Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

by Jasper Rees

  Stanley succumbed and secured a private mortgage from a member of the Liberal Party. For several months the Woods took on the project of renovating their next home. They would all troop up at weekends, occasionally staying overnight. Stanley donned overalls, in which he would be seen for years to come, to clamber up a ladder and apply another layer of cheap waterproof cement paint. Inside, every light had to be drawn down on a chain and lit, a fiddly process because the delicate gas mantles broke to the touch. The water was pumped from the farm half a mile away. The septic tank, which smelled in summer, meant they had to be careful about what they flushed into the system. Walls were often being knocked down or windows boarded up. ‘It was a wreck,’ says Rosalind. ‘It put a terrific strain on them. They didn’t have the money to do it up properly. They tried to do it piecemeal as they went along, and neither of them had the temperament or the know-how to pull it off. It was too big and too isolated and cold and damp and uncomfortable and draughty.’

  Into this house the Woods moved over the summer of 1958. The isolation was what appealed to Helen. ‘My mother couldn’t be doing with neighbours and gossip and suburban life,’ said Victoria.2 According to Penelope, Helen was ‘a bit sociopathic’. Her dream for her children was an idyllic expanse of countryside in which they could spread out. Although the front of the property bordered a golf course, behind it there were fields full of sheep. When snow arrived, they tobogganed. As Penelope entered her teens, she gradually stopped initiating games, leaving her sisters to make house in the rhododendrons or climb the trees to watch the golfers.

  The view, enfolding Manchester and the moors, was panoramic, but there was a cost. The nearest bus stop was a half-hour walk down a rough unmetalled farm track, and to get to Bury by car took fifteen minutes. Victoria started at Fairfield County Primary at the bottom of the hill, and after school she and Rosalind sometimes had to walk back up it. The house had a certain local notoriety – ‘Ooh, you live int’ holiday home,’ people would say to the girls – but they didn’t come to see it for themselves. ‘Nobody came to tea at all,’ Victoria recalled. ‘We had to bribe people to come and visit because it was a mile and a half walk from school.’3 Once Helen did organise a charity picnic in the adjoining field, but no one entered the premises. If they had, they would have found an unconventional household. To accommodate a family of six, the building had to be converted from its previous incarnation, in which the rooms were the size of dormitories. Victoria extracted comic mileage from the image of her mother ‘dragging bits of plywood off bombsites and lashing them to the top of a minivan and driving them home and making rooms out of them’.4 The truth was slightly more prosaic. The partitions were created from plasterboard fitted into wooden frames; a builder installed them to Helen’s plans to save on the cost of an architect. The bungalow was H-shaped and along one side were the girls’ bedrooms. The other side included a sewing room for Helen, where she made all her daughters’ clothes. She’d build a fire in the Victorian hearth and would summon the girls to try things on. They were required to knock first. When he returned from work, Stanley retreated into an office, where he pursued his second career writing radio scripts and composing entertainments for annual jamborees in the insurance industry. Their half of the house rattled to the percussive clack of the sewing machine and the typewriter. Christopher’s bedroom was vacated when he left for university in 1959. Victoria, who was six, would barely see him again till she herself went to university.

