Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography

by Sladen, Elisabeth

  I think Dad was a born adventurer. When the First World War began he was only fourteen, four years younger than the minimum age to be sent to the front line. Two years later, however, he turned up at the army recruitment office claiming to be eighteen. I don’t know what he was thinking but after some basic training he was sent off to fight. I’ve still got some shell cases he smuggled back.

  I don’t think it turned into the adventure Dad was expecting. He once showed me a picture of five young lads in smart military uniforms, all smiling as if they didn’t have a care in the world. It only took me a second to spot Dad among them.

  ‘I was the only one who came back, Lis,’ he said, tears in his eyes.

  And that was the last word he ever spoke on the subject.

  Dad was still a teenager when the Great War ended, and he needed a profession. You can’t be born in Salcombe and not love the sea, so he signed up to work for the Cunard shipping line. Unfortunately his first posting wasn’t to be in Devon – it was in Liverpool. For a young lad who had never been out of Devon before the War, Merseyside must have seemed like the other end of the world.

  But that was where he met my mother.

  There were all sorts of film connections in Mum’s life although she never had any interest in amateur dramatics – she preferred dancing and tennis. Apparently there were gasps at her christening, when the vicar baptised her ‘Gladys Trainer’ because everyone had been expecting him to say ‘Mary’. Mum always blamed the last-minute switch on her mother’s love of the actress Gladys Cooper – although I don’t think she was famous when Mum was christened, so we’ll never know.

  It was another actress who became associated with Mum as she grew up. To her friends she was the ‘Vilma Banky’ of Liverpool. Vilma was a silent film star from Hungary and everyone said Mum really looked like her. She was about my height, with dark hair and green hazel eyes. Oh, and the most beautiful nose. I wish I had it!

  Funnily enough, one of Mum’s boyfriends said he wanted to take her off to America but she didn’t believe him. Eventually she read he had opened a film studio in Hollywood. I’ve still got pictures of the pair of them in his old car.

  In the end Hollywood came to Mum instead. Whenever the old 1930s movie star Charles Coburn used to call at their neighbour’s house in Huskisson Street, Mum would pop round to talk to him. He hadn’t worked with Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by then, but there was already an Oscar on his mantelpiece. Charles was a great character and Mum adored listening to him (the company of talented raconteurs is definitely a passion we share). Later, once her brothers started travelling to the United States, they would come back with tales of all the American films and fill her head with visions of supermarkets that were so big you had to push a trolley around them!

  By the time Mum and Dad were dating, Dad was being posted all over the world. One of the first people to be sent trading to the Gold Coast in 1920, he absolutely delighted in every moment of it. Every so often family members or friends would return from visiting Lagos and bring new reports of Dad’s antics.

  ‘Your Tommy’s as bald as a billiard ball and brown as a nut.’

  ‘Your boyfriend’s riding motorbikes through the jungle!’

  Dad was about five foot eight, with piercing blue eyes and, when he allowed it to grow, blond curly hair. He was kind of square to look at, quite a powerful-looking build. I’ve never seen anyone tan like him. It must have been his time overseas because he always said, ‘You can never have too much sun or too hot a curry.’ How I tried to prove him wrong with the curry, but I never succeeded.

  After years of to-ing and fro-ing from exotic climes, in 1930 Dad returned to Liverpool to marry my mother. It wasn’t a white wedding. Mum’s mum had recently died and she didn’t feel up to making a fuss. I think Dad always regretted that he didn’t get to see Mum in the full veil and sweeping train because he wanted only the best for her. They had a six-month honeymoon instead, travelling the high seas on the Cunard line.

  Upon their return, Dad decided it was time to put down some roots in the area, so he gave up his Cunard job and became a bookmaker. He’d always loved sport, like his uncle Fred, and in particular the horses. I think profits were good for a few years but a bad run of favourites winning and the oncoming recession pushed him out of business. I’m sure he thought he would just get another job, but finding work during the Depression of the 1930s was impossible.

