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Not that Kinda Girl
Lisa Maxwell


Lisa Maxwell, an addition to the quick-witted Loose Women team, is a bundle of fun and laughter and a natural storyteller. Here, for the first time, she tells her astonishing story - a tale of remarkable spirit, incredible experiences and family secrets.A much-loved presenter and respected actress, Lisa got her first onscreen role at the age of just 11. In the eighties she became a TV presenter on series like Splash and No Limits, interviewing the icons of the time and partying with the likes of George Michael, Robert Downey Junior and Michael Hutchence, before moving more firmly into comedy, appearing on sketch shows like, The Les Dennis Laughter Show, The Russ Abbott Show and her very own, self-titled, The Lisa Maxwell Show. She narrowly missed out on the part of Daphne in a little show called Frasier. And then for seven years played the part of The Bill's DI Sam Nixon, before joining Loose Women in 2009, where she quickly became an audience favourite.But behind the fun, glamour and onscreen success, is a south London girl, hiding the secret she's been taught never to talk about. An illegitimate child, brought up in Elephant and Castle, Lisa's life very nearly took a different path. Lucky for her, her dear old Nan had a kind heart, and in a last minute change of plan she was brought home to her grandparent's flat on the Rockingham Estate.With warmth, honesty and humour, Lisa takes us to the heart of the Elephant, revealing a home filled with love, laughter and drama. From having the drawer of an old chest for her bed to hiding from the Tally Man, waiting for her Nan outside the betting shop to dabbling in petty crime, discovering her dad was still alive, and always looking for a way to be in the lime light, Lisa has written a colourful memoir of life as a daughter, a granddaughter, a mother, and an actress.









Lisa Maxwell

Not that Kinda Girl

A Story of Secrets, Longing and Laughter










Dedication


For Paul and Beau









Contents


Title Page (#ufd967607-3f7c-52e1-afeb-57e978ab0ec7)

Dedication



Introduction: Down at the Duke

1 Meet the Family

2 Early Days at the Elephant

3 Italia Conti Girls

4 My Secret Shame

5 First Love



Photographic Insert I

6 Moving On

7 Down to the Wire

8 The Lisa Maxwell Show

9 Life in LA

10 Meltdown

11 Coming Home

12 Falling in Love

13 Beautiful Beau



Photographic Insert II

14 Being DI Sam Nixon

15 Running on Empty

16 As One Door Opens …

17 Father Unknown

18 Finally Me



Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher




INTRODUCTION


Down at the Duke

As I walked towards the Duke of Sutherland in Walworth I could hear Nan’s voice belting out one of her favourite songs:

‘I’d like to be good …

And I know that I should …

I’m just not that kind of a girl …’

Just hearing her voice gave me a warm feeling. I’d always loved these words, because they’re funny and so familiar to me, from my earliest memories. As I pushed the heavy pub door open she was still at the piano, her left hand vamping a rhythm without moving across the keyboard, her right picking out the tune. She reached the last two lines:

‘Old Tommy Tucker …

Everyone knows he’s a dirty old … fella!’

The pub erupted in cheers and laughter, even though everyone there had heard the song before. I made my way through the fuggy, crowded bar, inhaling cigarette smoke and beer fumes, to the upholstered bench seat where Nan always sat with Grandad and their friends. She was basking in the applause and free drinks being sent across to their table.

‘Oh my Gawd, look who’s ’ere! Hide your wallet, Jim,’ she said when she spotted me.

‘I’m saying no, clear off out of here!’ Grandad would always say before I even had time to speak.

They were both laughing, and so were their friends.

I’d launch into my speech: ‘Guess what? I’ve seen these shoes in Grants in the Walworth Road, and they’ve only got one pair in my size. They were so nice, they said they’d put them by for me …’

As I wriggled myself in between them on the bench seat, I’d look at Nan.

‘You’d better speak to your grandad,’ she’d say, so I’d turn puppy-dog eyes on him.

