Once we did an after-school concert, a mini variety show with people singing, dancing and performing sketches. All our parents and friends came and the hall was packed out. It was really fun. I wore my best jeans and a glittery top and went out on stage thinking I looked really cool. Afterwards, my music teacher told my mum that I had the X factor!
I was loving school now. It’s really difficult when I look back now to know whether my parents did the right thing or not by taking me away from Abbs Cross. There is an argument for both sides. One part of me thinks it was the right decision, because I went on to have a brilliant time at King Solomon. I made some really good friends, got on well with the teachers and probably got much better results than I would have done at my old school, but at the same time I’m sure I would have been happy if I’d stayed at Abbs Cross, too. It’s a weird one. It was probably worth it, but perhaps it could have been handled differently, although now I’m older I understand what a difficult situation my parents felt they were in and I think they did the best they could.
I had a lot of friends who were boys, but my best friend at the time was a boy called Adam. What I liked about my male friends – people like Adam, Alex (aka ‘Ali C’) and Jamie – was that they were so funny. They made me laugh all the time. They were stupid funny and slapstick funny, but they were also clever funny. They were always making up words and playing around with language and meaning.
I used to feel really cool being friends with the boys. They all had massive houses and threw lots of house parties. I wasn’t seriously attracted to any of them, because I was far more developed than they were. Me and Adam went out for about two weeks and then realized it was gross and went back to being friends. The thing was, I was really tall, with big boobs and hips, so I didn’t look like a teenager, I looked much older. The boys in my year were all shorter than me, so I didn’t look right with any of them. Boys mature slower than girls, so I wasn’t interested in them as boyfriends. I just wanted to be friends.
I had loads of best girlfriends, too: Natasha, Jessica, Anya, Lauren, Mel and Haley. And along with all the girls in my year, I fancied three boys in the sixth form called Adam, Lee and Joel. They were two years older and so good looking!
At the end of year 10, I went to Israel on a school trip. It was a big thing for my family to send me to Israel and I was desperate not to miss out. ‘You have to go,’ my dad said, and my mum was really keen as well, so we all saved up for it, me by working at my sister’s nursery and babysitting. That was such a good holiday! All my friends went; there were about fifty of us staying in youth hostels all over the country. It was just the best experience. One minute we were in Midreshet Ben-Gurion in the Negev desert, the next minute we were in Jerusalem at the Western Wall. All of us.
Israel is a fantastic, beautiful country. People think it’s all fighting and bombs, but it really isn’t. One of my best memories is of going to Eilat, which is by the sea, and going out on the marina to see all the dolphins. It was the most unbelievable day. Jerusalem was amazing, too. We happened to visit the Western Wall (also known as the ‘Wailing Wall’) on the anniversary of the destruction of the Holy Temple in Roman times. It’s a very holy day, when Jewish people traditionally come to the wall to lament the loss of the temple, among other events in Jewish history. It was quite overwhelming to see the queues of weeping people everywhere, slipping notes and prayers into the crevices in the wall. I felt very moved to be there. It’s amazing to think that more than a million notes are placed in the wall each year. We were told to write something that we were thankful for and then fold it up and put it in the wall. ‘I’m thankful I’m alive!’ I wrote.
Death is the only thing I’m properly scared of. As long as I’m alive, I feel I can do anything and be anything. I’m having such a great time and everything is so good that the only thing that scares me is being struck down dead. It’s the one thing I’m afraid of in the whole world. I just don’t want my life to end.
We spent two weeks travelling around Israel and I enjoyed every minute. The exchange rate at the time meant that everything seemed very cheap. I had £100 spending money, which was around a thousand shekels, and as nothing seemed to cost more than five shekels, or 50p, I felt really rich. My friends and I bought friendship bracelets and the boys kept giving us sweets and presents because they had loads of money. It made us feel really special.