  Dad was unemployed for five years but he stayed busy. ‘He kept the house beautifully,’ Mum recalled. ‘He always set the table, our shoes were always gleaming – the shiniest on the street – and he could pack a suitcase like no one else!’

  Even though Dad was due to inherit his father’s large house one day, five years without a wage coming would have been impossible without the money Mum managed to bring home from her little job. A lot of women were forced to turn to cleaning or other physical work during the 1930s and Dad would have been horrified had his wife been forced to go down that road. But when Mum heard that Bon Marché, the big department store on Basnett Street, was looking for hat models she and her sister Dolly (‘Doll’) ran along. I’ve still got pictures of them posing in all the milliner’s finery. It was the ideal job for her and that store is still there, although today it’s called John Lewis.

  Dad finally found work as an accounts clerk at the Automatic Telephone Manufacturing Company in Edge Lane, where he remained until he was sixty-five. Retirement didn’t suit him, though, and he worked for another ten years at Thomas Cook, where he was in charge of the currency. Unlike me, he was brilliant with figures.

  When the Second World War started, Dad was at the Automatic. Too old to be conscripted this time, he became a member of the Home Guard. He would do a full day at Edge Lane then go straight out on the night watch. Mum hated it – ‘You never knew if he was going to come home.’

  Liverpool was a prime target for the Luftwaffe’s bombs during the War because of its importance to British shipping and manufacturing, but Devon also attracted attention from marauding Messerschmitts trying to stop ships in the Estuary. Grandpa was killed in one of the attacks.

  When Grandma had died a few years earlier, Grandpa decided to rent out the big house. ‘I don’t need all this space,’ he told Dad. ‘But it’s yours and Gladys’s whenever you want.’ His brother Fred’s old cleaner, Nell, and her husband had become good friends so Grandpa moved in with them and let out the house. I think his last years were very happy but nobody foresaw what would happen after he was killed.

  Dad arrived in Salcombe to attend to the funeral and later to sort out the family’s financial matters. When it came to acquiring the paperwork for the house, however, he hit a snag.

  ‘Your father sold the house to us,’ Nell told him.

  He bloody didn’t, and Dad knew it.

  ‘I’ll need to see some paperwork for that, Nell,’ he said.

  ‘There’s nothing left. Everything burned during the bombs.’

  And that was that. Mum was livid. She knew that if Dad had called lawyers in the family would have kept The Lonsdale but he didn’t want the fight. I don’t think he wanted his last memory of Salcombe to be ruined by squabbling over money so he just walked away.

  Even though Dad was too old to be conscripted for the Second World War, Mum still had five brothers who enlisted. Four went to sea and one joined the army. Every day while they were away, Mum and Doll used to go down to the Pierhead in Liverpool for news.

  When I was little, my mum was still quite jumpy about the War. Odd little things, like a car backfiring, would set her off down memory lane. To me, it all seemed like eons ago but the older I get, the more I appreciate how close I was to being caught up in all of it.

  I was born on 1 February 1946. That’s right, 1946. My daughter Sadie has a wicked sense of humour and she is forever laughing at articles that list my birth as 1948. ‘Here’s another one, Mum. Someone else who hasn’t done their homework.’ I think my agent was asked for my age
once in 1970 and he gave the wrong answer and that’s the year that has appeared in every piece of print ever since. So you can see how thorough journalists can be sometimes.

  My husband, Brian, really was a war baby, though – which Sadie reckons explains why he will never leave a scrap of food on his plate. ‘Dad never saw a banana until he was twenty – he’s making up for lost time.’

  Mum was forty-four when I came along, and Dad two years older, which probably explains why I stayed an only child, like Dad.

  Mum had planned all along to call me after her mother but when a neighbour heard her intention she said, ‘Well, you can’t have your mum in there and not Tom’s. It’s not right.’ So that’s why I became Elisabeth Clara. I wish that bloody woman had never opened her mouth – Liverpool neighbours can be very influential like that – because there was a picture of a cow called Clara on the wall at school, so of course that is what I was called. ‘Clara the Cow’ – that was me.

