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

by Jasper Rees

  Helen’s depression did not impact on Victoria’s progress at school. By the end of her first year her reading was deemed ‘good’ and her writing had ‘improved a great deal’, while ‘her illustrated work is colourful and shows promise’.31 At the end of 1960, she finished second in a class of forty-two, gaining full marks in nearly every subject. ‘She puts a great deal of effort into everything she does,’ said her teacher.32 Victoria looked back on this period as one of quiet confidence and emotional calm rooted in her status as one of the clever pupils – she was even deemed bright enough to read stories to younger children, much as her mother once had as a child. Many years later it would dawn on her that attainment was somehow connected to class: ‘One row had all these poor little children with eczema and impetigo and the ones who’d weed on the floor. They didn’t do terribly well in tests. There was the middle one with people who were stupid but were clean. And then there was the top row, which was these girls with very, very good plaits. I had plaits, but I couldn’t do a centre parting, so I had one big plait. Then there was a row of boys with dickie bows and sleeveless pullovers like tiny antique dealers.’33

  Consistent with her early desire to end up male, in the playground she looked on enviously as the boys played while the girls talked about playing, ‘with their raincoats tied round their waists by the sleeve to make themselves into ladies … I thought I was trapped with forty-seven middle-aged women. I didn’t want to be a woman at all.’34 She could certainly hold her own with roughhousing boys. One day after school she was walking up the path towards the Bury Road when the class buffoon took her by surprise and leaped on her back. Her classmate Graham Howarth witnessed it: ‘I remember her grabbing both his arms and just hoisting him right over her head on his back on the floor in front of her. Needless to say, he didn’t do anything like that again. She didn’t suffer fools.’

  Graham Howarth was the only classmate ever to see the inside of Birtle Edge House. The occasion was Victoria’s eighth birthday, which she said she’d like to celebrate. An arrangement was made for Stanley to collect half a dozen children from the bottom of Castle Hill Road: ‘Only one boy came. It was like nobody thought it was a real place because they’d never seen where I lived because it was so far away. And I remember going with my father, who was driving round to all these people’s houses saying, “Is your child coming to my child’s birthday party?” And they’re going, “No, don’t know anything about it.” And my mother coming out to greet everybody, and there’s just me and the school swot. The balloons and a cake and just this one boy.’35 After playing hide and seek in the house’s many rooms – Graham Howarth found it much bigger and messier than his own – they tucked into the spread of sandwiches, ice cream and jellies. ‘She made the best of it, and we had a good time,’ he says. Victoria refused to dwell on the apparent snub as some kind of formative trauma: ‘I blanked it. I wouldn’t see that it had any significance. I can see that it’s sad, but I didn’t feel it as sad at the time.’36

  If the world of her home felt contracted, Victoria’s knowledge of the outside world expanded with every book, every visit to the cinema. But there was one outing in particular that she would cite as life-changing when, a month shy of her ninth birthday, the family went to see Joyce Grenfell perform to a half-empty Buxton Opera House. One line in particular sank in: ‘I’ll give you a minute to decide if my dress is leaf green or lettuce green.’ Victoria was entranced by her conversational style, her command of the stage and the fact that, unlike every other comic performer, she was a woman: ‘I just thought she was so funny. It all made sense to me. I could picture everything she was doing. It really stayed with me … I didn’t know you could be onstage just all by yourself. And that was what set me off.’37

  There was a coda to the evening which helped cement it in her memory. Penelope had a habit of going to the stage door to meet the stars, and on this occasion she and Rosalind made it into the dressing room. As recorded in Stanley’s diary, Victoria wanted to go too and ‘complained bitterly to her mother – in getting lost backstage and being scared of stagehands’.38 She stayed outside with Helen. ‘Joyce Grenfell had these full-body pink corsets hanging up on the wall,’ says Rosalind. ‘She or a member of staff thought Victoria was too young to see ladies’ underwear. She said, “There are just the two of you?” And we said, “No, we’ve got a sister.” And she said, “Oh, I must meet her.” She came out and said, “So you’re Vicky, are you?” So she was made a bit of a fuss of.’

