by Sue Johnston
I had mixed emotions when I left college. I was very excited about getting out in the world and trying to make my way as an actress but at college I had been wrapped in the security of the course and my friends and leaving that behind was nerve-racking. There was also the fear that I might never actually get work and I admit that that fear as an actress has never left me. Every time a job comes to an end I feel sick with worry and am quickly convinced I’ll never work again.
Now at least everyone is in the same boat, most jobs are precarious and there is no guarantee of a job for life. But in the sixties, most people felt that their job and future was secure and here I was flitting around, ready to embark on a career that by its very nature was short term. My poor parents must have wondered what on earth was going to become of me.
At the end of the final term we performed a ‘Press Show’ where agents and managers would come to see who they would like to take on to their books. I didn’t get an agent immediately but I was offered work in the play Boeing Boeing, which was due to tour soon after we graduated. I took this job and I was now ready to go out into the world for the first time as a real actress.
Chapter Five
I WAS TWENTY-THREE years old when I left drama school. I was in one respect extremely independent. I had lived in London for two years and had forged a life for myself that really wasn’t expected for a young woman from my background. But when I went back home the fact that I was in London being an actress really didn’t matter. The important question was, ‘Are you courting?’ Getting married and creating a stable family life was still the most valued prize for women, even though some women of my generation were stepping away from this role.
I feel that I was still very much influenced by this way of thinking and instinctively I wanted this for myself. I wanted someone who would love me and validate me. Someone whom I could trust implicitly and who would be my ally in life. When I found out that my first boyfriend had cheated on me it had rocked me very badly. I felt that I had trusted him and that trust had been abused. After that something shifted in me, it was as if I didn’t know whom I could trust any more. Even though I had had a stable upbringing, I think that outside influences such as this were beginning to bruise me. As a result I’m sure I became needy. I wanted to know with absolute certainty that I could trust the person I was with. I now know that trust doesn’t work this way, but when I was younger I was insecure and needed reassurance. Neil gave me this reassurance.
I had been going out with Neil throughout drama school and when he moved to Lincoln we still managed to see a lot of one another, even though we were in different cities. I was visiting Neil as often as possible towards the end of my course and it was on one of these trips that Neil bought me a beautiful antique pearl and diamond engagement ring. I was absolutely thrilled.
In those days you were supposed to save up to buy a house before getting married. Neil and I had no money, and acting wasn’t a career with steady prospects, but we didn’t care. Mum and Dad came to visit and although they smiled and nodded and tried to look pleased, I knew they didn’t really approve.
*
When I finished college I was offered the role of understudy in the play Boeing Boeing. It was to tour, and this meant a lot of time away from Neil, but we both knew that this was the nature of the job and although I knew I would miss him I had to take this opportunity.
I would be working with the comedian Norman Vaughan. Norman was a well-known and much-loved TV personality. He had just finished presenting Sunday Night at the London Palladium and was hugely popular. I was very honoured to be working with him on my first outing after college. Norman had never acted before but he was a genius at knowing how to get a laugh. He’d say, ‘Right, I’m going to stand here and say my first line,’ then he’d march over to the other side of the stage. ‘Here’s where I’ll say my second line, then I’ll pause,’ he would pause for effect, ‘and then look back at the audience.’ And then he’d say with absolute confidence, ‘Then they’ll laugh.’ And sure enough, he was right. There was a lovely actress called Dory Henderson who played the housekeeper in the play, and Norman would always try to make her laugh but there was no getting Dory out of character, she would just look at him blankly which drew even more laughs from the audience.
We arrived in Torquay for the summer run and Yvette, the other understudy, and I hired a little bungalow together. Neil would come to visit with his brother Geoff and his friends and we had a lovely, fun, sun-drenched summer. I remember sunbathing on the theatre roof on our days off. The stage manager at the theatre was also a fisherman and would take us out on his boat. We would catch our tea and come back and cook it on the beach. Afterwards, we would hotfoot it to the local pub, the Devon Dumpling, where we would spend the evening drinking and chatting. If it was a warm night and we were all suitably equipped with Dutch courage then we would return to the beach to go skinny-dipping!
Max Bygraves was appearing at the theatre next door and I was terribly excited when, through Norman, we were all invited to his and his wife Blossom’s silver wedding anniversary. Yvette had a daughter, Deva, who was six at the time and she needed to find a babysitter. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ I volunteered. ‘I’ll call my cousins and see if they fancy coming down.’
So I rang my cousins Bob and David, who were only teenagers at the time, and invited them down to stay. They were both on the train as quick as their legs could carry them: a week in Torquay, away from parental intrusion, in exchange for a night’s babysitting? Of course they’d do it.
Bob and David arrived. ‘Right lads,’ I said as we were leaving for the party, ‘help yourselves to whatever, and if there’s any problem just come to the party and get us.’
‘Everything will be fine,’ Bob assured me.
I’m not sure why I took the word of a fourteen-yearold on trust – but I did.