  As for why Mum chose to spell my name with an ‘S’ and not a ‘Z’ like her mother’s, when anyone asked she just said:

  ‘The “S” is for “star”.’

  She reminded everyone of that when she first saw me on television.

  If I was a star then Mum was sunshine. She was just lovely. Every childhood memory I have of her is wonderful. Mum and Auntie Doll loved dancing as The Dolly Sisters, which was always fun to watch. And her baking days were legendary on Auckland Road, where we lived. Once every couple of weeks Mum would just devote the entire day to baking. I’d be out playing in the street and someone would say, ‘Glad’s baking.’ We had a houseful on those days.

  Every weekend we would all gather with Mum’s brothers’ and sister’s families. As the youngest child I was always made such a fuss of wherever I went. I thought life was always going to be like that!

  * * *

  I looked forward to bedtimes when I would have Mum all to myself. She loved to read poetry to me, or sing lullabies, which years later I found myself relaying to Sadie – although I wish my voice was half as good as Mum’s. (So does Victor Spinetti – but more of that later.)

  Our house on Auckland Road had four bedrooms and I had the smallest, the box room at the front. When I was older, that room would be plastered with posters of Elvis. He was my heartthrob. I always wrote on my schoolbooks: Elvis Presley, Errol Flynn and – someone who you’d never think was a heartthrob at all, with his very pockmarked face – the Australian actor, Ray Barrett. I think he was in Emergency – Ward 10 and, of course, an early Doctor Who, although I never saw that. A strange mix, I know. But my posters were Elvis, just totally and utterly Elvis. You’re not supposed to say this being from Liverpool but I never really liked The Beatles. They were never my cup of tea. It was The Kinks that I liked listening to. They were quintessentially English and Ray Davies wrote such timeless songs, like ‘Waterloo Sunset’. He was a poet really.

  One of the other bedrooms was usually inhabited by one of Mum’s brothers, Bill, when he was between commissions on ocean liners. He was always bringing me back little presents from his travels. Unfortunately, they were usually bottles of exotic alcohol!

  ‘Here you go, Lis, have a swig of that.’

  When guests came to the house I would offer them the drinks and uncle Bill was always shocked I still had any left. I guess a sailor’s life is very different. Actually I never really drank until I was thirty.

  Any spare moments were spent playing with my friends in the street. We’d all invent games or sometimes put on little dance shows. I worshipped Danny Kaye in the film Hans Christian Andersen, so I’d have all the kids singing and dancing up and down to ‘Wonderful Copenhagen’.

  Children weren’t under such scrutiny then. I remember one of our neighbours, Mrs McLean, running along the road and calling out, ‘Have you seen our Susan? Has anyone seen her?’

  We shook our heads. Susan hadn’t been playing with us.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs McLean said, ‘wherever she is she’ll be extremely popular because she has her sweet rations!’

  When I think of stories like that it’s only then that I realise how hard life for my parents and everyone in Britain must have been at the time. Rationing continued for five or six years after the War, but I never remember having to queue for things like some people do, or missing out on anything.

  Travelling with my older cousins on the train, across the Mersey, to the seaside town of Hoylake was a regular treat. You knew you were getting closer when you saw the sand on the grass. Usually we’d take sandwiches and spend the whole day playing by the water. In the school holidays we practically lived at Hoylake because Dad would come with us every day. When we weren’t there we’d go to Auntie Doll’s house whenever there was good weather because they had a garden instead of a yard like us. I loved staying over there with my cousins as well – it felt like such an adventure being away from home.

  And it seemed I was perfectly capable of having adventures anywhere. At the end of our road lived Mrs Derry, a colourful old Barbara Cartland sort of character. Everything about her was very pink, very chiffon, and she always wore hats with ribbons. It was as if she was always dressed for four o’clock high tea – completely inappropriate for walking around during the day.

  Mrs Derry, like a lot of people, kept chickens in her backyard, but unlike everyone else she used to take hers for a walk! She bought a little cat lead and fixed a collar onto a particularly plump bird and every day you’d see the pair of them pecking their way up to the bus shelter and back. Obviously I was fascinated by this and soon began turning up on Mrs Derry’s doorstep at chicken-walking time, begging to be allowed to hold the lead. It felt like such fun to a five-year-old, even when I had to wait for it to poop.