‘Please, Grandad – they’re really nice,’ I’d tell him.

‘I bet they are,’ he’d say.

‘Please, Grandad, I won’t ask for anything else ever again!’

Huge guffaws from everyone round the table.

‘How much are they?’ he’d ask, already putting a hand in his pocket.

‘Only £14.99.’

‘Here’s fifteen nicker – clear off, that’s yer lot!’

I would skip out of the pub with the whole group smiling and watching me and, I imagine, thinking, ‘Aw, how could you resist her?’ Even though I was 16 I was tiny, slim and, because of my stage-school training, confident. I knew Nan and Grandad were proud of their little Lise whenever I went into the pub, they loved me – and I also knew, from an early age, that when Grandad had a few drinks inside him I could get anything out of him.

Nan, Grandad and Mum adored me. I lived with all three of them and I was the centre of their universes. I never went without anything; they spoiled me rotten. As far as Mum was concerned, nobody could ever point a finger at me and say I lacked anything. Except one big thing she was unable to give me: a father.

On my birth certificate there are two stark words, words branded on my soul: ‘Father Unknown’.

Today, with more than half of all babies born to unmarried couples according to the Office of National Statistics, the stigma of being illegitimate has pretty much gone. It’s a word you never hear now, and a good thing, too: it means illegal, beyond the law. That’s a terrible stamp to put on a child. I was born outside the law, and back then in the 1960s only 5 per cent of all babies did not have married parents.

My birth was something friends and family whispered about, hoping I wasn’t listening. A child born ‘out of wedlock’ was something to be ashamed of, the subject of gossip and innuendo: a stain on a family. This was something I was aware of from the very beginning. I always felt the love I was given was tainted with embarrassment and shame, a shame that has coloured my life in so many ways; it has affected my relationships, my work, everything. It’s a shadow that stretched long and deep and out of which I have only recently emerged into the sunshine.

Yes, I have always been bright and bubbly, funny, up for a laugh and a party, but the parties, the drinks and the laughter, everything was a way to keep on moving, to make sure I never stood still long enough to look deep inside myself. Finally, in the last few years, I have come off that merry-go-round and found a quiet, happy place in life where I can face up to myself and my story. I’ve come to terms with my birth; I know who I am. It’s been a long and at times difficult journey, but writing this book has also helped me find myself and lay to rest the ghosts that have haunted me.




CHAPTER 1

Meet the Family


I was only three years old, too small to see over the balcony outside our second-storey council flat at the Elephant and Castle, but there was a metal grille set into the brickwork that gave me a view of the estate below. While Nan tried to drag me back indoors, I was clinging to the bars, screaming and kicking hysterically. Below, I could see my mum getting into a minicab with a man in the back.

‘Your mother’s entitled to go out …’ Nan was saying as she struggled to contain my hysteria.

‘She’s with a man, she’s with a man!’ I was yelling.

‘Just get in the car, Val. She’ll be all right,’ Nan shouted to Mum as she finally prised me away and dragged me back inside.

Mum seemed to be in some sort of danger: the thought of her with a strange man was disturbing – I felt she couldn’t protect herself. And I hated her for leaving me to be with a man. This is my earliest memory. I can’t say exactly how I knew it was wrong; at that age you simply sense it from the way the grown-ups are trying to hide it. Mum didn’t say goodbye – she slipped out, secretively – and when I asked where she was, Nan and Grandad had exchanged sideways glances. So I panicked: I wanted her to come back. In some childish, unrealised way I wanted to save her from the terrible things about to happen to her.

Even then, too young to understand it properly, I had taken on board so much of the shame of being born out of wedlock and all the judgement that went with it that I felt my mum should be whiter than white and live like a nun. I had no idea how or why, but I knew a man had been involved in my arrival and this was something to be ashamed of, that it had been wrong. How did I develop such dark thoughts from such an early age, such fully formed moral opinions about her life? It was as though they seeped into me without anyone ever sitting me down and really spelling it all out. I don’t remember Nan and Grandad ever saying bad things about her, they were kinder than that, but the disapproval and half-heard gossip about my own mysterious ‘Father Unknown’ became part of me by osmosis.

