Things I Couldn't Tell My Mother: A Memoir

by Sue Johnston

  ‘I’ve been having a hard time, Susan,’ she said.

  I nodded, pretending to understand what she was on about. I had that feeling of foreboding, sure that she was about to tell me something better suited to an adult’s ears.

  ‘What with the cancer…’ she continued.

  Uh oh, I thought and began bashing away at the piano keys again.

  ‘Breast cancer,’ she went on, undeterred.

  I wished that someone would rescue me from this situation. Then, without further ado, she whipped her top up and showed me her chest and the angry scar where her breast used to be. I was very shocked. She whipped her top back down again, as if knowing she had transgressed a boundary. I felt very sorry for her but I feel that at any age this would be very shocking; at twelve it was positively traumatic.

  I went home that evening very upset. ‘Mum, I don’t want to go to that lady any more.’

  Mum started into a speech. ‘Well, we pay good money for you to go there…’

  ‘She pulled her top up and showed me where she’d had her bust cut off,’ I said, embarrassed.

  My mother was speechless. When she finally gathered herself she said, ‘Right, you’re not going there again. I’m not having anyone showing her chest to my daughter, whether it’s there or not!’

  So that was the last time I had to venture to Thatto Heath for piano lessons and my mother set about finding me another teacher. They found me someone far closer to our house near the Church Youth Club on Prescot Road and I went there for four years until I was sixteen and my interest in playing the piano was starting to wane and the pull of a social life was proving too great to resist.

  I started skipping my piano lessons in favour of spending time in the back room of the nearby pub. Instead of using the half crown that Mum and Dad gave me every week to pay the piano teacher, I started spending it on a round of shandies for me and my friends.

  One summer there was the church fete and I was there with my parents but I had wandered off and was standing talking to some friends when I spotted them out of the corner of my eye, talking to the piano teacher. She was shaking her head and all three were looking puzzled. If I’d followed their advice and had trained with the Harriers I might have got across the field quick enough to nip the conversation in the bud, but it wasn’t to be. By the time I got there my dad had gone silent, something he only did when he was angry or disappointed. My mother took on the admonishment for the two of them and let fly. ‘How could you, Susan?’ she said, fixing me with a burning glare.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, wanting the ground to open up and swallow me.

  ‘If you’d done it for a week then sorry might be good enough, but six months?’

  ‘I know, I don’t know what I was thinking…’ I said weakly.

  ‘Well, you weren’t thinking, were you? Otherwise you’d have thought that half a crown is a lot of money for me and your dad.’ Then she turned to my father who still was silently looking at me with huge disappointment in his eyes. ‘Come on, Fred, we’re going.’ And they left me standing there, to think about the error of my ways.

  I was mortified to think that I’d spent the best part of six months spending my weekly half crown on myself and my friends, rather than my piano lessons. I had to pay back every penny of it, having my pocket money stopped for the forthcoming months and I was informed I couldn’t have piano lessons again.

  I was always on the lookout for a creative outlet and my cousin Lavinia recognised this. Lavinia was a total inspiration to me as a teenager. I was fourteen years her junior, a huge gap at that age, and it was through her that I developed a love of the theatre. Each year on my birthday she would take me into Liverpool to see a play and then for roast chicken dinner at the cafeteria in Lewis’s, the famous old department store. Spending time with an older cousin that I looked up to was something quite special. As a family we did manage to get to the theatre and the ballet quite regularly. I find this remarkable now, as at the time money was extremely tight. But somehow my mother and aunts would find the money to troop us off to the ballet, dressed up and buzzing with excitement. I suppose what else is amazing is that in the late forties and early fifties these very working-class ladies embraced high culture when it came their way. But then again, it was just what that generation did, I suppose. At this time Variety was still popular and people didn’t stay in huddled around the TV, they went out to the cinema and the music halls for their entertainment.

  Although I had been quite musical (if you discount singing) and I did like to go to the theatre when given the opportunity, the first time I ever really remember being bitten by the drama bug was around the age of fifteen. Until then, acting hadn’t been something that I’d thought of as an option. In the same way that we didn’t know anyone who had gone off to university, we didn’t know anyone who worked as an actor. It just wasn’t the done thing for someone from my background. I had always enjoyed English, and had won the school prize for spoken English reading from Alice in Wonderland when I was in the third form, but it wasn’t until I met my teacher Miss Potter that I realised that I wanted to act. Miss Potter was one of those inspirational teachers that everyone hopes they’ll have. She was only in her mid-twenties when she taught us, so she was young and enthusiastic and full of energy. We all loved her. She decided that we needed to perform a school play. Drama wasn’t something that was on the curriculum then so any plays that were put on at school depended on the drive of the teacher. The play she chose was The Tinderbox and she cast me as the witch. From the day we started rehearsals I knew that I loved acting. I can remember clearly rolling around on the stage as the witch, and feeling absolutely present in that moment. From then on I knew that this was what I wanted to do.

  After the play Miss Potter married and became Mrs Sutton. She continually encouraged me to become an actress. I never forgot about Mrs Sutton and the impact she had on me in my school years.