So Yvette and I went off to the party and had a great time. It was such a lovely occasion and great to meet Max who was such a well-known entertainer. The thing that stays in my mind about that party was that they had bread rolls in the shape of the letters ‘M’ and ‘B’. This really was the height of sophistication to me at the time! Afterwards, Yvette and I went for a swim in the sea, thinking that things must be fine back at the bungalow because if the lads had needed anything they would surely have come and told us.
We returned home in the early hours of the morning to a scene of devastation. The first clue was the front door which was wide open but as I strode towards it in panic I nearly tripped over Bob who was lying prostrate on the floor, out for the count. I knelt down next to him then looked at Yvette. ‘Bloody hell, Yvette,’ I said. ‘He’s drunk.’ Yvette bolted inside to see if Deva was okay as I dragged my sorry cousin inside. David was in a no better state than Bob, and he was spark out on the couch. I joined Yvette in Deva’s bedroom, and found the little girl sitting in bed sipping a light ale! Nowadays social services would have been round in a flash. I packed my cousins off to bed with a flea in their drunken ears and the next day they came down looking very sorry for themselves.
‘Sorry, Sue,’ they said in unison, their heads hung in shame.
‘We drank a load of cider,’ Bob added. ‘I don’t think it agreed with us.’
He could say that again!
Once my cousins were packed back up north, we managed to see out the summer without any more alarming occurrences, but it was soon time to go home.
*
I think if I’m really honest with myself I pushed Neil towards marriage. I wanted him to demonstrate to me how much I meant to him, and I felt that marriage meant a total guarantee of trust. I also wanted to be part of Neil’s family. I really loved his mother, Peggy. She was such a carefree woman. I remember we would go back to their house and stay up chatting and drinking and Peggy and her husband would be in bed upstairs. Neil would shout upstairs, ‘It’s us!’
She’d shout back down, ‘Help yourself to whatever!’
She was so laid-back
in her attitude. It didn’t bother her a bit that we were all there. I loved this as it was so different to being at my mother’s, who would have had a fit if I’d turned up late at night with friends. The next morning Neil’s mum and dad would sit around chatting to us about what we’d been up to the night before.
I probably inadvertently caused my mother to be jealous of my relationship with my mother-in-law. I think that she felt inched out and also a little insecure around this confident, urbane woman.
Neil and I moved back to London and got a place in Tufnell Park as we planned for the wedding. It was a flat where the landlady lived above us. It wasn’t an ideal situation and we didn’t have a front door to our flat, just a curtain which she would pull back and march in whenever she felt like it, which was a very claustrophobic way to live.
We were married in January 1967. I had just turned twenty-four. I recently found some footage of my wedding day and have had it transferred to DVD. I don’t watch it and wish that things had turned out differently. I just marvel at all the people who are on it who were so important in my life who have since died – to see them brought to life again is amazing. The other thing that strikes me about the video is how happy we all were. It was a wedding day, so I suppose of course we were happy, but to see myself and my family, all looking so young, brought back to life on that day is really very special. I also look at myself and think, ‘You’re just a girl! What were you doing?’
We didn’t have an evening do: we had the wedding and then a spread and a few drinks afterwards and then everyone went home. But I was married and I really don’t know what I expected to change for us or what was meant to feel different.
Neil and I returned to London and normal life. I got my second job in the theatre working as deputy stage manager and understudy at the Whitehall Theatre, which is now the Trafalgar.
After a while, the flat in Tufnell Park became very stressful and Neil and I began to argue.
I remember one argument particularly well. I had been working all day and then working at the theatre in the evening and I was really spoiling for a fight. There was no privacy and it was a large open flat. Add an intrusive landlady to the mix, and the fact that we’d had friends staying on the couch for weeks, and it was a recipe for disharmony!
Neil was unwilling to rise to the argument. I had been cooking spaghetti bolognese and eventually I became so enraged that I threw the entire bowl at him. It landed on Neil, and he sat there with bolognese dripping down his front. I stormed out only to return an hour later. Neil was still sitting in the chair with bolognese all over him. We laughed about it afterwards but it was becoming clear that we had big problems in our relationship.
We both agreed that we needed to get out of there for our own sanity. Surely a front door and a bit of privacy wasn’t too much to ask? So we handed in our notice and it went down like a cup of cold sick. The landlady was horrible to us. It seemed that she felt deeply betrayed because her tenants were leaving.
We found a place in Wimbledon and moved as quickly as we could. We felt a bit more settled in this new place. By then my contract at the Whitehall Theatre had finished, and I got a job in a toy shop called John Dobbie’s in Wimbledon village, a lovely old-fashioned toy store with hand-crafted toys, the kind you dream of as a child but imagine only children in large Georgian houses own. However, as we had started arguing in Tufnell Park, Neil and I found it difficult to stop now we were in Wimbledon. There were still niggles between us and a distance had begun to set in that I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to overcome.
Friends began to gently point out that maybe things weren’t right between us. I didn’t feel the need to confide in Neil about anything any more and I’m sure he felt the same. After months of this we both had to admit that things had come to an end. The marriage just ran its course. It was very sad but, in hindsight, we had married too young.