I had picked up, probably from the whisperings of the grownups, that Mum had ruined her life by going with a man, and so I was terrified whenever I saw her with one. Men spelt trouble: disaster, shame, something dirty. So any attempt she had at a private life was thwarted, partly by the stigma of being an unmarried mother, but also – I’m ashamed to admit – by me, and from an early age I was determined to sabotage any chances she might have.

Mum never talked about it properly to me: the usual way of dealing with things in our family was to try and ignore them. She never said it was OK for her to have a boyfriend and she was entitled to some happiness and a loving relationship. All she ever said was that no one wanted her because of me. Imagine having that on your shoulders all your life. For her part, she felt she had to compensate, to make sure I missed out on nothing because I didn’t have a dad. I ruled the roost. From the day I was born I controlled her life. Obviously any baby and small child must be the first priority, but Mum lost herself completely the day I was born.

The Rockingham Estate at the Elephant and Castle was where I grew up, living with Mum, Nan and Grandad at 15 Stephenson House. The estate is a collection of red-brick, four-storey blocks of flats built in the 1950s, with scrubby, worn grass in between. To get to our flat we had to go up two flights of stairs and then walk along the balcony in front. We were round the corner of the building, the last stretch of balcony, so quite private.

It was a comfortable home and a good place to grow up. Nowadays estates like this are rough, with gangs and the associated drugs and violence, but when I was little the only ‘gang’ was the knot of kids I played with – endless games of ‘Penny Up’, ‘Cannon’ or ‘Run Outs’. We ebbed and flowed around the area between the flats, hiding and chasing each other all day through the school holidays until our mothers stood out on balconies calling us in for tea, which was what the evening meal was called (‘dinner’ was served at midday). Next to the estate was the strangely named Jail Park (I think it got its name because it was beside the Inner London Sessions court) and this, too, was a safe playground.

Mum has an old black-and-white photo of the Coronation party held on the estate in 1953. All the mums and teenagers stand in the background while 50 kids sit at a great long table, stuffing themselves with jelly and ice cream. It seems like a different era, an age when neighbours looked out for each other and everyone helped out, but it was only 10 years before I was born and the estate was still a friendly, caring place to grow up. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.

Because it was a council estate all the front doors were painted the same colour: red. To this day whenever I move into a new house the first thing I do is change the colour of the front door just because I can. The only bit that scared me was the stairwell: the stairs were made of concrete with sparkly bits in it – for some reason, you only see this in council flats of that age. Yellow tiles ran halfway up the walls. There was no graffiti and it didn’t smell like a public urinal but it was dark and grubby and made me nervous. I don’t know what I thought would happen but I used to run up those stairs as fast as I could, often shouting, ‘Come on, Billy, there’s a good Alsatian!’ to my protector, an imaginary dog.

Our flat had three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bathroom. When I was really small my Uncle Alan lived there too. But let’s go back to the very beginning. How did I come to be living with Nan and Grandad and sharing a room with Mum?

Let’s start with Nan and Grandad. They were such an important part of my life. A typical working-class couple, they were strong characters. Grandad drove a road sweeper for the council, which was a bit embarrassing because he parked this big yellow-and-black vehicle near our flats – I think he even went down the pub in it. He also did planting for the council in Battersea Park. He liked his work, and we had window boxes at home. Grandad won an award for the best window boxes on the estate – I’ve a feeling we were perhaps the only people there who had them.

