Things I Couldn't Tell My Mother: A Memoir

by Sue Johnston

  ‘Well, you can wear one if you want, but it’s not a prerequisite…’

  It was great to see so many people in the audience; John and I just hoped we’d be able to give them their money’s worth. As soon as I was onstage the nerves fell away and I felt like I did all those years ago when I was in Miss Potter’s play at school. I was absolutely in the moment playing my characters, this was where I was happiest.

  The play was extremely well received. John and I were thrilled. It was such a relief to get the first night over with and to look forward to the run. We went on to win the Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for best new play. After that, we took it to Edinburgh for the festival. We were again petrified as Andy told us that all the critics were in the audience. John’s wife Kath had had enough of our anxieties by this time and said, ‘It’s been a success, you’ve had rave reviews, what’s up with the pair of you?’

  Again we got a great response at the festival. We were really pleased with what we’d achieved and when we went back to Brookside things never really felt the same again.

  I wanted security for Joel but I really wasn’t happy. Even the drive to work was getting me down: the same road, the same streets. I knew in my heart that I needed to move on. But the thought of being a jobbing actress again scared me.

  A year after we premiered at the Octagon, John and I were approached to revive Two but this time after an initial run in Bolton we would transfer to the Young Vic theatre in London. I knew John had decided to leave. As the character he played was Sheila’s love interest I felt that I couldn’t bear to see her lose another man but I also knew that Phil Redmond wouldn’t let me take another chunk of time out from Brookside to do it so I decided it was time for me to leave too.

  I went to see Phil and told him of my intentions. At first he tried to persuade me to stay and offered me more episodes. We were all paid the same Equity rate at Brookside, but I could earn more money by being in more episodes. It wasn’t about the money – it never really has been for me. Phil soon realised that I was ready to go and gave me his blessing. John and I left at the same time and had a joint leaving party. Brookside had changed my life and I will always be grateful to Phil for giving me my big TV break.

  *

  During this new run of Two one of the saddest and hardest things I have ever had to deal with happened. I was very close to a couple named Veron and Mike. I met them when I first worked at the Bolton Octagon, and they had a child, Dominic, who was six. They soon had a daughter, Gemma, who was born six months before Joel. Gemma and Joel used to play together all the time, and had a very special bond.

  The family had always seemed to be a very solid unit, but later Mike got a job at the Crucible Theatre and they moved to Sheffield, and things started to unravel. Dom did well in his GCSEs but never really settled in his new school. Mike was spending more and more time away from the family at work and Veron was becoming increasingly lonely.

  When Dominic went into sixth form he became very unhappy. There were a horrible few days when Dominic went missing. He turned up again, but it transpired that he had been smoking marijuana and then had taken magic mushrooms, which precipitated a breakdown in his mental health, and he was later admitted to a mental hospital where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

  Instead of bringing Mike and Veron together to deal with what was happening with Dom, it drove a wedge between them: Veron felt very much like she was having to cope with this on her own, and she began to question their relationship. She found it very difficult that she and Mike seemed to have grown apart but she struggled with it as she was a Catholic and had been with Mike since she was a teenager, there had never been anyone else for her.

  After much thought, Veron told Mike that she couldn’t be with him any more. He was terribly angry and after one particularly horrible and bitter argument Veron went to the psychiatric unit to see Dom. Dom told her that his dad had already been in to see him. He didn’t say what Mike had said to him.

  Veron was meant to be coming to stay with me the following day, a Friday evening. At about seven that evening I received a phone call from her.

  ‘Sue,’ she said flatly, ‘I think you’d better sit down. Dom’s dead.’

  I let out a horrified gasp. She told me that after she had left Dom he had borrowed a pound from one of the other patients and used it to catch the bus into town, leaving a note in his room. He had then gone to the top of a high-rise block of flats and thrown himself off. I closed my eyes, horrified by the violence of his death, horrified by what Veron must be going through.

  Veron was staying at her sister Di’s in Sheffield and first thing the following morning I left Joel with my mum and dad and drove over.

  Wordlessly, Veron looked at me, and I at her, and I held her. I could not comprehend what she was going through. She was so utterly in shock that it didn’t feel like she was actually in the room. I saw Veron walk off; it was all too much for her. She went into the bathroom and then moments later we could hear a banging. She was keening, hitting her head against the wall.

  Gemma was eleven at the time and it was awful for her to witness what was happening to her family. She asked if she could come back and stay with me and of course I said yes, and she came back with me for the week before the funeral.

  The funeral was dreadful. It was in a beautiful country church. I can remember sitting outside in the car with my ex-husband Dave and smoking like a chimney. I had given up smoking a few years previously but the horror of what was happening had seen me reach for the fag packet.

  We finally went into the church and I sat beside Margot and Dave. John Tams sang a beautiful song and I read the passage ‘Footsteps’. I don’t know how I kept my voice from cracking. When someone dies and they have lived to a grand old age, those gathered for the funeral can look back and celebrate their life. When someone dies so young and in such horrific circumstances there is none of that release. As Veron stood behind the coffin she let out a wail that seemed to come from the bottom of her soul. There was to be no respite from the grief for Veron. She was utterly devastated and blamed herself.