  Later on Mrs Derry’s son, Derek, came to live with her and all of a sudden my poultry-walking days were over. He drove a flashy red sports car and wanted somewhere to park it, so he persuaded his mother to get rid of her chickens and build a garage. It was the oddest one I’ve ever seen, with battlements on the roof, like on a castle, and just to make sure no one went near his beloved car, he kept a damn big Alsatian up there as well. I don’t think imagination was his strongest point because of course the dog was called Rex. I hated that dog – it always lolloped over to the side of the garage, barking its head off if you strayed near. In the end I had to walk a different route back from school.

  My fear of large Alsatians aside, I think I was pretty tomboyish. Another neighbour’s son, David, was about twenty and one day he came home on a brand new motorbike. It was the most impressive thing our group of six-year-olds had ever seen. After doing a few noisy revs and showing off how loud it could be, David said, ‘Anyone fancy a ride?’

  And of course I put up my hand.

  While my little friends screamed at me to stop, I climbed up behind my neighbour and said, ‘Let’s go!’ It didn’t occur to me that I was barely big enough to reach round him properly or that I didn’t have a helmet.

  The noise was amazing and as we shot forwards I hugged David for dear life. We just drove around the block, about six roads up, six roads back, and it was great. I loved every moment. When we pulled back into Auckland Road, though, there was a reception committee waiting in the shape of my mother. And boy she looked angry.

  I can’t remember ever being told off like that. Normally I was such an obedient child that I don’t think Mum knew what to say either.

  I had obviously inherited a bit of my dad’s adventurous streak. In fact, while on holiday recently, just getting my breath before filming on the fourth – and fifth! – series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, I found myself thinking about a few old battle scars that were a result of my love of speed when I was young. When I was fifteen I used to walk home from school and fantasise about owning this stunning red Raleigh racing bike that was in the window of the bike shop on the corner of Smithdown Road. Every day I lusted over it, and every day I asked Mum and Dad if I could have it.

  ‘Bikes are very expensive, El
isabeth,’ Dad would say. ‘Maybe one day.’

  And then, not long after Christmas 1961, I walked past the shop and my heart sank.

  The bike – my bike – had gone.

  I was inconsolable that night and even looking at the other bikes the next day didn’t cheer me up. But of course my sixteenth birthday was just around the corner and on the morning of 1 February, Mum and Dad led me into the yard and there, gleaming in the morning sun, was the red Raleigh.

  I would spend every afternoon after school whizzing around the area. Then one weekend a group of us went blackberrying in the fields. For me, finding the fruit was only half the fun – bombing down muddy hills as fast as I could was what I was there for. It was such a great day – and then the inevitable happened. I was flying down a hill when I thought, I’m not going to make that bend. I braked as hard as I could but as I turned, the front wheel clipped a small kerb and I flew clean off. Luckily it was high, thick grass that I tumbled onto, so I just skidded along a raised verge for a few yards. As I lay on my back, gasping for breath, I realised, At least I had a soft landing.

  But then the pain hit me.

  I went to stand up and couldn’t – my right leg felt like it was on fire. My calf was livid red, like a square slab of fresh meat on a butcher’s block.

  The grass I’d landed on had grown over rusty barbed wire. I’d actually had a lucky escape but boy it didn’t feel like it. I can still see the scars of the twenty-one stitches today.

  On the bright side, I discovered that if I stretched my scar for a minute or two it would turn bright red. So on the days I didn’t fancy sports it was just a case of limping along to the tyrannical games teacher and saying, ‘Sorry, Mrs Potts, but I don’t think I can walk well enough to take part today.’

  And she fell for it every time.

  Mum was just as gullible. Once I’d shown her my raw scar she immediately wrote to the school: ‘Elisabeth’s leg has gone septic again. She won’t be able to attend her mock exams today.’ Which of course was exactly what I was hoping for!