We met a group of Americans at one of the youth hostels. They were doing the same thing as us: travelling around and seeing the sights. Our teachers were very watchful of us and made sure that the boys and girls never mixed during the night. There was a girls’ dorm and a boys’ dorm and the teachers constantly checked that the boys didn’t go near the girls’ dorm. But, of course, they didn’t check the American camp, so the American boys would sneak over to our dorm every night without getting caught.
One evening I ended up getting off with a boy called Noah. Oh my God, he was so ugly! The tallest, lankiest, ugliest kid! I guess I found him interesting because he was American. Ah, these Americans! I thought. I was going out with Adam at the time and unfortunately he found out about Noah. I don’t know who told him, but it definitely wasn’t me. Adam was really upset and didn’t talk to me for the rest of the holiday, which I was gutted about. Luckily, we made it up when we got back to school and were best friends again after that.
Everyone went home after two weeks, but I stayed on for an extra week and went to visit Karen’s best friend on the kibbutz where she and her family were living. Before she met my dad, Karen had also lived there. It’s a modern kibbutz, with new housing; it’s more like a village than anything else, and my dad has a house there now.
I had a brilliant time there, even though I’d never met any of the people before. ‘Hello, Dad and Karen have told me a lot about you,’ I kept saying on the first day. I spent the week hanging out with all the kids on the beach. It felt like such a safe environment; it’s not dangerous for kids to play out, like it is in England, and everybody stayed at the beach until 4 a.m. without having to worry. It was really cool and I could easily have stayed there for the rest of the summer holidays.
It was great going back to school the following autumn. I was so happy at King Solomon, and things were a lot better at home, too. I was getting on well with my mum and dad and was being much nicer to Jemma and Matthew.
It may sound stupid, but the highlight of that year for me was being invited to a party thrown by Lee in the sixth form! I was really excited when he invited me and told me to bring a friend. I was the coolest girl in my year for that one day: ‘Oh my God, are you really going to Lee’s party?’ I don’t know why I was invited, to be honest. We weren’t that cool in my year. I took along my friend Thalia, who was quite old for her age, too. She was the first girl at King Solomon to try smoking, so she was kind of on my level.
The party was at the King George pub near Hangman’s Hill in Loughton. They say that Hangman’s Hill is haunted: if you drive your car up there and stall, some supernatural power drags you up to the top. I’ve never been up there because I’m too scared. Fortunately the pub wasn’t actually on the hill, so that was all right. It was a pub with a swimming pool out the back. It was all so posh over in Loughton, such a different world! I felt so cool as me and Talia walked into the party. I remember it vividly. All the older lot were there, and the older girls looked shocked, as if to say, ‘What are they doing here?’ They weren’t very friendly but we didn’t care. We felt so good just being there.
I spent quite a lot of time at the party with a boy called Adam, who I’d fancied for ages. He was going out with a really pretty, popular girl, but a few weeks later he dumped her and got with me. I felt like the coolest girl in the world.
From then onwards I became good friends with Lee, Joel and Adam. Lee had the biggest house, opposite Ali C’s. His dad had a Porsche with gull wing doors that opened upwards. Once when we went round to see him, he pretended it was his. ‘And this is mine,’ he said proudly, showing us int
o the garage.
‘Get off my car!’ his dad yelled from the house.
‘Aha!’ we said, laughing.
The following year I passed all my GCSEs. I got thirteen, a mixture of As, Bs and a couple of Cs, including English Literature and English Language, Maths, Triple Science, Music, Drama and Textiles and Sewing. Some of them I really worked hard at, others I didn’t bother so much with, but I still passed. I think I just got lucky.
That was the first year I auditioned for The X Factor, aged sixteen. The auditions were held at Wembley and I was one of the last people to be seen. My mum came with me and we queued for hours, from six in the morning until ten at night. We sat and waited, sat and waited, in a queue of 30,000 people, listening to everyone singing and practising their moves. My mum was so good to stay with me all that time. It must have been even more boring for her than it was for me.
Finally, it was time for my audition, and I sang ‘Over The Rainbow’ – of course.
‘Sorry, no,’ I was told after I’d sung a couple of lines. ‘Not this year.’