  After the funeral, Veron would have the occasional good moment but on the whole she was in a trance, desperate for the pain to go away. I would take her hand and just let her say what she needed to say. I wasn’t sure there was anything that I could say that would make things better.

  A few short weeks after Dom’s death I was invited to a party and Veron said that she would like to go, just to get out and to try to establish some kind of normality in her life again. We hadn’t been there long when Veron asked if we could leave. We went back to my house.

  That evening was awful, she kept saying that she could see Dom at the end of a tunnel calling for her. The following morning as she walked away from me to leave she cut such a sad figure. She was wearing a brown linen Wallis dress and she looked beautiful, she really was very beautiful. That was the last time I saw her.

  Less than a month after Dom’s death Gemma went to stay with her father for the weekend. That night Veron wrote a letter asking that her sister Di and I would look after Gemma. She then took an overdose. My friend Romy called me the following day to tell me Veron had died. I couldn’t quite take in what I was being told, I was utterly devastated.

  A month to the day after Dom’s funeral we were all back in the same church for his mother’s funeral. Veron was buried in the same grave as Dom.

  It was such an awful time for everyone involved but for Gemma, this poor little girl who was only eleven years old, it was absolutely devastating. I missed Veron but I was so terribly angry with her for leaving Gemma. Gemma went to live with her dad but she would also come and stay with Di and me. She always wanted to talk about her mum, she used to say, ‘Didn’t she love me as much as Dominic?’ Of course she had loved Gemma with all her heart but that wasn’t how it looked to her young daughter. Her mother couldn’t live without her son so she took her life. Suicide leaves this huge question that is never answered
which is why it is so hard for the people left behind to get over it.

  Gradually, as Gemma has got older and matured, I think that she has come to understand the guilt and shame that her mum carried on her shoulders and why it had become too hard for her to live with. Veron blamed herself for the breakdown of her marriage and for Dom’s death and didn’t have the heart to go on. I’ve come to terms with that now. And I think Gemma has too.

  Gemma really is the most amazing young woman. Despite all she has been through – which also included losing her father at nineteen in a tragic accident – she is a level-headed girl and a real beauty. When she got married I was so proud of her and I dearly wished that Veron and Mike could have been there to see her and share in her special day. Gemma is pregnant with her first baby, and I wish with all my heart that Veron could have held on, that we could somehow have got her through that pain. I just wish that there could have been some way to alter the course of events, to have Veron here with me now to share the joy of life with her. But I can’t, so I will just say that Veron is still sorely missed by everyone whose life she touched.

  Chapter Fifteen

  AFTER I LEFT Brookside I felt free to do things that I wouldn’t have been allowed to do while I was working on a long-running series. As well as Two, one of the other projects I took part in was a Radio 4 play set in a women’s prison using the stories and voices of real women prisoners. This wasn’t the first time that I would work in a prison. At M6 we had performed a play about the Peterloo Massacre at Strangeways. Strangeways is a huge Victorian prison in the middle of Manchester. It sits looking out of the north of the city as if as a reminder to the people of what grim fate awaits them if they step out of line. We were taken inside and into the prison chapel where we were to perform.

  The prisoners were brought in and we were let loose on them. I was playing a toothless hag, my hair was all over the place, my clothes in tatters and as I came onto the stage the room erupted in wolf-whistles. I couldn’t imagine how long these men must have gone without seeing a woman if what I was dressed as passed for sexy.

  We launched into our play. Five minutes in, a guard blithely breezed past with scant regard for our performance and plonked a number where the hymn numbers should have been. ‘Nice one,’ a prisoner said, jumping up like he had a full house in Bingo, and he hurried past like he couldn’t wait to get out of the room. Two minutes later the door opened again and the guard again heavyfooted across the wooden floor and stuck another number up. Again another prisoner was on his feet, pleased as punch that his number had been put up.

  I came offstage and whispered to one of the guards, ‘What’s going on? What’s with the numbers?’

  He looked at me, he was about as impressed by our Brechtian theatre as the prisoners seemed to be. ‘When the number goes up it means they’ve got a phone call. They’re just glad to be out, to be honest.’ My face must have fallen because he added, ‘No offence.’

  I don’t think my appearance at Strangeways was my finest hour.

  The time I would spend with the women in Styal Prison, recording the radio play, was a far more sobering experience. I was working with a group of actors including John McArdle again, and the director Kate Rowland.

  We were taken through to the secure section where the women we would be interviewing were housed. They were Section 45 prisoners, sex offenders. These women were seen as pariahs by the other prisoners, their crimes such that they couldn’t be kept near the others for fear of attack. While she was researching this play, Kate had spent a lot of time with these women. The script centred round a fictitious woman who was serving a life sentence but the women that Kate had interviewed were to play the extras.

  As we walked towards the section the other prisoners began to shout to us, ‘What you doing with them nonces? You should come and talk to us.’