Grandad’s shoes were always immaculate and he stored them in a little cabinet with all his kit for cleaning them. In cold weather he wore a flat cap. He had a tiny moustache, a bit like a Hitler moustache, like a bit of black tape stuck under his nose. For years I never had a clue what colour his hair was because it was Brylcreemed down. It was only when he was old that I could tell it was grey underneath. He rolled his own cigarettes with Golden Virginia tobacco, but Nan never smoked. Mum still has his toolbox with the nails and screws sorted and stored in old tobacco tins.

Nan and Grandad met when they were young, childhood sweethearts. He was the only man she’d ever been with. Her family was very poor, but his were a bit better off because his mother was a moneylender. In the old photos I’ve seen they look quite smart and Nan’s family seem really ragged in comparison. Grandad (Jim Maxwell) was a cheeky lad: his nickname was ‘Bagwash’ because there was a laundry round where he lived called ‘Maxwell Bagwash’. He saw this young girl (Rose) eating chips and said, ‘Give us a chip, Ginge’ – he called her ‘Ginge’ because there’s a bit of ginger colouring in her family, and as Nan grew older and greyer she always had her hair tinted a reddish colour. Alan was born ginger, and there were lots of jokes about how he must be the milkman’s, but it’s in the family. When they got married Grandad’s family felt he could have done better for himself, but he and Nan were together for the rest of their lives.

They both worked hard – Grandad was still working when he died at 76. Nan was always doing jobs and usually more than one: cleaning, working at the bookies. Their social life revolved around the pub. Nan was musical, and it’s fair to say she had a showing-off gene (in case you’re wondering where I get it from). She taught herself to play the piano by ear, never had a lesson, and would belt out songs like ‘Tommy Tucker’ and ‘Slap a Bit of Treacle on Your Pudding, Mary Ann’. She loved it, and that’s why she insisted Mum should look after me at weekends – nothing, not even me whom she idolised, could get in the way of their time down the pub. Nan loved having an audience in the palm of her hand. Everyone in the pub knew each other, knew all about their kids, there was a great sense of community.

I can still sing all her good old London songs. Nan was singing until she was in her eighties and perfected the same throaty wobble in her voice on a big note that Vera Lynn had. In April 2003, when I was the subject of This Is Your Life, she had Michael Aspel eating out of her hand and insisted on singing, finally getting her break on national television. As she got older and her voice wasn’t so strong, she would hold the mike too close (which gave a fuzzy edge to the sound), but my memories are of her belting the words out.

Nan was of average height (there’s nobody else in our family who is small like me) and the only make-up she ever wore was lipstick, which to be perfectly honest was never expertly applied. Let’s just say her lipstick thought her lips were bigger than they were. At home she wore a pink nylon overall, the sort of thing only Nans had.

So that’s Nan and Grandad, and now it’s Mum’s turn. Obviously I wasn’t around when all this happened, but eventually, years after my childhood, I heard it from her. It was not easy for Mum to tell her story, or to live it either: life on the estate may have been safer and friendlier in those days, but people were also a lot more judgemental and it was tough for a single mother. Her story has been shrouded in shame and half-truths for most of my life. In fact, it’s only in the past few years that I’ve managed to piece it all together.

My mum Val is the second eldest of Nan and Grandad’s four children: Shirley was four years older and after Mum came Jim and Alan. As a small child Shirley had TB, and at 18 months she went into hospital and only left when she was six. When she came home she thought Nan and Grandad were a nurse and a doctor; it was ages before she called them ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ again, and they were overjoyed when she did. This was at a time when families could only visit children in hospital for a couple of hours every day so it must have been very hard on them all. Val always felt Shirley was the favourite, and perhaps she was because of what she’d been through. Anyway, she was the one who could do no wrong and I think in a way both she and Mum fell into their roles: Shirley did everything right, while Val was the rebellious, cheeky one.

