My parents moved to Dagenham before I was born. By then they’d been together for six years and married for three. My mum, Fiona, came to London from the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, when she was eighteen. The daughter of a Church of England vicar, she was working as a student nurse and living in nurses’ lodgings in Victoria when she met my dad, David, at the Empire nightclub in Leicester Square. It was one of her haunts, apparently, and Dad used to take photographs there every night.
Mum and Dad quickly fell in love and decided to get married. My dad is Jewish and ideally he wanted Mum to convert to Judaism, but he didn’t put any pressure on her. It wasn’t going to affect whether they stayed together or not, and Mum wouldn’t have converted just for the sake of getting married, but when she looked into what it meant, she decided it was what she wanted after all. It takes five years to become an Orthodox Jew, but Mum went the Progressive route, which takes two years.
When she and my dad went up to the Forest of Dean to announce that they wanted to get married and that she was converting to Judaism, her parents were lovely about it. Her dad said, ‘At the end of the day, we all believe in the same god, in our different ways. If you’re happy and this is what you want to do, then do it.’ I loved my granddad; he was such a kind and generous person. He passed away recently at the age of ninety and we all miss him. Amazing, ninety! Please God I live until I’m ninety! What a joy that would be. My mum’s mum is still alive and we often see her. We all love Grandma; she’s lovely.
Dad’s family were very accepting of my mum, too, and there were no issues there whatsoever. My dad is the grandson of Iraqi Jews who were coffee merchants in Burma and fled to Calcutta when the Japanese invaded. They then moved to London in the 1950s. My grandfather died of heart failure when Dad was a young boy, leaving my nana with four children to bring up. It must have been really hard for her, but if anyone could do it, my nana could. She was an amazing person, the daughter of Polish emigrants to London in the early twentieth century. My dad was very close to her; we all were. She’s not with us any more, sadly, but I have great memories of her.
Mum and Dad had a traditional Jewish wedding in September 1986 at the North London Progressive Synagogue near Stamford Hill. Twelve years and three kids later, they divorced when I was nine. I don’t remember much about life before they split up, except the big occasions like Christmas, birthdays and holidays. For New Year, we used to go to Butlin’s in Skegness or Bognor Regis; whichever was the cheapest, I suppose.
In the summer we’d all meet up at Butlin’s or Pontins – my nan and my cousins and everyone – or sometimes we’d go camping. My dad’s family all live in Hackney, London, and I’ve got eight cousins on my dad’s side, so there were sometimes as many as eleven kids on holiday. We’re all around the same age and we lived in each other’s pockets, which was brilliant. I loved it. We went through everything together.
At Pontins we all stayed in one chalet, or in two chalets if there were too many of us, and the kids would all be in together. It was brilliant. The adults could never get us to go to sleep. We seemed to spend most of our waking hours following a man dressed up in a crocodile outfit, who was known as ‘Captain Croc’. At the kids’ disco, we did routines to ‘Agadoo’, ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ and ‘Silver Lining’, and then the crocodile would appear and do ‘The Crocodile Song’.
We went go-carting; did dive bombs in the pool, which had a wave machine; trampolined; played on the pirate ship in the playground and tried our luck on the 2p slot machines. The only thing I never liked going on was the bouncy castle, because of the loose black strings that were attached to the floor. They used to fly about when the other kids jumped and I was convinced they were spiders.
I was terrified of spiders, so when my dad put me on there I used to cry my eyes out and scream, ‘Get me off! It’s got spiders on it.’
My dad used to go totally mad, because he didn’t want us to be afraid of anything in life. ‘Go on! Get on that bouncy castle!’ he would tell me.
‘No, Dad, no! There are spiders!’
It was a proper phobia. I just couldn’t overcome it. It wasn’t a learned fear, because no one else in my family was scared of spiders and none of my friends were either. It wasn’t cool to be scared of anything. But I must have naturally and intuitively been frightened, because I didn’t even like to go barefoot in the grass in case I stepped on one.
