of Fig that I became a vegetarian. Fig was crazy about The Smiths and we were both slaves to Morrissey’s ‘Meat is Murder’ campaign. We had badges with the slogan all over our denim jackets. Giving up meat was an easy option for me – I’d never been that fond of it and often hid pieces in my mouth to spit into the loo after a meal. My mother was annoyed at first that she had to make me special meals until Dad announced that he didn’t much like meat either, and then Debbie said the same, so we all became vegetarian.
Sometimes, we’d go to Mum’s office after school. By then she was a secretary at the engineering firm Husband & Co, which operated out of a big Georgian mansion close to Fig’s house. Her mum worked there too, so sometimes she’d come as well. There was a beautiful cedar tree in the garden that I loved to climb – my very own Magic Faraway Tree. The house was stunning and had a sweeping staircase. I used to walk down those grand stairs pretending I was an actress.
It must have been moments like these that made Mum realise I needed an outlet, but without much money she had no idea what to do with me. She had seen me perform at school, in theatrical productions and on a float in the annual Bishop’s Waltham Carnival. She and my nan had kept every programme from every production I’d been in, and so she knew how passionate I was about singing, too. I’d written my own song for a band at school based on the movie E.T. The chorus went: ‘He came from another planet. He was totally alone. E.T., phone home.’ (More great lyrics!) For costumes, we went to the launderette and bought bin bags that cost 10p each, cut holes in the sides and wore them as dresses.
Mum even sent me for acting lessons to a lady called Estelle Westcomb, the solicitor who’d handled Mum and Frank’s divorce. Estelle had once been in the theatre so as well as becoming my vocal coach she taught me drama and deportment – like how to pull on a pair of gloves and balance a book on my head (which came in very handy later on. . .!). I was very enamoured with her – she introduced me to Shakespeare, Dickens and T. S. Eliot, and ultimately fired my ambition to become a serious actress.
So when a woman named Angie Stanley moved to our village and decided she was going to set up a local amateur dramatics group, it seemed to be the perfect answer, and I joined the Bishop’s Waltham Little Theatre. Angie was considered proper ‘showbiz’ because she used to work with an illusionist, Will Ayling (a member of the Magic Circle, you know!), and was good friends with Billy Dainty, one of the last great music-hall performers.
Mum and Dad not only encouraged me to join, they volunteered to help out – Dad made a lot of the scenery while Mum ran the bar. Debbie did theatre too but, like all little sisters, she tended to trail around after me, which I found really annoying. She followed me into gymnastics and then theatre. Instead of understanding that she was just looking up to her big sister and wanting to do the same things, I thought she was copying me and, I’m ashamed to say, I found it irritating. In fact, my sister couldn’t have cared less about theatre – all she was interested in was horse riding, which I’d secretly wanted to do as well, but after my mum kept telling Debbie silly things like she was always in my shadow, I decided not to pursue that so she could have her ‘own thing’.
In my first production, Babes in the Wood, I was a fairy and had to sing ‘May You Always’. (It was a very grown-up song for an eight-year-old and I didn’t want to sing it at first, so I put up a great fight – until Angie told me I had to do it!) I was doing fine in the dress rehearsal until my ‘boyfriend’ Clifford Culver walked into the back of the hall and my nerves got the better of me. With his eyes on me standing centre stage, I completely lost my voice and had a fit of coughing and clearing my throat. Poor Clifford, he was only nine years old. I don’t know who was more embarrassed, him or me. But things went much better during the actual performance and whilst I’m not sure that when I sang you could have heard a pin drop, as Angie tells it, certainly the moment that I heard the applause is when something clicked inside me. Angie says that, standing in the wings, she saw a glint in my eye and she thought, ‘She’ll go far.’ I’d definitely got the bug . . .