All Nan’s children attended the Joseph Lancaster school, which I went to later, which felt nice for me because I liked that feeling of continuity, of being part of the family, one of Nan’s children. Afterwards, they all attended the same grammar school: Walworth Central. Despite being the only member of her family to pass the 11-Plus, Mum left school at 15 and worked in office jobs. She was doing the wages at Arthur Miller & Co just off the Bermondsey Road (a firm which made donkey jackets) when she became pregnant with me at the age of 22. By then Auntie Shirley was married – she married early, her first serious boyfriend – and Uncle Jim was working in the Channel Islands, so only Mum and Alan were living at home.

Mum was very glamorous-looking – 5’8”. I’ve got a picture of her sitting like a model with her big peroxide-white hair back-combed up and wearing her winklepickers and a tight little cardigan. She looks so powerful, so in control of her life. Yet she didn’t handle anything difficult that happened to her in the way you’d imagine the woman in the photo would. It was the early sixties and in some ways women were beginning to take charge of their lives, but the moment they became pregnant it was right back to the fifties, the days when nice girls didn’t part their legs until they were married and any girl who got pregnant was ‘no better than she ought to be’.

Everyone who knew Mum when she was young says she was extremely attractive, great fun, very into how she looked and having boyfriends. Even now, when I say those things, I feel I have to add, ‘but not in a tarty way’. I think I just imbibed the general feeling in the household that my mother was a bad girl who liked boys a bit too much and ended up getting pregnant like girls who sleep around. That was the way of thinking of Nan and Grandad’s generation, the judgemental view I grew up with.

Mum used to go out with a friend, Norma, who worked as a receptionist at the same firm. One evening on the way home from work, Mum (who was 20 at the time) bought ‘Let’s Twist Again’ by Chubby Checker. After playing it back at the flat, she wanted to go out and have fun, so she rang Norma – I’ve a lot to thank Chubby Checker for! They went to a pub in Lambeth Walk and a couple of guys came in, one of them wearing what my mum described as a ‘Frank Sinatra’ hat.

‘He’s gorgeous, he reminds me of Paul Newman,’ Mum told Norma as soon as she clapped eyes on John Murphy. Luckily, Norma fancied the other one. Mum liked the self-assured look of John – she always went for the cocky ones. After the ritual chatting-up, Mum and Norma agreed to go on to a drinking club in the Strand. Being close to Fleet Street, it was a place mostly used by printers (John worked ‘in the print’ for a firm of typesetters in Shoe Lane). As Mum was to learn much later, he was married, but his job gave him great cover for their affair because everyone knew printers worked shifts so on the nights he wasn’t able to see her he had a perfect excuse.

Mum and Norma were bowled over by these two blokes, but Mum admits they were much keener than the men so they took to hanging around in the drinking club in the hope of seeing them. Sometimes John would ring Mum at work and she’d walk around on Cloud Nine for the rest of the day. She’d really fallen for him. She admits she always knew she was more into the relationship than he was, but that’s young love for you. And she’s often told me she was bang in love with him. She used to say, ‘You always kid yourself that they will get keener, don’t you?’ John would sometimes come to the flat and go to the pub, so Nan and Grandad met him too, but he never fully played the role of Mum’s boyfriend – he always had a mate with him.

It was an erratic affair: Mum could go weeks without seeing him, but she was always desperate for him to call, and whenever he did she would drop everything. She was mad keen and that’s why she says she slept with him: desperate to hang on to him, she was trying to take the relationship to another, more committed level. Some nights he would come round to Nan and Grandad’s at about 2 a.m. after he’d finished work and Mum would let him in. He’d stay for a few hours and creep out later. Two years into the relationship, however, Mum found she was pregnant and John Murphy was about to become ‘Father Unknown’.

I think she didn’t believe it could happen to her: she admits she was in denial. When she missed her first period she thought it must be because she had a cold, and the next time it had to be an upset stomach. When she faced up to it she started jumping down whole flights of stairs, drinking neat gin and taking hot baths, but I was determined to make my entrance – Mum says I was a ‘clinger’. You couldn’t have abortions in those days (they were illegal) and besides, she wouldn’t have known where to start.

