by Cole, Cheryl
‘Don’t worry, the truth will come out,’ I told him, but nothing I said calmed him down. He was absolutely fuming, and he told me he was convinced that Arsenal fans in high places were out to get him because of the ‘tapping-up’ scandal he’d been through with Chelsea. ‘They want to get me back for trying to leave Arsenal,’ he said. ‘They think I should stay there for life because that’s where I started.’
This went on for weeks, and it was hell to see Ashley suffering like that. In the end he successfully sued for harassment, breach of privacy and libel and was paid damages, but nothing could compensate for the torment he went through.
‘Concentrate on the World Cup, that’s where your energies need to go,’ I told him, because I knew that if his football suffered because of all this stress, he’d be a hell of a lot worse.
For my part, I had plenty on my plate to take my mind off what the press was saying. There was the wedding to plan, and the girls and I were filming a six-part TV series called Girls Aloud: Off the Record. Television crews followed us preparing for our Chemistry tour in the spring, which was our first UK arena tour, and we were also filmed on promotional tours to Australia and New Zealand. On top of that we travelled to China as London ambassadors with the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, we also did gigs in Ibiza and Greece, and we went to Paris to make the ‘Whole Lotta History’ video.
I look back now and I think I was so unworldly it was ridiculous. For instance, I moaned about everything from the rain to the state of the toilets in Shanghai, and I don’t think I appreciated at all what a huge honour it was to be a cultural ambassador. I’d never been to any of those countries before and I should have been saying: ‘Wow! How lucky am I?’ but it just wasn’t like that at the time.
In my head I remember lots of early morning starts, horrible jetlag, feeling totally out of my comfort zone and missing Ashley like crazy.
I was 22 years old, and I couldn’t wait to get home and get married. Our wedding was planned for 14 July 2006, just after the World Cup in Germany. Ashley let me make all the decisions about the wedding.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to get involved?’ I asked him many times.
‘No, I just want to marry you,’ he always said.
The only thing he did was taste the cake, which I thought was quite sweet. ‘You’re like a big kid,’ I teased.
I hired wedding planners and decided I wanted an angel theme, and I took advice about my wedding dress from Victoria Adcock, who did the styling for Girls Aloud. The next thing I knew Victoria was telling me Roberto Cavalli had offered to make it, and I was flying to Florence for fittings. It was insane really, looking back, but I just got on and did it.
There was only one real hiccup in the arrangements, which had thankfully happened very early on in the planning stages, in September 2005. Ashley and I had just put a very large deposit down on Highclere Castle in Berkshire, because it looked perfect for the fairytale theme I had in mind.
‘The model Katie Price is to marry Peter Andre at Highclere Castle later this week …’ I heard a newsreader say.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I was in a shoe shop in West London, and Sky News was on. I looked up at the TV screen and my heart sank. I phoned Ashley immediately, close to tears.
‘It’s not ’cos it’s Jordan, it’s that it won’t be special to us. This completely takes the shine off the venue for us.’
Ashley agreed, and I phoned the bank and stopped the transaction straight away, before phoning the wedding planners and sobbing down the phone.
‘What are we gonna do?’ I wailed.
‘We’ll need to find another venue soon or we’re screwed,’ the wedding planner told me plainly, and I left the shop feeling gutted. It was pouring with rain and I stood in a dirty big puddle, then I realised that I’d parked on a yellow line, thinking I would only be in the shop for a few minutes, and my car had been towed away.
‘Looking back, do you think all that was a bad omen?’ someone asked me recently.
‘Nah!’ I replied. ‘I never had bad vibes about marrying Ashley. I wish I was still married to him … if only things had turned out differently.’
8
‘You’ve come a long way, Cheryl!’