  Years later, I was surprised to find myself on This is Your Life. My mother had told the producers about Mrs Sutton but they were unable to track her down. I always wondered where she was and how she was getting on, but there just seemed to be no way of finding her.

  About twelve months after This is Your Life I was asked to present at the Teaching Awards and when I went onstage the presenter began to ask me about teachers that had inspired me as a child. I of course told them about Mrs Sutton. Then a voice that I recognised came over the speakers and I turned around to see an older lady on the screen behind me, sitting at a desk and reading from her diary. ‘Today Susan Wright was remarkable in The Tinderbox and I hope she’ll continue with her acting endeavours…’ It was Mrs Sutton!

  The next minute there she was, up on the stage with me. I was absolutely thrilled. Afterwards we spent all evening in a bar catching up. She said that she’d followed my career but had never known that I was the Susan Wright she had taught. She introduced me to her husband and we talked about the time we had seen Albert Finney understudy for Laurence Olivier in Stratford. She said, ‘Well, of course we all had the hots for him…’ As schoolgirls we never thought that our teacher felt the same way about the young actor as we did!

  We ended up the evening with the footballer Sol Campbell sitting between us while Mrs Sutton and I stroked his head telling him how beautiful he was. I don’t know how that came about, but we both enjoyed it! After that I stayed in touch with Mrs Sutton until she sadly passed away two years ago.

  *

  I think it is so important to have figures like Mrs Sutton, outside of your family, who can encourage your passions as a child. Parents aren’t always the best people to understand why you want to follow a certain path in life. Although my mum did encourage some things that I was interested in, it was in my teenage years that a definite divide appeared between my mother on one side and me and my dad on the other. My mother had always been disapproving and caught up in what other people might think, as if somehow what mattered most was the opinion of the neighbours five door
s down whom she’d never really met. My mother was quick to judge and as a result Dad and I forged an alliance as we strived to avoid her scathing criticism. We shared small things, never huge secrets, but it did lead to this air of division between my mum and me and my dad.

  That said, if my dad thought that I was out of line, especially with regard to my mum, he would tell me straight. He loved my mother dearly and was fiercely loyal to her. The only reason he ever kept things from her was to not upset her, or at least to make life easier.

  There was a lot that we kept from my mother. My dad would say to me as a teenager ‘Don’t tell your mother’ about the slightest thing. My father liked to smoke, but my mother wouldn’t let him so he would go to his shed to do it and only I knew.

  We knew that if my mother found out that I was going out into Liverpool or seeing a friend she would have something to say about it, put it down in one way or another, so we didn’t tell her. We couldn’t face the disapproval.

  When I was seventeen years old my dad was in charge of my curfew. There were times when he would willingly cover for me. He’d know that I’d come in late but would say to my mum, ‘Oh, Sue was in in good time,’ and then give me a wink. I felt that me and my dad were a team, and that he understood me. One evening, though, I pushed him too far.

  My dad knew what time the last bus back from Liverpool was and that if I missed it then the only other bus dropped me miles away and meant I had a long walk up a dark country lane. One night I had chanced my arm, stayed out a little later than usual, and missed my last bus home. I got off the other bus and ran, my heart pounding in my chest. What would usually happen was that my dad would go to bed, leave the back door on the latch and then I could let myself in and sneak to bed. However, that evening he’d obviously had enough: I was way too late. I got to the back door and pulled but nothing happened; it was locked. I pulled again, still nothing. I stood back and looked at the door for a moment. Surely he wasn’t going to make me knock them up? I took a few steps back and looked up at the drainpipe, wondering if there was a way I could scale it and break into my own bedroom. As I stood there, dithering on the step, I heard the bolt being drawn and the door opened. My dad looked at me, with an expression on his face that I dreaded. He was disappointed. He stood back to let me in the house.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad, I missed the bus and then I had to get the other one, it won’t happen again…’ I gabbled. The quieter my dad became the more I filled the air with excuses. ‘I didn’t realise the time, I looked at my watch and it was nine o’clock then the next thing I know it’s eleven…’

  My dad fixed me with a look that still makes my heart sink thinking about it now. ‘You’d better go to bed. And we won’t tell your mother about any of this.’

  I slunk off upstairs, my tail firmly between my legs. I don’t believe I was the most rebellious of teens but my mother and father had high standards and I often felt that I fell below them.

  At that age I thought that the gap that appeared between my mother and I was all down to me. Something I had done, something that had changed in me, my yearning for independence. I picked up tension in other people, and thought that if they were upset it was all my fault. It’s something I still tend to do now. But, when I think back, my mother may have had concerns that had nothing to do with me.

  I was coming up to the age where I would sit my O levels when my mother took a job in a shoe shop and the owner, a widower, was a firm family friend. My parents would go out dancing with this man, together with his brother and the brother’s wife, and I remember photos around the house of them all dressed up in their Saturday-night finery. One Valentine’s Day, Mother received her usual card from my dad, and another one, from a mystery admirer.