  The Wood family started to lead cellular lives: they were isolated not only from the town, but also from one another. Victoria compared it to living ‘like battery hens’.5 Imposing isolation on their children may not have seemed unnatural to parents who had, for different reasons, known it themselves when young. In her room Victoria embarked on a lifelong passion for reading. Her weekly diet included Bunty and later Jackie. She would fondly namecheck both in her songs and sketches, and kept her back editions of Bunty for the rest of her life. Later she moved on to Punch, which were bound into volumes. But books were the thing. There was no shortage of titles to choose from as Helen crammed the house with literature: ‘My mother was an obsessive collector of second-hand books. I only ever had a new book bought for me at Christmas – I’d get a new paperback. The rest of our books were second-hand, and there were tons and tons of them. There were lots and lots of those Boots library books that were circulating from the mid-Thirties onwards. I was an absolutely obsessive reader.’6 Bookshelves sprouted everywhere, many constructed by Helen from planks propped on bricks. When these filled up, the books were pushed back to the wall and a new row started. Shelving even invaded the loo. Victoria’s early preference was for children’s classics such as A.A. Milne, Just William, Billy Bunter and Jennings ‘where they just live in their own mad world’.7 It’s a measure of her precocity that at seven she picked up a copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, thinking, ‘This is quite a nice story about these two nice girls that go round Europe. I didn’t realise they were sleeping with men for money.’8 Some books would have a more lasting influence. She feasted on Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (1936) in which three penniless orphan girls make ends meet in Cromwell Road: ‘I was attracted by the London aspect of it – these big houses and iron railings and the V&A. It was very different from where I lived.’9 Ballet Shoes, she said, ‘had a big effect on me later when I was deciding what to do’.10 She also feasted on a volume found around the house called Modern Masters of Wit and Humour: ‘It was full of A.A. Milne-type pieces, and I found it absolutely hysterical.’11

  But nothing would have as deep an impact as The Swish of the Curtain, Pamela Brown’s 1931 novel about a group of children who create their own theatre in a disused chapel. Victoria’s enthusiasm was such that she was commissioned to write the entry on it for The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books. ‘The descriptions of the preparations for the shows are convincing and absorbing,’ she wrote. ‘Parents are satisfyingly absent from most of the action, and readers can lose themselves in a lost innocent world of exercise-book scripts, raspberry-juice wine and home-made costumes.’12 The freedom to put on plays was an attractive fantasy, but it was the lack of adults that went to the core of the book’s appeal for Victoria. ‘I don’t like authority figures,’ she said. ‘I only really liked books where there weren’t any parents.’13 In particular she ‘madly identified’ with Maddy. ‘She is supposed to be slightly fat, and I was slightly fat. She’s cheeky and a bit anarchic, and I identified with her completely. I just liked the idea that they all sit there with pencils. It said, “By the end of the evening they’d written the first act.” I drank it all in, and I didn’t think of it as a fantasy.’14

  When family members did meet they would do so on a provisional basis, standing in a group to talk and josh, but never sitting. Stanley’s habit was to natter in doorways, as if always keeping open the option of a getaway. ‘My father was lovely in a way,’ Victoria would say, ‘but not easy to talk to, he didn’t hurt one, he just didn’t connect.’15 He also loitered impermanently when Victoria watched television: ‘He would only watch it standing up, as if about to leave, and so you would spend the whole time thinking, is he going?’16 Victoria would watch anything comic: ‘I think I laughed at everything. I can remember Lucille Ball and Phil Silvers, but I don’t remember anything particular that I liked about them. I liked the fact that it was comedy.’17 The rental television was not a permanent fixture – it went back to the shop over the summer: ‘If anything happened in the summer, I never saw it. “Did Ken and Deirdre get married?” “Oh yeah.” “When was that?” “July.” “Oh well, that’s why I didn’t see it.”’18 Helen never watched television.

  The Woods would meet in the dining room round an oval mahogany table covered in a tablecloth. There was a connecting hatch to the kitchen, in which a black ring of grease gradually bloomed on the ceiling above the stove. Helen’s repertoire included Irish stew, cottage pie and corned beef curry. Rosalind was outgoing and enjoyed these gatherings. Stanl
ey might comically embellish an encounter from the world of insurance. ‘If somebody had a good story to tell, they’d talk,’ says Penelope. ‘Otherwise it was a bit grim. We were either full of tension or hilarity. There was nothing in between. At mealtimes we’d be sitting round, and nobody would dare to speak.’ Victoria would bring a book to the table, though reading while eating was discouraged. Once she was asked if the family had rows. ‘Didn’t talk enough to have rows!’19

