by Sue Johnston
I went happily to school on the first day but the next day I woke up and said to my mother, matter-of-factly, ‘I don’t think I’ll go to school today, thank you.’
My mother, with a look that could curdle milk, said, ‘There’s no “think” about it. You’re going to school, young lady!’
With that I was dressed and whisked out of the door, my feet barely touching the floor.
I wasn’t having this, I decided. They might have got me there under false pretences for one day, but I wasn’t going again. As all of the other children filed obligingly through the school gates, I clamped my hands around the railings and clung on for dear life. My mother tried to pull me off but I was having none of it. ‘I’m not going in!’ I protested. My poor mother. In the end she gave up trying to extricate me from the railing herself and marched into the school, asking the head teacher if she would be kind enough to come outside and prise me away from the school gates and into the school itself.
The head came out and looked at me. I glared back, my face puce with defiance. ‘Come on now, Susan, let’s have you inside,’ she said. She peeled one finger off and immediately I flipped it back on to the gate. It must have been like wrestling an octopus. Finally the head and my mother managed to prise me away from the gate and the head carried me, under her arm, kicking into the school.
After this altercation I was fine, but I like to think that this was a precursor to my future political life – the first of many protests!
I remember very clearly being in the nursery class aged four; it was an old Victorian schoolroom, and it had a big open fire with a guard to protect us infants from falling in. If we were naughty Miss Cross would make us stand facing the fire so that our faces burned. I think about this now and wonder how that would go down with parents if primary schools were to introduce a policy of Stand by the Fire!
I was, I am informed, very bright at infant school. We had little cards that we would write our class exercises on and I’d always be the first up with my card, arm outstretched, ‘Finished, Miss!’
One day as I was standing impatiently waiting to be seen by the teacher, I slid my exercise card down the back of a poster on the wall. I’m not sure why I did it: boredom, curiosity, whatever was the reason, it resulted in me receiving a good hiding. I was given the ruler – for that! Mind you, at that time if you had the audacity to go home and say that you’d been smacked you would get smacked again, so I never told my parents that I had had the ruler. They wouldn’t go down to the school and defend your corner to the teachers as parents do now. Years later I bravely told my mother I had had the ruler at school and she just said, without looking up from the magazine she was reading, ‘Well, you must have deserved it.’
I may have been a bright girl at infant school, but one thing I couldn’t do, which Miss Cross seemed to think was essential to the holistic education of her charges, was knit. For Miss Cross, humiliation was the art of education. I remember trying to concoct something with my knitting needles that was probably meant to be a scarf, but that just looked like a tangled mess – quite arty though, I thought. She held it up to the class with a look of disdain – all of my classmates looked on, marvelling at how bad my creation was – and then I got the ruler again! I was only five at the time. Five years old and being burned by the fire and beaten by a ruler for bad knitting was an everyday occurrence at Whiston Infants.
I had my first acting experience at that school. I’d like to say there was the early evidence that it would eventually become my career. That wasn’t the case. I remember seeing my parents come into the room and look around, maybe they were looking for me playing Mary, or even a shepherd or king. But no, there I was, standing on a stool pointing at the words with a stick, under strict instruction that I wasn’t allowed to sing. At least I’d been given a job, I suppose! I’m still no use at singing. I might on occasion fancy that I can sing but I’m reminded that I can’t as soon as the notes leave my mouth. So, Miss Cross, you may have burned me and beaten me but you got one thing right – recognising I was tone deaf from an early age!
We moved from infants to junior school when we were seven. My junior school, Eccleston Park Church of England school, was a mile and a half away and I would walk there and back twice a day, coming home for my dinner. Six miles a day, no wonder we were all beanpoles! One of the tricks of our teachers at junior school was to throw our work out of the window if we were misbehaving. Mr Dean was the worst for it. So we would be standing there, agog as our work frittered through the air. While we were unawares we’d get a great thwack on the back of the legs but not from a ruler this time but a cane; we were seven now, we’d moved on! Then we’d have to hobble into the garden to pick up our ruined work. Thinking back, school really was like running the gauntlet, it’s a wonder we learned anything.
When I was in juniors I had terrible bladder problems, something that affected my entire family. Weak bladders were known to run on my mother’s side and my poor aunties and mother were martyrs to it. If they laughed they wet their knickers. My dad always said it was a sign of a good holiday if there was a line of knickers pegged out. One time, someone in the family was getting married and my mother and aunties took my grandma to get her outfit from Lewis’s, a grand old department store in the middle of Liverpool. Grandma was trying on a particularly smart outfit when she had a fit of laughing at something someone said and laughed so much she wet herself and had to buy the dress.