‘How do you cope with the scrutiny?’ I asked Victoria Beckham one evening, when we were in Germany together, supporting our men in the World Cup. We were staying in adjacent rooms at the Brenners Park-Hotel in Baden-Baden, and I was blow-drying Victoria’s hair before we went out to dinner. I’d met her several times before at different events and we got on well. Victoria is so easy to talk to and has a great sense of humour – totally the opposite of how she is portrayed in the press. We had a lot in common, with Victoria having been in a girl band too, and unlike some of the other ‘WAGs’, we were both only interested in supporting our men.
‘How do I cope? I cope because I have to, because it’s just the way my life is,’ Victoria told me.
I’d seen that it didn’t matter what anybody else around her did, Victoria was always the one who got the worst press. I remember one time she was literally pulled apart from head to toe in a newspaper article that commented on everything from her pout and her collarbones to her boobs and her bunions.
‘I’m hardened to it,’ Victoria said. ‘I know how I’m perceived is not how I am, and that’s what matters. When they say I’m too thin, I just think: ‘You know what? I’m happy to be thin. I’m into fashion and I like to be able to wear whatever I like. It’s my business, and if other people don’t like it, that’s their business.’
Ashley and I had been described as the ‘new Posh and Becks’ ever since our engagement, which I thought was a joke, but nevertheless it was so interesting to be able to talk to Victoria about her life, because to me she was admirable. She had such a lovely family, and I told her I hoped that when we had kids, Ashley and I would be able to juggle our careers and family life together as well as she and David managed theirs.
‘You’ll be fine, because you’re just so normal,’ she told me.
Despite what Victoria said, and how normal she was too, I couldn’t help noticing that when we went out to dinner that night and I made her laugh she held her handbag up over her mouth. I wondered if it was just an insecurity caused by the media, though I was still learning about the huge level of press intrusion Victoria was subjected to.
Around this time there was talk of a possible move for Ashley, to play for Real Madrid. We’d discussed it and I was very honest and said I didn’t want him to go, because I couldn’t see how I would be able to continue with Girls Aloud if I lived in Spain. We’d only just started to be completely accepted as a band and I couldn’t contemplate giving up now, not after working so hard for nearly four years.
‘What’s it like, living in Madrid?’ I asked Victoria casually over dinner.
‘Do not, whatever you do, do not live there,’ she told me, explaining that there wasn’t much for her and the kids socially, and she’d found it tough managing her career from there.
I was absolutely gobsmacked when a Sunday newspaper later reported that Victoria had told me how wonderful life in Madrid was, and that she had supposedly offered to help me find a house there. It just seemed so weird that journalists would completely make up a story like that, especially when the World Cup was happening right under our noses and there must have been so many real stories to report on. No wonder Victoria was so cautious, I thought, if that’s the sort of nonsense she had to put up with constantly.
Watching England play Portugal in the quarter-finals was painful, as it came down to a penalty shoot-out and Ashley was taking one of them. I just felt sick. I knew that if he missed it he’d be so down and moody, because that’s how he got if a game hadn’t gone his way. Even if he got a mediocre write-up on the back pages there’d be hell on at home, because he has a champion’s mindset and anything short of winning was a disaster.
‘It would be boring if you won everything,’ I’d said to him in the past.
‘Yeah,’ he’d reply, ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ but I knew he didn’t agree with me, not at all.
When Ashley stepped up to the penalty spot that day I knew there would be nothing at all I could possibly say to console him if he missed. The whole world was watching, and it was like everybody took a breath at the same time as Ashley took the shot.
‘Come on!’ I shouted when I saw the ball hit the net. ‘Get in!’
I was euphoric. Ashley had scored, and the relief was huge. England weren’t through yet, but it wasn’t going to be Ashley’s fault if they lost. That’s what I thought in that moment.
In the end England did lose, on penalties. Frank Lampard was crying, as were nearly all the players, and I hated seeing that. David Beckham was going to quit the captaincy so Victoria was all in a fluster with herself, and all the players and their partners had to fly home together in a private plane, without a trophy.