  As she approached and passed her tenth birthday, Victoria’s progress in class was praised – ‘particularly in English’.39 ‘especially in English’.40 In early 1964 she sat the eleven-plus. Fairfield County Primary had a good record in the exam, and Victoria didn’t let the school down. Where most children set their sights on the Derby School, Bury’s state grammar, Victoria’s parents aimed for a place at the more middle-class Bury Grammar School, which two of her three siblings had attended (Rosalind, being dyslexic, failed her eleven-plus and went to a Catholic school in Rochdale). ‘The work of your daughter, Victoria Wood, in the recent examination qualifies her for a fee-paying place in the school,’ wrote the headmistress Miss L.D. Lester. The place was accepted in May, though Helen, who took charge of all educational matters, did not give up hope of avoiding the fees. The Lancashire Education Committee offered a free place at Bacup & Rawtenstall Grammar, but that would have entailed a far longer journey and a separate trip down to the bus stop. So the decision was taken to pay. In her final term at primary school Victoria finished fourth out of forty-one. Out of a possible 450 marks in her final term, she scored 424. Almost all of the dropped marks were in arithmetic: ‘Vicky has worked exceptionally well and produced a first class result.’41 There was every chance that at Bury Grammar she would thrive.

  3

  BURIED

  ‘I wouldn’t be an adolescent again if you bumped my pocket money up to three and six.’

  Victoria Wood As Seen on TV, 1985

  ‘I wanted to catch up with what I had missed when I was younger. When our youngest child was fixed up with the 11-plus examinations, I decided to start.’1 In the autumn of 1964, Helen Wood resumed the schooling she had been obliged to abandon at the age of fourteen. She spent two years studying for five O levels at Bolton Technical College, where she returned to complete her A levels after a year studying drama at Manchester College of Further Education. In 1968, at the age of forty-nine, she moved on to a general degree in history, English and drama at Manchester University. ‘I intend to participate in the university’s social life,’ she told a local newspaper. ‘I shouldn’t think there will be any domestic problems – everyone will rally round to help.’2

  At the same time as Helen accelerated through her secondary education, her youngest daughter stumbled into hers at Bury Grammar School for Girls. The problem, as Victoria came to perceive it, was the shock of no longer standing out. Everyone else had passed the eleven-plus too: ‘Instead of saying, “Well, I will be more clever,” I just sank underneath. I thought, well, I won’t compete, I won’t do my homework, and I won’t wear clean shirts and I won’t wash my hair. I just sank below the surface.’3

  Her descent is recorded in her school reports. Suddenly praise no longer rang in her ears. ‘Victoria must extend the effort she makes in English and French to include every subject,’ said her form mistress at the end of her first term.4 Her bluntest report was reserved for music: ‘Victoria could do much better.’5 The slump wasn’t as chronic or dramatic as she sometimes, when eyeing a laugh, liked to suggest – ‘I just dug holes in my desk with a pair of compasses for seven years’.6 But she was deemed ‘capable of making a much better effort generally’.7 Her dismal reports for needlework suggest rebellion against her mother’s domestic passion. By the end of her second year her work was ‘still very variable’.8 Her indifference showed in her appearance: her blue jumper would be too baggy, her grey skirt lopsided and one knee-length woollen sock would be down round an ankle.r />
  Bury Grammar School had offered education to both sexes since the late eighteenth century when £5 was bequeathed for the schooling of ten poor girls. Girls were still in the minority by 1903 when the new school building, a solid presence built in red Accrington brick in the neo-Renaissance style, was completed to the west of the town centre. The girls were in possession by the time Victoria arrived, the boys having moved to newer premises. It meant the hundred pupils in Victoria’s year were free to file through a door whose carved inscription identified it as the Boys’ Entrance. Above it the school’s early Victorian crest depicted a swan with a key in its beak. ‘Sanctas clavis fores aperit’ went the motto: the key opens sacred doors. The centrepiece of the school was the assembly hall, tall and imposing with high stained-glass windows, a raised stage at one end, and a Steinway grand piano along one flank. There were heavy stone staircases, and the corridors were tiled and painted in washable gloss. If girls were caught dawdling in them between classes, they were hurried on by teachers, who seemed yet more stern when they donned gowns for assembly.

  In 1964 Dorothy Lester, who was short and round, had been headmistress for ten years and was known to the girls as Lettice Leefe, after the heroine of a popular Fifties comic strip. Her legacy in the oeuvre of Bury Grammar’s most famous pupil is a line in Good Fun, the play Victoria wrote in 1980: a schoolboy nicknamed Lettuce ‘always maintained he was going into show business’. Many other teachers were also of a certain age. Victoria wrote out a list of the twelve mistresses who taught her in the Upper Third. In brackets Victoria’s mother added annotations against two: ‘red hair, young’ for her English teacher; ‘blonde + young’ for her history teacher. Youth was a rare and distinguishing feature, and an aide-mémoire for Helen whenever she attended parents’ meetings. Not that she was a regular sight at the school. Lesley Schatzberger became one of Victoria’s closest friends from the start, but not even once did she meet Helen or Stanley, who, in her memory, ‘never came to school’.