A big highlight of the holiday camps was the gift shop. Everything on the shelves was glow-in-the-dark, and we’d go in there and gasp in wonder. We were all allowed to choose one thing each at the end of the holiday and I chose luminous ceiling stars. I remember one year when we went camping, all the girl cousins bought false nails at the local shop. We loved them, even though they were the worst false nails ever and used to flick off if you touched anything.
My dad’s mum was always at the centre of things. She was the best nana in the world, and the most Jewish. I mean, you’d walk into her flat and she’d be making chicken soup! Everyone had to have some. She was a little bit deaf and sometimes she couldn’t hear you. ‘WHAT DID YOU SAY?’ she would boom.
She was so funny, just the nicest lady, and my dad adored her. Everyone who met her loved her. She was a real Jewish bubbe. When I say that she had a heart of gold, I really mean it. I’ve never met anyone like her, not my mum, not my stepmum. She had barely a penny, yet she would give everything to her grandchildren. She’d lived in the same flat all her life and wouldn’t move; she would rather give everything she had to us.
As far as she was concerned she had everything in the world, whereas to someone else it would seem as if she had nothing. They might think, Oh dear, that poor lady! But she would have said to them, ‘Trust me, I’ve got all I need in the whole wide world.’ She had her family around her the whole time. We visited her every Friday for dinner, without fail.
Sadly, we saw a lot less of my mum’s family, because her brother and sisters live all over the place. One of my aunties on my mum’s side lives in Scotland and the other is in Canada. Still, there were enough of us on my dad’s side to make up for it. We certainly weren’t short of relatives. We had wonderful holidays with Grandma and Grandad in Wales and the Forest of Dean. I have very happy memories of swimming in rivers and chestnut picking, and going to our favourite places, the Giant’s Chair and Eastnor Castle.
It’s hard to know exactly why my mum and dad split up. They’ve never said anything about it in front of us, because they’re not like that, so we’ve had to piece it together for ourselves over the years. I used to ask my mum about it, but she’d only say, ‘One day I’ll tell you.’ But I don’t think she would ever say anything that she thought would change my attitude towards my dad, and he’s the same; he would never say anything that might change my opinion of my mum. Maybe there will come a time when they think they can tell us without being judged, but maybe not.
I do know that my dad spent a lot of time working. He had just started a company with his brother called White Weddings, a photography business catering for Jewish bar mitzvahs and weddings. He set up a tiny shop in the Blackhorse Road in North London and put everything into it, as you have to when you’re just starting out. He had been passionate about photography since he was a kid, and he’s an established photographer now. It was all he ever wanted to do; he even had a dark room at home, at my nana’s house, when he was growing up.
My mum has never had a bad word to say about my dad. I just think that he left her on her own to do everything, and she reached a point when she’d had enough. She threatened divorce, assuming he wouldn’t take her seriously. I think she expected him to say they could work it out and to promise that he’d spend more time with her, but sadly that didn’t happen and so my parents divorced.
Dad went to find another house, and we didn’t ask any questions. Mum just said, ‘We’re not together any more.’ That was it. Everyone was sad, especially Matthew. I remember him being really, really upset, even though he was only seven and I don�
�t think he really understood what had happened. He became very quiet and you could see the sadness in his face. My mum would cuddle him when she was feeling upset, so in a way he had to carry her sadness, which must have been tough for him.
My mum never cried in front of us, but we always knew when she was crying, because she’d turn on the hoover and we wouldn’t be allowed downstairs while she was hoovering. She was so sad. It broke her heart that our lives would never be the same again.
I can’t imagine how awful she must have felt. I haven’t been with my boyfriend, Aaron, for ever, but I really like him and Zach loves him and he loves Zach. And I know that if he was really bugging me and I said, ‘Fine! We’re not together any more!’ and he left and didn’t come back, I’d be heartbroken.
We didn’t see my dad for a little while after they decided to get divorced. Time wasn’t the same then as it is now, so it’s hard to judge how long it was exactly. If he went away for a month or two now, I would say, ‘Where the heck have you been?’ But back then none of us thought much about it. We didn’t ask him where he’d been and he didn’t say.