At first the only person she told was her friend Norma. When she was sure, she told John Murphy, and that’s when he dropped the bombshell in her hour of need: ‘I can’t do anything, I’m married,’ he confessed. Mum says it never occurred to her that he might be married. She admits she should have questioned him more and should have known because he wouldn’t commit, but she never did: she just wanted him.

Mum was devastated, but told no one else, and because she was tall and slim she managed to conceal her bump for a long time. Eventually, when she was about six months pregnant, she broke down in floods of tears at work and confessed to one of the directors. He asked why she was so upset and she said, ‘Because I am not married.’

In that moment of utter despair he gave her the support she so badly needed. ‘A baby is a joyous event,’ he told her. ‘You have to embrace it.’ The owner of the company told Mum that they would do anything they could to help, so it’s unfair to say everyone was judgemental, but in reality no one could do much to help her.

For Mum, the biggest problem was that she had not told her parents. A daughter ‘in trouble’ was such a shameful thing and she was terrified of Grandad’s reaction. He was old school: he’d sit in his chair and call for Nan to pour him a cup of tea, even if the teapot was in front of him and even though Nan went out to work and probably needed a sit down, too. Some things were women’s work.

Somehow, Mum heard about a mother and baby home in Streatham and she got herself booked in there. But she didn’t like it when she went to see the people in charge: she sensed their disapproval and they made her feel there was a lot of shame involved in going there – which, of course, in those days there was. This is not the place to go into the conditions of homes for unmarried girls, but I don’t think many who went there in the fifties and sixties would describe them as happy, caring places. Mum was at her wit’s end and had no idea what else to do: she was supposed to move into the home six weeks before the birth, give the baby (me) up for adoption as soon as it was born and then stay for six weeks afterwards. She packed her bag and even wrote some letters, which she was going to send to Uncle Jim in Jersey for him to post one back to Nan and Grandad each week as if she was working out there.

‘I don’t think I ever said the word “adopted”, even to myself,’ she later told me. ‘I was in denial about what would happen to my baby. I didn’t think about it.’ I can hardly imagine how scared and alone she must have felt as she made these elaborate plans. In the end, it was clearly too much: Mum couldn’t keep it a secret from Nan any more and confessed she was pregnant. Nan was upset at the news but even more concerned about the idea of Mum going into the home and having to give the baby away. She told her not to go and said they would face Grandad together.

Mum says she would not have gone through with it. She didn’t really want to, but she needed someone to say the words ‘Don’t go’, and when they did it was a terrific relief. Mum and Nan had a cry together, unpacked her bag and threw away the letters. Meanwhile, Nan was just as scared of Grandad’s reaction as Mum was, so they put off telling him, but at least Nan helped her daughter to face up to the reality of the situation. She insisted she saw a doctor and about six months into her pregnancy Mum attended antenatal classes at Guy’s Hospital.

In the end Grandad heard the news in the worst possible way. Word must have got round because one night in the pub great-Uncle Dick (Grandad’s brother) asked, ‘Has our Val had the baby yet?’

Grandad went ballistic, not just because she was pregnant but because he’d been kept in the dark. He stormed home from the pub. Mum was cowering under the sheets while he shouted and swore and banged on the bedroom door. He called her a slag and worse, then yelled: ‘Why didn’t nobody tell me? We could have done something. Now it’s too late!’ It was the worst rage any of them could remember hearing from him, and Mum was sobbing, clutching her pillow over her head to drown out the noise. I think the whole of Stephenson House knew about it that night.

Meanwhile, Nan was trying to soothe him. He’d never laid a finger on her or any of the children, but he was very strict and absolutely furious, so it could have been a whole lot worse. As it was, it was all shouting and swearing. The next day, when things had calmed down a bit, Nan said to Mum: ‘We’re going up to Johnny Murphy’s to sort this out. Can we have his address?’