  The first impression Victoria made on Lesley was that she was withdrawn: ‘She tended to have her head a little bit down in a shy way and hide behind her curly hair.’ The two girls shared a sense that they were misfits – Lesley was the child of Jewish refugees from Vienna and preferred ballet and classical to pop. They bonded as musicians. At the start of their second year the school offered pupils the chance to take up an instrument. Victoria opted for the trumpet, while Lesley chose the clarinet. Victoria got an A for technique in her first year, and the girls were soon playing duets. ‘She seemed to come to life somewhat playing the trumpet,’ says Janet Davies (née Eastwood), a young music teacher who conducted the school orchestra.

  After school Victoria regularly went to Lesley’s home on the train a few miles to the north of Bury. Decades later Victoria still fondly recalled Mrs Schatzberger’s Austrian mincemeat loaf. Her own home remained out of bounds to others – when Lesley’s father took her back to Birtle, Victoria insisted on being dropped at the edge of her drive. ‘It felt as though she was ashamed of us getting any nearer to the house,’ says Lesley. Miss Eastwood had a similar experience when, taking girls back late one night after an outing to the opera in Manchester, Victoria asked to be dropped right at the bottom of the hill rather than driven up the rutted track.

  Victoria would joke that she ‘had all the lame friends that you didn’t really want to be friends with but were just available because they had calipers or plasters over their glasses. And I was fat, so I was in the losers group.’9 She was aware that her body was changing faster than the girls around her. ‘She developed quite big boobs quite early on,’ says Lesley. ‘She seemed self-conscious a lot of the time anyway. She always walked in that way [as if to say] “I shouldn’t be here. I don’t want people to see me very much.”’ On the hockey field her body would be cocooned inside the goalkeeper’s comical padding. ‘I couldn’t play games,’ she said. ‘I was in the hockey team for about twenty minutes and I let in thirteen goals.’10

  At the same time there was the ordinary jauntiness of a girl on the cusp of her teens. At the end of her second year, in July 1965, Victoria went on a summer trip to Selsey on the West Sussex coast, where she slept in a school dorm with five other girls. ‘Dear Mother and Father,’ she wrote. ‘The food so far is not too bad (spaghetti and chips for tea).’11 She approved of the number of televisions on site (three) but not what could be seen on them. ‘Excuse my writing,’ she added, ‘but I did not have enough money to buy a proper fountain-pen (HINT-HINT).’12 She went into more detail reporting to Rosalind, noting the mods ‘whizzing past on lovely scooters’ and two nice German boys, both well over six feet:13 ‘The short (HAR-HAR) one has taught me to play table-tennis (which is the only decent game), but I do not see him much as he has to go around with his friend who likes a tarty girl who is in our room.’14 She drew a picture of her lumpy lower bunk. ‘On top of me,’ she concluded, ‘is a very fat girl who creaks all night.’15

  Her burgeoning wit was apparent to her classmates. At twelve, inspired by the squibs she read in Modern Masters of Wit and Humour, Victoria wrote a comic account of a school trip and read it out. Getting the laugh became a vital prop, she discovered, ‘because I didn’t have a huge amount of confidence in other areas at all. It was my way of getting in with people … My way of being in was to act a bit strange. I felt they were normal, and I wasn’t quite normal, so I exaggerated my oddness. I was always desperate for attention.’16 This craving ran in parallel with a contradictory instinct to keep others out. ‘She usually acted as though she was very sulky,’ says Lesley Schatzberger, ‘and reticent to reveal anything.’ Here, in embryonic form, was the split between Victoria’s public and private faces.

  In the third year at Bury Grammar streaming was introduced, and Victoria met a kindred wit in Anne Sweeney, who was intrigued by her new classmate’s attitude: ‘She was very self-contained and not bothered about pleasing. It was as if she didn’t care about getting approval.’ They first bonded when their maths teacher was talking about a trapezium. ‘He flies through the air with the greatest of easium,’ muttered Anne, and Victoria completed the rhyme: ‘The daring young man of the flying trapezium.’ They were sent out to stand in the corridor.