Dad managed to find a house in our road, which was brilliant as we got to spend a lot more time with him. I especially remember Wednesdays, when Dad took us to the swimming pool just around the corner. We loved going there because it had a fantastic tube slide. You couldn’t go down it without an adult, so we spent most of our time waiting at the side for him, while all the big kids went down before us, shouting, ‘Come on, Dad! Hurry up! It’s our go now!’
Life went on and we all got used to the new situation. We had to, because nothing was ever discussed. No one explained exactly why our parents had split up, so we just got on with it. Looking back, I think it was quite confusing for us. As a child, you don’t understand why adults behave in the way they do. You don’t realize that a divorce is about the adult relationship breaking down; you think it must be something to do with you and that maybe you’re the one who has done something wrong. All that confusion and hurt built up inside me and stayed there, unexpressed. It didn’t come out until years later, by which time it had turned into anger.
For the moment, though, outwardly at least, I was happy enough. I enjoyed going to John Perry Primary School, just down the road. It wasn’t hard to be happy there, because at primary school all you do is make sarcophaguses out of pasta or papier mâché, and other fun things like that. You have a Christmas party and everyone brings in a pack of biscuits; you take in a tin of beans for harvest festival. What’s not to like?
By now I’d decided I wanted to be a singer, because it struck me as a really cool thing to do. When we were in the car with the radio on, I’d think, Wow! I’d love to sing on the radio. I loved Eva Cassidy, especially when she sang ‘Over The Rainbow’. I thought she had the best voice in the world. My mum listened to The Carpenters all the time and I loved them, too. Karen Carpenter had the most distinctive voice, so beautiful and velvety. I like it when you can tell who’s singing, no matter what the track is, and you can always tell when it’s Karen Carpenter singing.
‘You can be a singer if you want to,’ Mum would say.
I didn’t get very far with my performing career at primary school, though. Every year, I’d audition for the nativity play, hoping to be cast as a shepherd, which was a really good part, but every year I ended up being a sheep, with one line: ‘Baa!’
‘Dad, I’m a sheep,’ I’d say every year.
‘Wow! You’re a sheep!’ everyone would yell enthusiastically, but I wasn’t happy.
In the last year, we were allowed to take part in a concert in the school hall. My friends Charlie, Rebecca, Gemma and me made up a dance to ‘It Wasn’t Me’ by Shaggy. We were eleven years old and had no idea what the lyrics meant, but everyone cheered us and I really liked the feeling it gave me.
I was always a little bit into boys, even at primary school. There was a boy called Bradley Wiggins in my class and I used to tell my mum I loved him. ‘Mum, I love Bradley Wiggins.’
‘Stacey, you don’t love him,’ she’d say.
‘I do, Mum, I do.’
He didn’t love me back, though. He didn’t even like me. He used to find me funny, but he liked a girl called Rosie. Unlike me, she was really pretty, with long blonde hair and pink cheeks. I was a pretty toddler – I looked like a mini version of my mum – but I didn’t blossom as I grew older. I had gappy teeth, glasses, the lot.
My friend Gemma lived opposite Bradley Wiggins and she fancied him, too. He was the class pin-up – everyone loved him. When I stayed the night at Gemma’s house, we used to lie awake planning how we’d sneak out of the window, run across the road to Bradley’s house, break in, slip past his mum and wake him up. But we never seemed to get beyond drawing the map to his house or deciding what we’d do if we got into his bedroom and woke him up. We just fell asleep on the map!
I have a vivid memory of something that happened in class one day, when I was being an idiot and not listening to the teacher. I was pulling faces and messing around and Bradley was really laughing. He was wetting himself, crying with laughter. Great, I thought excitedly. He finds me really funny.
He laughed and laughed and I laughed with him, thinking I was hilarious. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned round to find the teacher – Mrs Twiglet, we used to call her – standing behind me. She’d been there for ages, all the time I wasn’t listening, all the time I was happily thinking that Bradley was laughing at me because I was so funny, when in fact he was laughing because I was about to get into trouble. I was heartbroken. Oh no, I’m in trouble and he was laughing at me. Darn! Of all the things that happened at primary school, that moment really sticks out in my head.