‘Nobody knows if they’ll have another shot at a World Cup,’ I’d heard a commentator say, and that was the hard truth. You could almost smell the disappointment in the air, and I couldn’t wait to get off that plane and go home.
Our wedding was just a fortnight away, and I tried to get Ashley to think about that instead of the football.
‘You’ve got your stag do to look forward to,’ I said, but Ashley was so upset he could barely speak.
He went off to Marbella on his stag do not long afterwards, and my mam came down to help me with the last-minute wedding preparations. Looking back, there was a hell of a lot going on in our lives. Ashley was thinking of moving to Chelsea, although the deal was not yet done, and he’d just written his autobiography, which was coming out very soon.
I was more than ready to let my hair down on my hen night, and when a group of us went to a bar and then a club in Shoreditch I got absolutely paralytic drunk on champagne, cocktails and shots. At the end of the night Nicola was hugging me at the top of a flight of stairs and I lost my footing. All of a sudden I was at the bottom of the stairs and she was on top of me, roaring with laughter. That’s the last thing I remember – lying there on my back with my legs in the air and looking up at my shoes.
All the other girls were going mad, saying: ‘Nicola, it wouldn’t be good if Cheryl had no teeth for her wedding day!’ but we just laughed our heads off.
The wedding venue Ashley and I had eventually chosen, Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, didn’t actually have a wedding licence and so we were taking our vows the night before our big day, at a place nearby called Sopwell House. Thankfully it was just the two of us, Ashley’s mam, my mam and the registrar, because when I turned up I had the worst hangover ever. I’d been vomiting all day, and my face was green.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ Ashley said.
I was wearing a fifties-style white strapless dress with blue flowers on, no make-up and I hadn’t even blow-dried my hair. Luckily Ashley was only in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and I just looked at him and welled up. He smiled back at me and had tears in his eyes too. It didn’t matter what we looked like, we were both ridiculously emotional, and when we said our vows everybody in the room burst into tears, including the registrar.
I was really glad we’d done it like this. It was such a private moment and, because we were already married, it really took the pressure off the next day when we had two hundred guests coming.
‘How do you feel?’ Mam asked me as I put on my wedding dress. ‘Calm, not nervous, not worried,’ I told her truthfully.
It was crazy, really. I was in this fabulous Roberto Cavalli gown, about to step into this amazing mansion house that was decked out like something from a magical fairytale, but I really did feel completely at ease. Garrard had loaned me a diamond tiara head-piece and I was travelling in a horse-drawn carriage. I felt like a princess, but one with her feet firmly on the ground.
When I’d been with Victoria Beckham in Germany a few weeks earlier she had said to me: ‘Make sure you and Ashley spend the day together,’ and that’s what was on my mind. I wanted to be with him, all day long. Ashley sent me a beautiful bracelet in the morning, and I had a surprise up my sleeve for him for later. I’d booked our favourite singer, John Legend, to sing at the party, and he’d flown in from America especially for us.
We had a blessing in front of all our friends and family, and my dad made everybody laugh in his speech by presenting Ashley with a Newcastle shirt with ‘Cole’ on the back. ‘Come on, Ashley, make my dream come true,’ my dad said. ‘Come and play for the Toon.’
Ashley was really, really nervous when it was his turn to speak, and I just remember him looking at me afterwards, holding my hand and saying: ‘Babe, babe, I done it!’
I was so proud of him because speaking in public is so not his thing, but he did it really well. He was blown away when the walls opened up after dinner, turning the room into a nightclub and revealing John Legend on the stage.
‘Did you get a lookalike?’ Ashley asked, because he really couldn’t believe his hero was actually there, singing as we took to the floor for the first dance.
There was a great atmosphere and it was a fantastic day and night. It wasn’t a celebrity bash. Of course the girls were there, as all four of them were my bridesmaids along with my sister, my niece and my cousin, and there were a few other famous faces. We invited the Beckhams but they couldn’t make it. Victoria sent a lovely telegram instead, and David’s mam came, as she’s Sue’s friend.