  At the Sweeneys’ house in Prestwich, Victoria politely accepted square meals in a spick-and-span kitchen. ‘She thought my home was comical, being so conventional,’ says Anne. ‘We’d find things hilarious – my mum insisting on coasters. We had a disdain for what we saw then as stuffy, suburban, old-fashioned things.’ Whenever Victoria visited friends’ homes, she professed herself ‘amazed that the house wasn’t full of junk’.17 Anne became the first friend regularly to break into the inner sanctum of Birtle Edge House, which she found ‘rambling and neglected’ but ‘thrillingly bohemian’. What was most unusual of all was that ‘there didn’t seem to be anybody there saying, “Do this, do that.” She never used to talk about her parents at all. They just seemed shadowy presences.’

  The house was emptier with Penelope having left for Leeds University, while Rosalind was at school in Rochdale and, if not sewing, Helen was studying. Meals were not cooked as often, and no one sat around the dining table any more. Victoria catered for herself and, says Anne, ended up ‘eating quite badly’. When she was twelve, Helen took her to the GP and asked for a prescription for pills to suppress both their appetites: ‘I wasn’t that big, but of course once you start dieting you upset the whole thing. I used to have a slimming tablet instead of a meal and then go [to my room] for the good bit – four Curly Wurlys.’18 When her mother did lay on meals they might be found to feature Energen, crispy low-calorie rolls which mainly consisted of air. According to Penelope, this neglect seems to have been rooted in impatience. ‘Mum wasn’t very nice to Vicky really,’ she says. ‘I think she found it hard that she was so scruffy and lazy and sleeping and reading all the time. I think Vicky might have been hard going for Mum somehow.’ When Penelope came back in the holidays, the three sisters would convene
in the kitchen at ten each night to make cocoa with toast and bananas. ‘Occasionally,’ says Penelope, ‘Father would poke his face into the kitchen and say, “It’s about time people were in bed.” We had no proper rules at all. We grew up despite our parents, not because of our parents.’

  It was made harder for Victoria that her sisters were tall, thin mods: ‘I felt they were better at everything, and they were very glamorous … I thought if you were thin you were happy, if you had a boyfriend you’d be happy, if you had a different family and lived in a nice, clean semi, you’d be happy.’19 The contrast between Victoria and her sisters is memorialised in her photograph album. Where Rosalind wears eye liner and glad rags, Victoria is usually in a duffel coat. She was also found to have defective eyesight and started wearing National Health specs: ‘I wasn’t very prepossessing to look at. I was fat. I had very fat spots, like Dick Whittington’s hanky. I had glasses. We only used to wash our hair once a week, so by Thursday afternoon it had gone; it was like chip-pan fat.’20 It was an effort to keep her hair clean at Birtle, as there was no shower and she had to take a basin of hot water from the kitchen to her bedroom: ‘The rest of the time you fannied about with dry shampoo and lemon juice and vinegar. The amount of time I spent combing talcum powder through my hair and trying to brush it out, I could have washed it in half the time.’21

  Victoria’s private territory expanded across the house. She still had her bedroom, dominated by a Paul Newman poster onto which she daubed red lipstick. Now she also took over her brother’s former bedroom beyond Helen’s sewing room, where Stanley installed an upright piano for her. Here, alone and unsupervised, she could pursue what she identified as her four obsessions: piano, books, TV and eating: ‘I don’t know if I was obsessive because I had nothing else to do, or whether I was just like that anyway. Certainly it was a way of filling up time as much as anything.’22 The arrival of the piano coincided with the resumption at thirteen of piano lessons. ‘Victoria undoubtedly has a talent for the piano,’ wrote her new teacher Rosamund Collins. ‘She practices [sic] new pieces too quickly though.’23 She was glued to the instrument, and was soon experimenting on it, making up tunes, consulting a book in her father’s collection called Orchestration for the Modern Jazz Band. At thirteen she wrote her first ever lyrics, about a girl of her age whose flat chest enlarges miraculously when she takes some pills: the ambition to be funny was rooted, from the first, in personal experience. She played these early compositions to Rosalind, who didn’t see the point of them: ‘My sister said, “Why don’t you write proper songs instead of these stupid jokes?” I said, “But I like stupid jokes.”’24 As for improving on the piano, when Victoria missed her last lesson of the academic year in 1967 no summer holiday work could be set, ‘but I am sure she will learn several new pieces on her own without my telling her what to do. We will do Grade II in November.’25 By the following summer she was working on Grade IV.