I was to be cursed with this affliction as a child. In junior school I sat next to a boy called Roger Kelly. He would go on to be an actor himself and changed his name to Sam Kelly. He was in Porridge and ’Allo, ’Allo, among other things. I remember sitting on his desk in a fit of laughter and then the floodgates opening. I would only have been seven or eight at the time. I ran back to my seat; I didn’t want to sit down, I just wanted to die. It was awful as a little girl to have that dread of the inevitable humiliation. A hand went up, ‘Miss, someone’s weed on the desk,’ they said with disgust. The teacher made everyone stand up and turn around and then, with all the eyes of my classmates burning into me, I heard, ‘Susan Wright, go and get the mop and bucket.’ I didn’t. I ran the mile and a half to our house and into my mother’s arms, crying my eyes out. It was the only time I’d felt able to come home from school and say what had happened to me, I somehow knew that on this occasion my parents would fight my corner. I felt so wronged. I was right – my mother went mad. She understood a weak bladder could be the most embarrassing thing in the world. She went to see the headmistress and defended me to the hilt. And then she went and gave the teacher what for too. It was the one and only time she defended me in school, but it was the right time. I don’t think I could have gone back to school after that if my mother had taken the usual parental approach of the day and sided with the teacher. My mother then took me to the doctor’s and I seem to remember being given some tablets that sorted it out. But the fact is at that age mud sticks, and whenever a puddle was found in class, from then on the finger was always pointed at me.
Growing up I may not have had any brothers or sisters but I was extremely lucky as there were three other girls in the three houses next door to us who were only children too. That there were four of us in a row, the same age with no brothers and sisters, was a rare occurrence, especially back then. We all knocked about together playing on the street and in our garden – my dad had strung up some old netting he’d acquired for us to play badminton, or ‘shuttlecock’, as we called it. Dad could always be relied upon to make something out of nothing. A skipping rope, a rounder bat, a tennis racket: Dad was the man to go to.
We were such a tight-knit little bunch of girls. There was Leslie Kruse, who was very clever and went on to Cambridge. My mum always held Leslie up as the person I could have been if I had applied myself. ‘If you’d worked hard like Leslie Kruse,’ she would say, ‘you could have gone to Cambridge.’ This is something I don’t believe to be true for a second. Leslie was exceptionally clever and
also extremely hardworking and very much deserved her place at the top university. The fact that she was from a working-class background and one of the first women to be admitted to St Catharine’s College to study English made her achievement even more admirable. Then there was Valerie Thompson, whose parents I called Aunty Betty and Uncle Joe. Valerie lives in New Zealand now. And there was Frances Rimmer who moved in later than the rest of us. We were a real gang of mates. Valerie’s dad Joe who had one leg, and who had so kindly gone to the phone box for me when I scalded my foot, was a whiz on his crutches and would trim the hedges in between the gardens balancing on them. It was a wonder to behold! He never wore a wooden leg although it was rumoured he had one. One day Valerie decided she was going to show it to us and we all crept upstairs. We walked into her parents’ bedroom and huddled in tight.
‘Sssh!’ Valerie demanded. We knew we’d be in big trouble if her mum or dad found us snooping around in their bedroom. We all fell silent as, with all the ceremony that the occasion was due, Valerie reached under the bed and pulled out a long, narrow box. She flipped the locks on the side and we all took a small step back. Then she opened the lid and in unison we let out a piercing scream as we clapped eyes on the wooden leg.
‘Be quiet!’ Valerie hissed, sure we were going to give ourselves away. ‘What do you think it’s going to do? Jump out of the box and run round the room?’
We all piped down, Valerie put back the leg, and we crept downstairs undetected.
The four of us would play outside together every day after school and we’d often be joined by a lad called Nigel who lived in one of the police houses on the estate. As a child I don’t really remember spending much time inside. Unless it was teeming down with rain we were all ushered out into the street to play and told not to come back in until it was time for tea, and then after tea we were pushed out the door again until it was time for bed.
I stayed in touch with my friends from the street until we left Whiston and went our separate ways, but over the years we got back in contact again and Leslie came to my mother’s ninetieth birthday party, which thrilled Mum to bits. It also gave her another opportunity to bring up the fact that if I’d only knuckled down I might have gone to Cambridge and made something of myself.
*
Some of the happiest times in my childhood were during our family holidays. We would rent a seaside chalet in a place called Gronant just outside of Rhyl. North Wales was and still is a big draw for people from the North-West. It’s not too far and has some lovely seaside towns. There would usually be a gang of us: Clive, Ena, Charlie and Barbara, Millie, Dave and my cousins, my parents and me. Then others from the family might come along if they could get the time off work that week. There was a bluebell wood near the campsite and a stream where I played in the water with my cousins, when we weren’t on the beach building sandcastles. Of course now as I look back it all seems to have been dappled by sunlight, but I’m pretty sure we also had days, if not weeks, of rain where we sat in the chalet and vowed never to go back to Wales again.
We would sometimes hire a caravan when it was just my parents and me. I loved holidaying in a caravan; there was something very comforting about cosying up on a bed that flipped down from an overhead cupboard, while my mother and father turned the table into a double bed. Cosier still was the feeling that we were all together in the same room, playing cards and board games.
When we were holidaying with my extended family they would get all us kids to bed and then the adults would stay up and play canasta. My mother was a demon canasta player, as were all her family, and would often go to the casinos in Manchester, even late in life, and play canasta into the early hours.