I remained very close to Neil’s family and his mother Peggy took me in when the marriage broke up. His brother Geoff and I were great friends for many years and he was like a brother to me.
I was very nervous about telling my parents that my marriage was over, my mother more so than my dad.
I called home, and spoke to my father; I was very upset.
‘Dad, Neil and I have split up,’ I explained.
There was a long pause and then he asked, ‘Are you all right, love?’
Through my tears, I managed to blurt out, ‘What will Mum say?’
‘Come home, love. I won’t say anything until you get here.’
So I headed home, feeling dreadful but knowing that my dad was on my side. My mother wasn’t thrilled by the notion that her young daughter was to be a divorcee. I don’t think we even knew anyone else who was divorced at the time. There I was again, breaking new ground! Mum held her counsel for a little while but then couldn’t help a round of ‘I told you so’s. She was very upset for me, and was wondering what would become of me, I suppose her concern was that no one else would want to marry me again, that I’d be left on the shelf. She was also worried about what other people would think.
There was a family party that weekend. ‘Don’t say anything when we get there,’ Mum warned me. So that evening I had to do the rounds and smile while everyone asked me how Neil was and how life in London was treating me, when all I wanted to do was go home and cry. I came away from the party annoyed and embarrassed.
‘I’m not coming back again, Mum, until everyone knows. It’s not on,’ I informed her.
My poor mother. She really didn’t want the job of telling everyone I was getting a divorce but if she wouldn’t let me tell them the truth, then she would have to.
Not long after the marriage ended, I discovered that I was pregnant. I was very scared and wasn’t sure whom to turn to, so I called my dad and told him. I said that I didn’t know if I could have it, how would I cope? Dad went very quiet on the other end of the phone. The idea of contemplating an abortion in those days was extremely controversial. It must have been very hard for Dad to hear this from his only daughter, especially when I was so far away and in such a predicament. Dad eventually said, ‘Well, you do what you need to do, love.’ I knew that I had my dad’s support in whatever happened and this meant the world to me, I wasn’t on my own. Then he said quietly, ‘Let’s not tell your mother.’
I agreed that Mum didn’t need to know this right now, and I put down the phone. I was still in a total bind and didn’t really know what to do, so for a little while I did nothing. A few days later I miscarried. At the time I was relieved. Relieved I’d not had to make a decision, relieved that I didn’t have to be a single mother at the age of twenty-five. I felt that I could move on a little now but these things have a way of staying with you.
*
I had moved into Peggy’s after the marriage ended. I felt safe there, and still considering myself to be one of the family. I began working at a pub on the Thames in Shepperton called the Red Lion, and the great atmosphere and camaraderie of working there buoyed me up for a time.
I got to know the customers well. One of the regulars was a man in his fifties. He would begin the evening chatting away pleasantly, and seemed to all intents and purposes a lovely man. He would begin with beer then move on to spirits and a mixer, then he would dispense with the mixer and drink more and more until he was completely paralytic. I had never known anyone get quite so drunk.
‘You know, Sue,’ he said to me one day, leaning in and waving his empty glass towards me, ‘you know something?’ he repeated again, as if gearing up to impart some immortal words of wisdom.
‘What?’ I asked, smiling at him as we had been having a great laugh as the night had gone on.
‘You’ve got a lovely face.’
I smiled awkwardly and served the bloke next to him.
‘No, really,’ he said, as if everyone had disagreed. ‘You have! It’s such a shame about that nose, though,’ he added, waving his finger at his face to indicate where my nose was, shou
ld I not have realised. ‘Spoils it. You really should get a nose job.’
He plonked himself back on his bar stool and his mind wandered to his next drunken thought.
The man I was serving paid and slunk away, embarrassed. I was devastated. How could he say something so personal? The landlord had been serving someone else nearby and had heard what the drunk had said. He lifted him from the stool and ejected him into the London night. But it was too late; I was in floods of tears. This comment was like a spear to my heart. I was so low at that time, living with my mother-in-law but knowing it couldn’t stay that way for ever, still grieving the end of my marriage and dealing with the miscarriage.
This man’s cruel jibe stayed with me for years and years. I suppose it still does, if I’m honest. In fact, it came back to haunt me last year when I had something written about me that was so hurtful that I felt the same pain again.
Last year I was on steroids for my back and had put on weight. I had gone up to eleven stone, which is very heavy for me. It was during the time I was filming A Passionate Woman. I am immensely proud of that drama but I find it hard to look back at because my face looked so bloated by the steroids.
Then something compounded my self-consciousness to such a point that if I hadn’t been working on Waking the Dead and had to go into work the next day I might have given up acting altogether.
It was the day of the London Marathon and I had been invited by Ian McKellen to go and watch the marathon from his place in London. I had bought the Observer that morning and I was having a quick flick through when I came across a large picture of me and Alun Armstrong – who played my husband in A Passionate Woman – and underneath it was the line, ‘Sue Johnston looked confused, but wouldn’t anyone with a pair of tennis balls lodged in their cheeks?’ The writer then went on to mock how I looked, being extremely personal.