By this point John had left his wife and was living back home in Streatham. Mum had already visited him there a couple of months earlier, after his wife (also pregnant at the same time) had confronted her. ‘Are you Val Maxwell?’ she asked. ‘I’m not here to cause trouble – Johnny has left me and gone back to his mother’s. Will you come there with me? I want to front up to him with this business that you and me are both pregnant.’ Mum had heard that John was a real player, but she was so desperate to be with him that she naively went along with it, hoping she might convince him to choose her.

Anyway, after they found out, Nan and Grandad went to see John at his mum’s house and he looked very uncomfortable, so they arranged for him to come round to their flat the next day, but when they saw him again all he said was: ‘I can’t do anything – I’m married. But I’ll help out financially.’ Mum felt she didn’t want his money, but at least it was finally clear to her.

Mum says Grandad was kind to her after that, but I’m not sure she’s telling the whole truth. I think he gave her a hard time, because years later, when she was very drunk one Christmas, she started to knock him: she said he may have been a good grandfather to me but he wasn’t a good father. I was very upset at the time because my memories of him were good and I felt she was taking that away from me, but I didn’t have any idea of what she went through. Grandad felt the shame bitterly and I’m sure he let Mum know on every occasion he could.

I was born three weeks early. Mum was washing and setting Nan’s hair (she always did this every Saturday, like clockwork) when the labour began. I was born three minutes after 8 p.m. on Sunday, 24 November 1963, two days after President Kennedy was shot. Mum has often told me she remembers hearing about the assassination just before she went into hospital.

I weighed 5lb 13oz, small but not worryingly so, and had jaundice. Mum stayed in hospital for 10 days, like they did in those days. She admits she had no idea what having a baby entailed – all the sleepless nights, endless washing and feeding – she thought she would just get on with her life. She also hoped that when John Murphy saw me he’d want to be with her, but once again she had her head in the clouds and he never saw his new baby daughter.

Looking back, Mum says she never doubted she did the right thing in keeping me – women who give their babies up for adoption are often tortured souls. But that’s not to say it was easy. In those days the damage was also profound for those who went through with keeping an illegitimate baby, and she would not be free of the shame of my birth for many years, if ever. In reality this was just the beginning: the beginning of my life and the beginning of a struggle that would exist between us for the next 40 years.

When we came back home from hospital, Nan was in charge. Mum liked dressing me up, but Nan did most of the other stuff – the bottles and the nappy changing. Apparently Grandad said to Mum at one stage: ‘It’s about time you did something for your baby – it’s yours, not hers.’ Mum says she regrets not doing more but at the time she was more than happy to hand me over. Whatever he felt about the way I was conceived, from the moment I arrived home Grandad adored me, though. I won him over straight away and any doubts he might have had before I was born were gone: I was the apple of his eye.

It has made my life very awkward having three parents: Mum, Nan and Grandad. I’ve always had to be careful – I could never say how much I loved Nan for fear of upsetting Mum. It was a strange upbringing in that way. And now, with hindsight, Mum thinks it was a mistake to stay at home with her parents all her life and she should have found a place for the two of us. But living at home meant she could go back to work after 10 months off on maternity benefit. ‘I don’t mind looking after her all week, but at the weekends you have to stay in,’ Nan told her. She and Grandad liked to go down the pub every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

For Mum, living at home with her parents meant that she never found out about running a home. She never had to cook because Nan did it all, but she did her share of the washing, putting my terry nappies in the old boiler in the washhouse next door to the flat. Because Nan was always there, Mum didn’t have the confidence to break out on her own. She tried to take responsibility for me – ‘She’s my daughter,’ I remember her saying to Nan. ‘Well, stop fucking having a go at her then!’ Nan would say.