A very early holiday was a trip to Butlin’s. I was probably only two but it is memorable for one particular reason. We went to the one in Filey. I was on the train that took you around the park and these older girls took a bit of a shine to me and decided that I could be their friend. Mum and Dad seemed to think this was a fine idea. That was until the girls covered me in transfers and swung me around by the arms and they came out of their sockets! I had to go to hospital and have them clicked back in. My mother was very angry about this, declaring that I’d ruined the holiday.
But usually holidays were good times. Another that sticks in my mind was on a farm in Egremont, Cumbria. There was the usual family group and my aunty Josie also came with us. It was haymaking time and they had a young lad on the farm whom we made friends with and who kindly allowed us to get involved in the bailing. Everyone seemed to really click and it was one of those holidays that stands out as so much more than just a week away. Again, it seemed to be sunny all the time.
They would get the hay on the back of the cart and then my cousins and I would climb up and be pulled along, bobbling about on top of the hay, by two carthorses called Blossom and Biddy. After seeing the fun their children were having my mother and her sisters decided that they wanted to get in on the act. The farm hand decided not to put them on the hay but instead to put them on Biddy, the more truculent of the two carthorses. Blossom placidly looked on as Biddy decided to do her own thing, skedaddling off before the sisters were ready. The family bladder weakness took hold and my mother and her hysterical sisters wet themselves and poor old Biddy into the bargain. Another day on holiday ended with a washing line full of knickers.
My childhood really was lovely and I am pleased that I got to tell my mother that I felt that way. My memories as a youngster are something that I’ll always treasure and I am thankful to both my mum and dad for creating the kind of environment that allowed me to have such a happy time.
Chapter Two
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH my mother began to change when I was a teenager. Although on the one hand she had been encouraging of my progress at school, on the other she was wary of the fact that I was bright and of where that might lead. Now that I was growing up, she was beginning to view my enquiring mind with suspicion.
I don’t believe my mother’s attitude to have been malicious, I just think that she feared losing me, she feared that I was outgrowing our family unit, she feared the inevitable day that I would leave home and make a life for myself. My mother wanted to have her family near. Her ideal situation would have been for me to marry a local lad, settle down nearby and have grandchildren for her. But I had ambitions and a life that I wanted to lead. Even though I didn’t know that I wanted to be an actress, I certainly knew that I wanted to see a bit of the world, or at least travel a bit further than the end of our road.
My dad was always very encouraging towards my academic success. I think that this is because, in another life, he would have loved to have been a scholar. He had to leave school aged fourteen because his parents couldn’t afford the uniform required should he have continued on. He took an apprenticeship as a plumber and later in life went to night school and worked his way up to become a clerk of works at the Ministry of Defence. My father was a very bright man and in lieu of any formal education he educated himself. He had a great love of literature and would recite chunks from Shakespeare. It never occurred to me that this was quite unusual; I thought everyone’s dad knew whole swathes of King Lear.
Dad also loved books, or at least loved talking about books. I never saw him read, but he knew an awful lot about many great works and he would talk about Dickens, telling me abridged versions of his favourites. He loved Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson and I felt like I knew that book without ever having read it. So where my mother was unimpressed about any of my academic successes, my father was always very interested. He wanted me to go to university, to get a degree and have a vocation, to have the opportunities that he hadn’t had, I suppose.
My mother was encouraging in other areas. In my teens I was good at sport and Mum really liked this fact. I showed real promise at the high jump and she thought this might be a good thing to pursue. Mum too had been good at the high jump when she was at school and, although she never said it directly, I knew that she was pleased t
hat we shared being good at the same thing. She and Dad wanted me to go on and not only represent the school but to train and be part of the Liverpool Harriers, and so did I until I realised what a commitment it would be. There were plenty of other things going on.
One thing I was quite good at and pursued for a number of years was playing the piano. This was another thing that pleased my mother as she and her sisters had some grand aspirations for their children. It was a very ladylike thing to do – at one stage we were all sent for elocution lessons! I used to attend piano lessons with a lady called Miss Anderson who lived in Prescot, Merseyside. I used to really enjoy playing the piano and I even got to play at the Philharmonic in Liverpool.
On reflection, I think that she was very proud of me that day. I wore a little pink suit with a pleated skirt that I’d been bought to wear at Easter. I had been put forward by my music teacher to play alongside other young people who in turn had been nominated by their teachers, and I played Mozart’s ‘Minuet in G’. When I saw my mum after the performance, it was clear she had been crying. And for a time she used to tell her sisters, who weren’t particularly interested, ‘Her music teacher says she’s got a lovely touch.’
Then suddenly Miss Anderson stopped taking piano lessons and my mum and dad found a lady in Thatto Heath, an area of St Helens about three miles from where we lived. I would sit on the bus dreading going to this woman’s house. She wasn’t as warm and welcoming as Miss Anderson. One day I walked in and she sat me down at the piano and flicked through the musical score book to indicate what she would like me to play. I immediately set to work on ‘Für Elise’ when she stopped me.