  The family was together in a more concentrated way when they crammed into whatever new or hired car Stanley was driving. An enthusiastic motorist, he would queue up to test a new section of the motorway, and would happily give anyone a lift anywhere, or dash down to the shop two miles away. He changed cars often – the various makes of Morris would fetch up in Victoria’s sketches and monologues. The three girls squashed into the back, with Victoria always in the middle. ‘If we got a bit quarrelsome,’ says Penelope, ‘Mum used to lean over and arbitrarily just whack with her hand.’ There were weekly trips to the Saturday matinee to see whatever was showing – cartoons, musicals, westerns. Or they went further afield to stately homes, galleries, museums, parks, the Dales, where the thrifty Helen would encourage the girls to bag wool snagged on barbed-wire fences. She planned to knit jumpers. The muddy wool was soaked in the kitchen, then hung out to dry, but it stayed soggy and was always thrown away. Once they visited Haworth Parsonage – Helen was a Brontë fan – and then strode up onto the moors to breathe the air that inspired Wuthering Heights.

  Several times a year they went further afield, often with a caravan in tow – to the seaside, to various corners of the UK, including London, where they stayed in small hotels, visited the sights and caught shows: The Sound of Music with Petula Clark and My Fair Lady, Oliver! and Anne of Green Gables ‘which I remember even then as being dreadful,’ said Victoria.20 They drove up one coast of Scotland and down the other, and took the ferry to France. Stanley’s longest drive was to Vienna: ‘It took us about five days, towing a Sprite Musketeer four-berth caravan behind him. He went everywhere with his caravan, because my father didn’t really like to go away without his own chip pan.’21 Penelope shared a double with Rosalind, and Victoria took the bunk on top. The beds were hidden behind curtains. In the mornings the smell of toast would permeate the caravan. ‘Dad would say, “Toast, anyone?”’ says Penelope. ‘And this hand would come through the curtain with a plate of buttered toast.’ Victoria kept a visual record of these trips in a photograph album. It was perhaps the Musketeer caravan that inspired Victoria’s earliest recorded joke, jotted by Stanley in his diary when she was eight in the summer of 1961: ‘Me: “D’Artagnan was one of the Three Musketeers.” Vicki: ‘I suppose he was deaf (Must-get-ears).”’22 Her technical knowledge of caravanning enabled her to write a double entendre in dinnerladies that was both technically correct and filthy: ‘Can I winch my legs down onto your hardstanding?’

  Hugger-mugger in the car, the Woods would sing songs, or look out of the window and observe. There was a culture of commentary in the family as other people came under the microscope. The practice extended to cafés. Helen was the more disparaging critic – ‘She’s not going to be able to go very far in those shoes,’ she might say – while Stanley would silently lean back and cock an ear to a conversation at a table behind him.

  Victoria’s father was a source of good cheer. Family snaps show him balancing a ball on his head or smiling in a collapsed deckchair. His gregarious nature suited him to his job. ‘He always seemed to enjoy his work,’ said Victoria. ‘I can remember when I was little him coming home and saying, “I’ve done three sales today.” And my mother would say, “Oh, that’s good.”’23 All the girls loved having lifts by him on their own, when he gave them his undivided attention. ‘He was a silly man,’ says Rosalind. ‘He could clown around. He wasn’t an authoritarian at all. He stepped back from that side of parenting. If Mother was telling us off, he’d give you a little look. I think he saw himself as another child.’ Sometimes he was told off himself. ‘Oh, Stanley Wood!’ Helen would bark, perhaps adding a thump for emphasis. Their to-and-fro was a game both were in on – according to Penelope it was ‘like being with Morecambe and Wise’. Once Stanley boasted about his father having fought with Lawrence of Arabia, prompting mockery from his wife: ‘I suppose he saluted him when he went past on his camel, did he?’ ‘She always claimed very proudly to have no sense of humour,’ said Victoria. ‘And she had no sense of humour, but she could be quite witty, and she was very, very observant. She was always coming back and telling us what she’d seen, so she had a good eye.’24