By this time, I’d been a member of the gymnastics club for years. I represented Bishop’s Waltham in competitions and the vault became my speciality. I was very disciplined and went to practise three times a week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sunday mornings. Gymnastics definitely set me up for my life in terms of my shape and my fitness, and also in terms of my work ethic. It was very disciplined and stood me in good stead for the rest of my life. Gordon Larkham, who’d known me all my life, ran the gym at Ridgemead Junior, my second school, and made me appreciate Simon and Garfunkel, which he used for our warm-up music (the opening bars of ‘Cecilia’ still make me want to do the splits or stretch). I trained with Gordon until I was thirteen years old, when the club ran out of finance. After a stressful time, it closed and we all had to filter off into other clubs. To be accepted, we had to be able to compete strongly on the beam, floor, vault and bars. The bars had always been my weakness – because I was so skinny I was constantly bashing my hip bones. (I had to shove polystyrene down my leotards to do them, so they’d never been my favourite!) Now, though, the bars let me down totally and I was unable to filter into another club. My ten-year gymnastics dream was over.
Gordon phoned Mum one night to tell her that I wasn’t going to get into Southampton, and I lay on my bed and listened to her response outside in the hallway. ‘Oh, she’ll be heartbroken!’ she told him. She was right. After she came into my room and told me, and gave me a hug, I cried myself to sleep, but by the time I woke up in the morning I’d reached a decision.
Stubbornness runs in my family, along with pride and dignity. I didn’t want to look like I’d failed – I would have found that humiliating. If I wanted to do something, then I had to make it happen. That was just how it had to be. Nobody else was going to do it for me. Not being accepted for gymnastics was my first big rejection but it opened a new door for me. I put my heart into acting, instead. These days Chris moans at me that I have no hobbies. But that’s because my hobbies turned into dreams, and my dreams turned into my job.
Chapter 4
I Have a Dream
I became obsessed with performing and was like Bishop’s Waltham Little Theatre’s answer to Rachel in Glee – ambitious, driven and demanding every lead. I must have been a nightmare. For me, though, it was all about the buzz of being on stage and becoming an actress – I had no comprehension of money, or the effects of fame. Back then, there was no celebrity culture and certainly no sense of becoming famous just for the sake of it – you did something because you loved it. There were no real celebrity magazines and, although there were shows like Opportunity Knocks and New Faces, they were completely out of reach for the likes of us. (The closest I got to them was on special occasions when my mum would call me back down after bed to let me watch the Benny Hill dancers and the Roly Polys doing their tap routines!) Mum and Dad wanted me to have an education to fall back on but there was never a moment they didn’t believe in me and make me believe that things were going to happen for me.
My amateur dramatics theatre director Angie Stanley was my champion. I think she recognised the ambition in me even before I knew it myself. She certainly seemed to understand me. She says now that she could see that I had ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ was) and she wanted to encourage me as much as she could – ‘there is nothing as sad as wasted talent’, she says. However, there is also nothing quite so political as ‘am dram’ and there were other girls who wanted the lead roles, so one year Angie gave the lead role in Aladdin to another girl, ‘to be fair’. I was so angry. I remember thin
king, ‘This is not how the business works.’ (I was thirteen – as if I knew anything!) And so one evening, my mum dropped me off at Angie’s house to have this very conversation.
Angie opened the door and I just burst into tears – I was beside myself and could hardly get my words out, I wanted that part so badly. Eventually I sobbed, ‘You get somewhere with an audition, you don’t do it to be fair.’ She was very sympathetic, if unmovable, and even gave me a sherry to calm me down! (You’d never have that now, but back then it seemed quite normal to be having a medicinal glass of sherry with my theatre director!) She explained that I couldn’t do it every year because it wasn’t fair on the other children and said that it was better I had my first taste of rejection now, when I could go home to my own bed and my mum and dad, rather than in years to come when I was in London and had nowhere but some grotty bedsit for comfort. I, of course, wasn’t convinced, but had no choice but to accept it. She gave me the second part, the part of the handmaiden, and I decided to front it out. I was like, ‘Okay, I can handle this.’