Then one day a rumour went round: ‘Bradley Wiggins is moving!’
‘What? Bradley Wiggins is moving?’
‘Yes, Bradley Wiggins is moving. To Kent.’ Me and Gemma burst into tears. We were heartbroken. My first love was leaving Dagenham. It was a crushing blow.
After that, I was always in love with some boy or another. I never went through a tomboy stage.
‘I love that boy,’ I’d tell my mum.
‘Shut up,’ she’d say. ‘You don’t.’
Like a lot of girls, I used to dream about meeting my Prince Charming. I loved Disney films and was determined to turn my life into a Disney fantasy. My mum showed us Disney films from a young age and I liked them all; my favourites were Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Cinderella. Beauty and the Beast was the big one. I think it was the colours that made it so vivid for me: that bright red rose and her yellow dress when they fall in love. All the stories inspired me to write little poems and songs, which I pasted into my scrapbooks. I loved writing my feelings, thoughts and dreams down, and I still do to this day. My dad even framed one of my poems once, because I won a prize for it in a competition at school.
We enjoyed all the classics like The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music, and I discovered that Disney was a wonderful escape for me when I wanted to forget about everything. It still is today. It’s another place, a happy place, with happy endings. You can’t be scared when you’re watching a Disney film. I particularly identified with Disney’s Aladdin, because someone calls him ‘a diamond in the rough’ and that’s what my dad always used to call me.
By now, my dad had had a couple of girlfriends. Like Mum, he was upset about the divorce, but instead of staying in and being sad like she did, he started dating, although he tried to hide it from us.
Then, in the summer of 2000, when I was ten, he introduced me and my brother and sister to someone new. ‘This is Karen, everyone,’ he said when we were at his house one Saturday. Karen was dark-haired and pretty, with blue eyes, and she had a deep tan because she used to live in Israel. I thought she looked really young, although she’s actually older than my mum.
At first we felt weird about it because we didn’t realize Dad had been with Karen for a while. When they moved in together, soon after that – along with Kare
n’s three children, Aaron, Samantha and Ray – everything seemed to be happening really quickly. My sister hated my dad for seeing someone else, and didn’t want to be a part of any of it. Jemma used to say exactly what she thought in front of Karen and it made everyone feel really awkward. Karen was really good about it, though. ‘It’s understandable,’ she’d say sympathetically. ‘She’s just trying to get used to the idea. It’ll take time.’ Karen’s three kids hated my dad, too, at first, so it worked both ways.
I soon got over my initial wariness, and when they announced they were getting married I got really excited about the wedding. ‘I’m going to be a bridesmaid!’ I sang, skipping around the house. It was like something out of Disney. I liked Karen, who seemed like a really nice lady, and I loved Ray, her youngest son, who was quite a lot older than me and really good looking. I enjoyed making new friends, and he seemed incredibly cool.
Like me, Jemma was a bridesmaid at the wedding, but she wasn’t too happy about it. She said Dad was out of order for getting married again and she cried all day. My poor dad. He was only trying to move on with his life. I thought it was a really great day. All my family were there, including my mum. We wouldn’t have gone without my mum. I would have hated the idea of her sitting at home while we all celebrated my dad getting married. It sounds odd, but it didn’t occur to me that Mum would find it painful. Me and my brother were a bit naive about things like that, or maybe we were just burying our own conflicted feelings. I think my sister was more aware of how Mum might feel, which was why she reacted in the way she did. Luckily, my mum isn’t a bitter person and she was able to leave the past behind. She would never not like Karen just because she was with my dad. She and Karen have always got on well, because they’re both really good people.
A few years later, when Karen got pregnant with Josh, I was thrilled at the prospect of having a little baby brother. ‘I can’t believe you’re happy about it, Stace!’ my sister said. She hadn’t wanted them to get married or have a child. Karen already had three children and Jemma felt that was quite enough. She was also worried that Josh would feel isolated, being so much younger than his brothers and sisters.
Stacey: My Story So Far Page 2