‘OK, thank you. Bye,’ I said. It was so funny. I was such a geek.
Mum was waiting for me. ‘I didn’t get through,’ I said.
She just smiled at me and said, ‘Oh well, come on then.’ After sixteen hours of waiting and less than two minutes auditioning, we left. Dream over; back to school.
By now, all my friends seemed to have lost their virginity. People at school were always talking about having done it. If you were still a virgin, as I was, you’d just sit there, saying nothing. You wouldn’t admit that you hadn’t, but you wouldn’t say that you had, either. You’d just nod and smile and stay silent.
One weekend I went to an adventure holiday centre, where we all went canoeing and climbing and stuff. On the first night, some of us got drunk and I found myself going into a bedroom in one of the dorms with a boy on the trip. The dorm was deserted. We didn’t speak. Nothing was agreed between us – there was no exchange of words – but that night I think I lost my virginity to him, although I was never really sure if we’d done it properly. I had no idea what to do.
Now I could sit around with my friends at school and say that I’d done it, even though I wasn’t truly certain that I had. Is that it? I wondered. Did I really do it? Is that what everybody else does? Since me and him were never going to discuss it, I was never going to find out. I couldn’t ask my friends, because although they all used to talk about it, I don’t think any of them really knew what they were on about, so I just left it at that.
I decided to stay on at King Solomon for the sixth form. Sadly, the gorgeous older boys had all left school now – Ah, the older boys have gone! – and they weren’t cool outside of school, weirdly, because they weren’t the older boys any more. They were just men. They were so attractive in the enclosed school environment, but out in the real world you thought, There has to be someone better!
I chose to do Biology, Maths, English Literature and Law A Levels, partly to please my mum, who really wanted me to go to university and on to a career that would earn me lots of money. But my heart wasn’t in it, even though I loved English Literature and Biology. The problem was that I wasn’t singing any more, because I wasn’t studying music, and I really wanted to sing. It wasn’t long before I began to feel restless. I enjoyed writing and analysing plays and books, like The Merchant of Venice and Great Expectations, and I enjoyed learning about the cell structure of plants – it was all really interesting – but I didn’t want to be a writer or a biologist, I wanted to be a singer. It sounds crazy, but I would have been happier if my A Level subjects had just been hobbies.
When I stayed with my dad in Hornchurch, I often bumped into my friend Lauren. We’d lost contact when she left King Solomon after GCSEs to study music and drama at Havering College, just nearby. Havering had a good music department and she was enjoying herself there. We met up a couple of times and became close again and I started thinking about leaving King Solomon and joining her at Havering College.
I looked into it and found out that I could take a diploma in Musical Theatre, which would be the equivalent of taking three A Levels. I would have to wait until the following September before I could sign up for the course, but it sounded fantastic and I decided that it would definitely be worth the wait. Oh my God! I thought. I can study something I’m really passionate about and still go to university afterwards.
‘Mum,’ I said, halfway through my first year in the sixth form. ‘I really want to go to Havering College to do Musical Theatre.’ I was banking on the fact that she had always said there was something about my personality that was different, and that from an early age something had told her I wasn’t going to be your average nine-to-five girl.
There was a long pause. ‘It sounds like a good idea,’ she said, ‘as long as you stick it out and get your diploma, because that will give you choices.’
In the meantime, I needed to support myself, so I got a job in a massive fish and chip shop called Oh My Cod! just down the road from the college. I loved it, and eventually I got Lauren a job there, too, which made it even more fun.
The owners of Oh My Cod! were Turkish and Greek – they sold fish and chips on the Greek side of the shop and kebabs on the Turkish side. Me and Lauren always worked on the fish and chip side. I got to know a lot of the regulars well and I always remembered what they ordered so they really liked me. ‘Two cod and chips, with extra vinegar?’ I’d say, and I used to throw in extra gherkins, too, which pleased them.