Someone less focused might have been put off by that but, far from putting me off, the whole experience just fuelled my determination even more. When I wasn’t rehearsing or performing, I pored over magazines like Look-in. I loved Collect-a-Page, the back page that featured a different singer or pop band member every week, and I’d read it over and over, pretending I was being interviewed and rehearsing my answers so that I’d be word perfect when my time came. You can imagine . . .
‘What’s your favourite song?’
‘“Dancing Queen”,’ I’d reply (to myself).
‘And your favourite pet?’
‘Elsa, our dog, who I believe is reincarnated from Marilyn Monroe.’
Yes, I was totally nuts about Marilyn Monroe and I was convinced she was related to Elsa. This was proved beyond any doubt when I used to shout ‘Marilyn’ and Elsa would come running. (Any more of this and I’ll get carried away in a straitjacket before the end of the book!)
I loved school. English was my best subject and I loved making up stories – in fact, if I ever had a Plan B in my plans for the future, then it was to be a writer. Not that I was ready to settle for anything less than Plan A at that point. As well as ‘am dram’, I volunteered for several school theatrical productions including a musical called Dracula Spectacular, directed by my teacher Miss Pearce, in which I played a character named Miss Nadia Naïve. My mum had a beautiful polka dot dress made for me by a lady in the village and then she, Dad and Debbie came to see me on the opening night. We’ve still got pictures of it – Nan and Papa didn’t just keep every programme, they had every photograph and newspaper cutting of everything I was ever in, too.
At school, I used to do impressions all the time – Ruth Madoc as Gladys Pugh from Hi-de-Hi! playing the xylophone and announcing, ‘Morning, campers!’, Margaret Thatcher, my teachers . . .
The girl I looked up to the most in the world at that age was sixteen-year-old Lisa Dolson, who was picked to play the lead in our production of My Fair Lady. She was my first close-up heroine. Night after night I sat mesmerised as she sang her heart out. Unfortunately for me, I was four years younger than her and a mere broad-bean peeler dressed in rags. But she was everything I wanted to be, and it suddenly struck me that I could do everything I wanted to do, too.
Once Dad went back to work my parents had two incomes to rely on and we were able to move to a bungalow in Waltham Chase, two miles from Bishop’s Waltham. My mother had always dreamt of running a guesthouse but they couldn’t afford to buy anything large enough at first. I didn’t care – I thought the bungalow was the best house we’d ever lived in. To supplement the 50p pocket money Mum gave us every week, Nan collected her loose change in an old toffee tin under the bed. She’d take the tin out and rummage around in it to give us something to buy treats at the corner shop. I loved sweets: penny chews, Parma Violets, necklaces on elastic, cola cubes and pear drops, which I’d split my tongue on by sucking them so hard. (These days I’m a Haribo Tangfastic girl.) Even so, I never had as much money as my friends, although I hid it well. I remember once we got the bus into town and I bought a blue and silver double eyeshadow. We all went for a pizza and I deliberately didn’t have much to eat because I knew down to the last penny what I had in my purse. It wasn’t that I cared much about money – if you’ve never had it, you can’t miss it – but I think I pretended I wasn’t hungry or something just to save face.
A lot of our clothes were second-hand and inherited from my cousin, but we were always grateful for anything new. That was until the day I was given a Victorian-style dark blue coat with puffy sleeves. I thanked Mum and told her I loved it (because I knew she couldn’t afford a new one), but secretly I hated it and took it off as soon as I left the house. I’d rather have frozen to death than be seen in it, so I draped it over my arm instead. I even dragged it over a bush to tear the lining in the hope of getting a new black donkey jacket like the ones all my friends were wearing. On my next birthday, that’s exactly what Mum had bought me. She must have saved up and kept it hidden at work because it smelt of photocopier fumes. I loved that coat so much I wore it until it was hanging off me.