  I walked into my parents’ bedroom and my dad was crying. I went to say something but then withdrew, it didn’t feel right: whatever had my dad so upset was deeply personal. I came out of the room and crept along the landing so he didn’t hear me making my retreat. I went downstairs where my mother was standing at the sink washing up. She looked at me.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. Then I decided that I really did need to say something, so I dug down deep for some courage. I was hopeless at confrontation, especially with my mum. ‘Dad’s upset, Mum. I think he’s crying,’ I said quietly.

  Mum waved her hand over her shoulder dismissively. ‘Oh he’s being daft,’ she said. ‘He’s bought that car,’ she nodded outside to my father’s new pride and joy, ‘and now he’s worried he can’t afford it.’

  She didn’t look at me; she just stayed rattling the pots around the sink. I wanted to say that I couldn’t imagine Dad actually crying about a car but of course I didn’t, I just stood there dumbly.

  ‘If you’re not doing anything you can get a tea towel and dry these pots.’

  And that was the end of that discussion. Afterwards I felt odd about the whole situation and was left wondering what on earth had really gone on.

  After that Dad stopped going dancing but my mother still went. I clearly remember a photograph taken after that time: my dad isn’t in it and my mother is standing close to this man.

  But Mum’s Saturday night dancing didn’t last much longer. The friendship, if that’s what it was, broke up and the job in the shoe shop came to an end. I have no proof that anything ever went on, and at the time I would never have seriously considered that my mother could have betrayed my dad in any way. But all the same I did feel very very sad for my dad.

  Of course, it wasn’t something I could ever ask my mother about outright, even when I was much older. We simply didn’t talk about such things. And there is always the chance that this was all in my head; I’ve had a vivid imagination from an early age!

  A couple of years on from this my mother became really ill. She had always been a bit of a drama queen about her asthma, but this was serious. She developed pneumonia and had a huge carbuncle on her back, which the doctor had to dress. Eventually the doctors brought in a respirator and my mother was surrounded by tubes and bottles of oxygen. It was a very scary time. Mum was only forty-seven but I felt that there was a possibility we might lose her. Dad would drive all the way back from Liverpool city centre every lunchtime to tend to her, and her sisters came around to make sure she was okay when Dad and I weren’t there.

  One day, the doctor came round, took one look at my mum and said, ‘She needs to go into hospital.’

  ‘What, now?’ I asked. He couldn’t mean now, could he?

  ‘She’s very ill,’ he informed me and my dad.

  Dad prevaricated. My mother was adamant that she wasn’t going anywhere so Dad comforted her and told her that it was fine, she didn’t have to go anywhere. I looked at them both and then decided that if they weren’t going to do anything about it, I would. I went downstairs and called for an ambulance.

  As Mum was strapped up and bundled into the back she turned to me and said, ‘I’ll never forgive you for this!’ The idea that the entire street would have seen her taken to hospital in such a public manner was mortifying to her. Never mind that she was at death’s door!

  I jumped in my dad’s blue Volkswagen Beetle and followed the ambulance, its sirens blaring, to the hospital. I was petrified that something was going to happen to Mum. I parked up at the first place I could find to dump the car and ran inside to A&E. Mum, an oxygen mask covering her nose and mouth, was wheeled past me on a stretcher and taken into a cubicle where the curtains were quickly drawn, leaving Dad and me outside.

  Feeling terrible, I looked at my dad.

  ‘Don’t worry, love, I think she’s forgiven you,’ he said.

  ‘No I haven’t!’ Mum’s voice floated out from behind the curtain. Dad and I had to laugh.

  After this my mum went to a convalescence home in North Wales where she stayed for three weeks. This was much more acceptable to her, there was something genteel about convalescing.
/>   The other thing that must have been going on for my mother around this time, which I didn’t realise of course then, was ‘the change’, as the menopause was referred to (if it was ever referred to at all!).

  I think that these things that were going on in my mother’s life, combined with a daughter who was spreading her wings and wanting to take on the world, must have contributed to my mother’s malaise. She might have had a burning desire to do something that she was never able to because her life had gone down the family route. Not that she ever said as much, except perhaps by referring to me as a ‘Michael the Mistake’. I’m speculating, of course, but I do often wonder if there was something else that my mother may have wanted to do. Sadly, this didn’t result in her being pleased for me as I sought to fulfil my own ambitions.

  I did well at my O levels, but the leap between O levels and A levels was vast, as was the social life that suddenly became available. I left school at the end of the first year of sixth form. My dad really wanted me to go to university and he was fiercely disappointed when I left, but I just knew that there was life out there that I had to experience.

  Chapter Three

  I LEFT SIXTH form in 1961 and decided that I would get a job and see where things took me. After my first tentative acting steps under the tutelage of Mrs Sutton, I knew that I really wanted to be an actress, but as I had no idea how to go about becoming one, I thought I should earn some money.

  My uncle was an inspector of taxes in Manchester and he suggested I might enjoy working in the tax office. My parents were happy about this as they thought that if I took a job I might relent and think about university in the near future. It was also highly respectable and my mother was thrilled at the thought that I was going to be a civil servant. I went to work in the tax office in St Helens for six months and was then transferred to one on Dale Street in Liverpool.