The people who worked at Oh My Cod! were all really nice, and they often used to cook us grilled fish for supper. Sometimes on a Friday night we’d turn up with a Mars Bar and they’d deep fry it for us. Delicious, but not very healthy, I know!
It didn’t bother me that I constantly stank of fish and chips: my hair, my clothes, everything. My parents used to hate it, but I didn’t mind. I’d just jump in the shower after work and go out. It was a bit of a pain having long hair, but often I’d put it in plaits and go out without drying it. There wasn’t time to bother with a hairdryer, I just wanted to get out!
I tried again for The X Factor that year, but it was the same old story. I sat in the queue for ages, with my mum – yes, she came again, the saint! – and I sang ‘Over The Rainbow’ again.
‘Thank you, but no,’ they said. ‘See you next year.’
‘OK,’ I said, and we went home.
Despite my X Factor failures, this was a very happy time for me. My job was fun, I was having a really good time with my friends and it was great to have my own money at last. Life was opening up and I was really looking forward to September, when my course would start. Then everything would be perfect and I would finally be doing what I wanted.
I forgot that life rarely goes according to plan.
Chapter 5
‘You know what?’ Lauren said. ‘We need to find a good night out.’ Now that Lauren and I were working we could afford to dress up and make a night of it.
The old brewery in Romford had been a hangout of ours at school, back when it was dark, dingy and deserted. Now it had been done up and turned into a shopping centre and leisure complex, with restaurants, a cinema and a bowling alley with a bar. One night me and Lauren were drinking in the bowling bar when we noticed a sign saying, ‘Karaoke Every Wednesday’.
‘That’s it!’ Lauren said. ‘We have to come here every Wednesday.’
So we did, and it was so good that we went on meeting there every Wednesday for ages. During that time, we met loads of great people and built up a massive group of friends. Our mate Elise used to come with her boyfriend, and he’d sometimes bring along his brother, Dean. Dean’s best friends were Phil, Wonky and Steve, and Phil brought along his girlfriend Sam. The group just grew from there and it was the best fun.
I really liked Phil and Sam. Phil loved singing karaoke, especially ‘How To Save A Life’ by The Fray and ‘New Shoes’ by Paolo Nutini. Sam wasn’t a singer, though, and she never sang; sh
e just hung out with everyone and talked. The only time I ever heard her sing was one night when we all went to Brannigan’s, a club in Romford, and Sam was the designated driver. We sang at the tops of our voices in the car on the way home. It was hilarious. We were all trying to be the loudest and Sam was shouting the words as she drove.
Quite a few of Lauren’s friends from college started coming along to the karaoke and I got on with all of them. The only person I had a problem with was Elise’s boyfriend’s brother, Dean. He was often very cool with me and used to ignore me a lot of the time. It infuriated me, because I had a laugh with everyone else. But Dean made it obvious that I annoyed him. He was always telling me to go away and I hated it.
Tall and skinny, Dean was two years older than me and reminded me of the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins: cap on, dirty face, just a real boy. He was a car body worker who sprayed cars and worked on their exteriors, like Kenickie in Grease. He was definitely more Kenickie than Danny.
My strongest memory of Dean from those early days at the karaoke bar is of him playing pool, wearing a polo and jeans, with a grandad hat on his head and a fag in his mouth (back then, you could smoke indoors). I’d take the mickey out of him and tell him he looked like a grandad. ‘So?’ he’d reply coolly, making it clear that I got on his nerves.
Something about his attitude intrigued me. The more he ignored me, the more I wanted him to like me. But he really irritated me as well. I could never make up my mind about him. I used to look at his cap and think, I hate your grandad hat! Even though I liked it really.
Dean hated going to the karaoke, but his brother used to drag him along for support because he was seeing Elise. ‘I’ve got to go and see her; come with me, please,’ he’d say.
Elise used to ring me up and say, ‘You coming out?’
‘Is Dean coming?’ I’d ask, and I’d hear her say, ‘Are you coming, Dean?’
‘No,’ would come his voice down the phone, ‘I ain’t coming.’
Stacey: My Story So Far Page 7