I had big lips, a cowlick and a gap between my front teeth as a little girl but thanks to my mum and dad I’d never felt anything other than beautiful, so I didn’t mind at all when, as I became a teenager, I had braces fitted to my teeth – not least because my friend Fig had them, too. Fig had massive boobs, big hips, skinny legs and a bubbly personality, and the boys loved her. (Although I developed early and was wearing a bra by eleven, sadly my cup size didn’t develop much from the age of twelve!) I tagged along with her and thought she was really cool, so I thought her braces were in, too. Fig was also really into Madonna. I wore lace fingerless gloves, threaded lace through my perm and bought my first pair of red stilettos in homage to her (Madonna, not Fig).
This was about the time that boys – scarce since I married Eric Austin in the garden – made a reappearance in my life. After my short-lived relationship with Clifford Culver (at nine!), my first boyfriend was Matthew Bishop. I thought he looked like Bobby Ewing from Dallas. I used to listen to Radio Luxembourg at night and made Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Hello’ ‘our song’. (He, of course, knew nothing about it, but to this day when I hear ‘Hello’ on Magic FM even Chris says, ‘Awww, Matthew Bishop – get over it, Mandy!’)
I also got my first weekend job, at Hylands fruit shop in the village, for £13 a day. Of course, I spent it all on clothes and No. 7 make-up. (I adored fashion and I’d pick up bargains in Snob and Chelsea Girl in Southampton.) That job gave me my first taste of exotic fruit. Seedless grapes were a treat in our house, but they were abundant there – not to mention star fruit and kumquats, ‘which go very nicely as a sauce with duck’, as I’d tell all the customers, even though I had no clue what I was talking about – I only knew because Ken Hyland, the shop owner told me!
Sometimes, after school and work, I’d go to Spratt’s garage where Dad worked and watch him working on a car in his oily overalls. We called the owners, Chris and Jimmy Spratt, ‘the Ewings’ because they lived in a huge house (‘Southfork’!) and were married to two – very glamorous – sisters. The best car Dad ever did up while he was there was a beautiful blue-grey Morris Minor 1000 with red leather interior, which I fell in love with and hankered after for years. We had a Morris Traveller on the drive that my sister learned to drive in (aged ten, in secret – until she flooded the engine!) and we all loved it until it finally gave up the ghost and sat at the end of the drive covered in moss, looking like an old tortoise. A Morris Minor remained my dream car and from then on I always wanted to own one myself.
Years later, I worked at Spratt’s as a petrol pump attendant for a while and used to ask if I could write out receipts for the clients for a bit more so I could have the extra in tips! I loved to dip my hands in the tub of Swarfega hand cleaner gel – that smell will always remind me of my dad. It was also there that
I first listened to Steve Wright in the Afternoon on Radio 1 blasting across the forecourt. I love going on Steve’s show and never dreamt I would as that young girl.
I learned how to play the piano to Grade 5 (with Distinction) but I scraped by on the sight-reading by listening to my teacher and simply copying her. After a while, I couldn’t get away with that any more and as I couldn’t be bothered to learn to read music properly I gave it up to concentrate on the things I loved more. We have a piano at home now, but it’s as if I never played – I should really take it up again.
With both parents working, Debbie and I were ‘latchkey kids’ and were used to letting ourselves in and out of the house. In the mornings, I used to get myself up, put my heated tongs on, listen to Terry Wogan on Radio 2, tong my perm into my hair and spray clouds of Silvikrin and Shockwaves hairspray. I’d have a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal, make my own packed lunch, sort my homework, grab my satchel and run outside to meet the friend’s mother who took me to school. (I know this makes my mum sound redundant – but she’s terrible at getting up in the morning. She’d get up with minutes to spare and cycle like crazy to get to work on time!) I’d hate you to think I wasn’t being looked after though – she was amazing. It’s just that I was very independent, which I think was good – and definitely set me up for the future.
No Holding Back Page 4