  The sense of isolation in the family was intensified by the absence of other relatives. Both Victoria’s grandfathers had died before she was born, and Helen had little contact with her own mother, who died in 1961. That left Stanley’s mother Eleanor, who they knew as Nana (pronounced Nanaah). She never came to Birtle, so Penelope took her sisters on the bus to Chorlton-cum-Hardy. Nana offered a glimpse of a different world. Her house had proper furniture, she wore fur coats and scarves, smelled of lavender, and poshly dropped the H when she said ’otel, where she would take afternoon tea. She went to gatherings of the Women’s Institute and made up a bridge four with friends who in 1960 would join the original cast of Coronation Street – Violet Carson, better known as Ena Sharples, and Doris Speed, who played Annie Walker. She introduced the girls to the more child-friendly whist and rummy, and used card games and word games to help coax Victoria out of her shyness. ‘It allowed Vic to join in – and win,’ says Rosalind. ‘She was very patient and encouraging with her.’ The other treat of visiting Nana was the television lurking in a mahogany case. ‘Shall we look in?’ she would say, and open the doors. Once a year she booked tickets for the three girls to go to a pantomime at the Palace Theatre or the Opera House in Manchester, and insisted they scrub up for the occasion. Rosalind and Victoria were put into new dresses.

  This was another field of battle between Helen and her mother-in-law. Unusually for the era, Helen often dressed her daughters in trousers, deeming them more practical. It would excite comment in the street. Victoria’s lifelong aversion to dresses started here. For all Helen’s enthusiasm for clothes-making, she struggled to keep her daughters looking neat and clean. She was summoned for a chat with the headmaster about the girls’ appearance. ‘We were both very dirty and obviously looked neglected,’ says Rosalind. ‘I remember standing in the dinner queue and saw my mum’s van come into the car park. She had had her hair done and was wearing lipstick and a skirt and stockings. He greeted her like she was Princess Margaret.’ Both girls were soon smartened up.

  Her daughters’ neglected appearance was a product of Helen’s struggles with depression, during bouts of which she would give up on cooking and washing. ‘Sometimes you’d go through the sitting room and she’d be sitting in a slump,’ says Penelope. According to Victoria, the root of her depression was Birtle: ‘She had moved from a normal busy street to this rather windswept bleak house, and I think she couldn’t quite extricate herself; she couldn’t say, “Actually we made a mistake.” … I think she was depressed for a lot of the time when I was a child.’25 Her hoarding was another manifestation. The house gradually filled not just with row upon row of books, but other bulkier and less practical items. From salvage yards Helen scavenged Victorian wardrobes which would fill the hall and corridors, into which she’d stuff other things she’d rescued from junk shops. ‘I lived in a house that never had anything new in it,’ said Victoria. ‘Everything was second-hand. My mother was a believer in economy.’26 The seamstress in her was moved to buy the costumes from a production of The Merry Widow which sat untouched for fifteen years. Her most eccentric acquisition was a sack of shoe lasts, retrieved from outside a shop or factory with the intention of burning them as fuel in the basement furnace, but they were found to contain metal and stayed in the sack for decades.

  One household item which served a practical function was the grand piano next to Sta
nley’s office, where he would play after work to unwind. When she was seven Victoria showed an interest in the instrument, and Stanley gave her an induction, pencilling the names of the notes on the keys and on the sheet music for ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’: ‘And then he left the room, typically.’27 The piano swiftly developed into her new obsession, and the notes on the keys had to be refreshed more than once. ‘This morning I found Vicki in her pyjamas in the playroom,’ he wrote a week before Christmas in 1960, ‘engaged at the New Chronicle Song Book, reading every word and note bar by bar. Rather like the infant Mozart.’28 Helen arranged for her to have lessons with a male teacher, but the new pupil’s shyness soon asserted itself: ‘I couldn’t cope with the embarrassment of being alone in a room with a man. It used to make me sweat and I’d have to go and wash my hands. I stopped going in the end because I didn’t have enough social skills to handle it.’29 But she had enough confidence to play in front of her class when her teacher heard she was learning, while back at home Victoria continued furtively to explore the piano when no one else was listening: ‘I was so ashamed of not being able to go that I thought my parents would be cross if I played the piano, so I used to play it when they were out, and then when I used to see the car headlights coming up the drive I used to jump off and shut the lid.’30 Her secret was soon discovered, and she started to play duets with her father.