My old school friend Kelly came down from Newcastle, which meant a lot. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ she told me, and we laughed about how we used to wag off school together and smoke cigarettes in Walker Cemetery. ‘You’ve come a long way, Cheryl!’ she beamed. It was great to see her.
My brother Andrew could not be at the wedding, because he was in prison again, and to be honest I didn’t care and didn’t want to know the details of his latest offence. I was actually starting to lose track of all his charges and convictions because there were so many.
I went to see him in prison before the wedding, believing it wasn’t too late for him to change his ways, despite the fact he’s spent most of his adult life behind bars.
‘Why can’t you stop?’ I begged him. ‘Why can’t you change your ways?’
I was dressed in a tracksuit and baseball cap and could feel other inmates staring at me, but I just stared back at them.
‘Don’t look at them,’ Andrew hissed.
I didn’t care what the other criminals thought of me. All I cared about was my brother, not whether some convict was checking me out and thinking, ‘Isn’t she someone from Girls Aloud?’
‘How can you live like this?’ I said to Andrew.
‘I’m used to it.’
‘Well, I’m not. I’ll never get used to it. Do you know how you ruined my childhood? It was plagued with fear and worry because of you. If I hear a bang on the door, even now, I can still see them – the police kicking the door in, searching the house for weapons and drugs. You caused me so many sleepless nights, and you’re still devastating the whole family. Why can’t you just stop?’
He shrugged and looked me in the face. ‘I’m too far gone.’
I left the prison in floods of tears. I had the means to really help Andrew now if only he wanted to be helped, but he clearly didn’t.
That hurt like hell. He was my brother and I loved him, and even if I’d been on the bones of my backside, still living on the council estate, I would have been saying exactly the same things to him, and offering as much help as I could possibly give.
Not having Andrew at my wedding was very sad, but I was actually relieved in a way too. It was one thing me stepping into his world, but how might he have behaved stepping into this part of mine? I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wouldn’t have to worry about him drinking too much or causing trouble on the day.
Ashley and I flew to the Seychelles for our honeymoon the next day, taking a helicopter from the airport to a super-top-security
island. I was ridiculously happy and couldn’t stop looking at my wedding ring and telling Ashley how proud I was to be his wife. ‘I’m the lucky one,’ he said, and my heart was literally melting with love for him. This island had just 16 villas on it and we had our own walkway down to a little garden and beach and a private dining table. It was the most idyllic place I’d ever seen.
On the first night we were sat out there, talking about the wedding, when I suddenly felt a weird sensation on my leg.
‘Ashley, there’s something hot and warm and heavy, breathing on me leg.’
‘Piss off!’
‘I’m not joking you. Will you please have a look?’
He looked under the table and started screaming like a girl. It took me right back to our second date, when he’d found that huge cat purring in his living room.
‘What is it?’ I said, starting to panic.
Ashley had actually jumped up on the table now in fright.
‘It’s eight inches long!’
I screamed too and shook the thing off my leg. It was a huge, scaly lizard – the biggest, fattest lizard I’d ever seen in my life, but thankfully it scuttled straight off into the bushes.
‘You can get down now,’ I teased Ashley. ‘I’ve dealt with it myself, thanks.’
We laughed for ages afterwards, and we were like that for the whole honeymoon. It was amazing being finally married and we were both on a real high every day. Ashley had bought me the most incredible yellow diamond wedding ring, and every time I saw it on my finger it put a huge smile on my face. Being called ‘Mrs Cole’ had the same effect. I absolutely loved being called Ashley’s wife.
Back home we had all the excitement of moving house, which actually felt like an extension of the wedding. We were building our life together, planning our future and I was already getting broody.
‘Have your career first, you can have the babies later,’ Ashley said whenever I mentioned kids. I knew he was right but I just couldn’t wait to start a family with him. It was the next step after getting married, and I was really looking forward to taking it.