  We definitely felt some trepidation about the project we were embarking upon. We were introduced to the women that we would be working with during the next five days. In their cells were pictures of their children, some that they had been party to the abuse of or even killed. It was hard, but we had to try to disassociate ourselves from what had brought these women to this place and try to get the best out of them to make the play work.

  The aim was that they would tell us their stories and then we would build it into the play. We wanted to know what being a female ‘lifer’ in prison was like. What we hadn’t thought about was the amount of denial that these woman had about their crimes. They would begin to tell their stories and then tail off. A lot of them blamed their partners for the abuse they had been accused of but couldn’t accept their part in it. Ironically, as the week went on the women began to trust us and open up to us, which was good for the project, but didn’t sit easy with me at all, I didn’t want to know the extent of why they were there – I didn’t want to judge but I still had an opinion on what I heard.

  Anyone who says that prison is an easy option can never have been inside one. The loss of liberty is always there. The clank of keys against locks a constant reminder of the fact that someone else is in charge of where you go and what you do. The cells are small and bare. The women had personalised them with pictures from home, but it seemed to me that this only served as a constant reminder of the crimes they had committed.

  My lasting memory of working on that project was leaving those women after five days. We looked back and could just see these hands waving out of the cell doors. I found it terribly sad. I still think about them, and the fact that they were in there for life. I think about all I have experienced and seen since then, and that two decades later some of those women will still be there, in that same little space, contemplating what they did that brought them there.

  We all went back to the BBC in Manchester and slumped into our chairs in the studio, not saying a word to one another. It was as if where we had been and what we had heard had just hit us. Kate opened a bottle of wine and gave us all a glass each and we drank it without speaking.

  *

  Later, I was sent a script for a three-part TV drama called Goodbye Cruel World written by Tony Marchant. I thought it was fantastic. I went to an interview with the producer David Snowdin and the director Adrian Shergold and read for the part, and when I arrived home my agent had already called to say that I had been offered the role – I was thrilled.

  It was about a woman suffering from motor neurone disease, although we never said directly that that was what it was. We termed it ‘Wey’s Disease’ – some symptoms we used might not have been experienced by someone with motor neurone disease and we didn’t want to portray anything that wasn’t factually correct. Alun Armstrong was to play my husband with Jonny Lee Miller as my son.

  Motor neurone disease is degenerative, aggressive and fatal, attacking the neurones that control the motor function of the body. Alun and I met some amazing people with the disease during our research. One woman lived in a council house outside Oxford. She was very kind and hospitable to us and I thought it was extremely brave of her to let us in to see how she coped. She showed Alun how to pick her up and how to put her into the bed as I watched her intently, absorbing it all.

  We went on to meet someone who told us how people dealt with MND psychologically. It is such an aggressive disease that the trauma of having to accept what is happening to you is often as bad as the physical symptoms. And we met the people whose lives had been turned on their head when their loved ones were diagnosed.

  Alun is a brilliant actor and before Goodbye Cruel World had played Thénardier the Innkeeper in Les Misérables. When we arrived at the hotel where we would be staying while we worked on the series, the door flew open and there stood the lady owner of the hotel resplendent in a Les Mis T-shirt. She looked at me for a split second and then realised that standing next to me was Alun Armstrong. ‘Oh Alan!’ she exclaimed in her strong Welsh accent. ‘I loved you in Les Misérables.’ She pointed at her T-shirt by way of demonstration.

  She ushered us in an
d from then on she couldn’t do enough for us. If one of us needed anything doing we would pretend it was for Alun and she would happily go off to fulfil our request, beaming from ear to ear in her freshly laundered Les Mis T-shirt. She really was the most lovely welcoming woman and even more so because we had the man who sang Master of the House with us.

  Around this time my dad started to have problems with his health. He had contracted shingles and had been in such distress. I used go to see how he was and he would rub his head constantly, irritated by the pain. One evening as I was sitting in my room, learning my lines, I received a call from my mum. I was relieved as I’d been trying to get hold of her to see how Joel was. I’d called several times and it wasn’t like my mother to not be in when she said she would. ‘Hi, everything all right?’ I asked, assuming that the answer would be, as it always was, ‘yes’.

  ‘Your dad’s in hospital, Susan,’ Mum said, sounding shocked. ‘He’s had a stroke.’

  I couldn’t believe it. Even with the shingles, I never thought of my dad as an invalid. It was too late to drive home so the following morning I was on set first thing. I told the director and the producer, who were very understanding, and I drove from Margate to Warrington. I had the soundtrack to Les Misérables in my car and I played it, crying all the way home. I needed my dad to be all right. I went back to Mum’s and bought a potted plant as Dad liked plants and I didn’t want to go to his bedside empty-handed, then I headed to the hospital.

  I was shocked when I saw my dad. He was sitting in the bed, his face drooping to one side and his arm was paralysed. I couldn’t believe it. I took his hand and sat down next to him. I’d recently been on holiday abroad and had bought my dad two hundred Benson & Hedges, but when I returned and he had shingles I didn’t give them to him. When my mum went to the toilet, Dad leaned across and out of the corner of his mouth said, ‘Have you brought those fags?’