Now I can see that Nan was undermining Mum, but as a child I thought she was just taking care of me. Nan was a strong personality and you’d need a hell of a backbone to go against her wishes. Mum never could, and I can see why not: she was formidable. Both had big mouths and big voices, and they’d go at it hammer and tongs – lots of door slamming, lots of swearing. But Nan always had the last word and it was always the women making the noise: Grandad never took part.

He also made it difficult for Mum to be a normal mother to me. She remembers he was always telling her off for nagging me because as far as he was concerned I could do no wrong. Mum couldn’t stand up to him because she felt obliged to her parents for letting us live there. Looking back, I can see it was very hard for her.

I do remember Mum was usually there to put me to bed. She’d do the rhyme about the little piggies – ‘This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home …’ playing with my toes. And she would hold my hand and recite, ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddybear …’ Both ended with me being tickled, which I loved.

Having a social life was difficult for Mum, and not just because I was hell bent on stopping her. As she says, in those days a woman with a baby was not a good proposition. She had a couple of chances: at one stage she got engaged to a guy called Johnny who she’d been seeing for about a year (somehow Nan must have persuaded me he was all right). Auntie Shirley even found a flat for Mum, him and me to move into. A mate of Grandad’s brought some rings to the pub and Mum chose one. They were discussing wedding dates and she was over the moon: at last she would have the respectability she craved. I was about five at the time and he got on well with me, lying on the floor with me doing puzzles. Finally, Mum’s life was taking shape.

When Johnny’s mother found out, she told him: ‘If you marry that girl, I want nothing more to do with you.’ It seemed he cared more for her than he did for Mum because he sent round a letter:

Dear Val, I won’t be there tonight. My mum and dad are going down to Cornwall and I’m going with them. I think it’s time we called it a day.

Mum left me with Grandad and rushed to where Johnny worked, but he’d already gone and she never saw him again. It was so cruel, and once again she was devastated. Every time she went out with a man she dreaded telling him she had a kid because she knew he wouldn’t want to see her again, she says. Although she didn’t tell me the story of my father until many years later when I had a family of my own, at the time she told me that no one wanted her because of me.




CHAPTER 2

Early Days at the Elephant


From the moment Nan and Grandad accepted me into their home, nothing was too good for me, no hand-me-downs. I had a big Silver Cross pram bought new for me from Morleys of Brixton. It was navy-blue and silver and Mum said she felt so proud of me when I was in it. She chose my name after Lisa Marie (the actress from Rock Around the Clock).

From day one, the way I looked was top of her list of priorities. She would do me up like a piece of installation art, all the best clothes, like a ‘Tiny Tears’ doll in my little white crochet bonnets and capes. She’d bump me down the stairs of Stephenson House and leave me on display for passers-by to admire. It was two floors down and she couldn’t see me from the balcony, but in those days no one worried about children being kidnapped. Perhaps there was a much greater sense of community – no one would do it today. Anyway, if anyone did want to snatch me they’d have to get past our old bulldog, Ricky, who was tied to the pram. Call it Elephant and Castle childcare.

Mum loved buying me clothes. When I was older she’d dress me up and take me over to the park, where she’d take pictures of me smelling flowers. She used to clean my patent shoes with milk to make them shine and spend ages on my hair, giving me doorknocker plaits with loops and always with ribbons. I remember when I was old enough for school she’d stand me on the side in the kitchen and make sure I looked immaculate while Noel Edmonds prattled away on Radio One.

As I grew older I identified with her need to create a good impression on the outside. I loved shopping for clothes, picking out my outfits for family dos. Whenever I got new clothes, I would ask Mum to hang them on the back of the bedroom door so I could fall asleep gazing at them. For Mum, dressing me up was a way to validate us both. ‘’Course we love ’er – look how nice she looks’ was the message she was sending out. It rubbed off on me and I’ve always worried about creating the right visual image, wanting people to like how I look; what started as a love of fashion became a way of controlling people’s perceptions of me. If I looked great on the outside, no one would search for the real stuff underneath. The last thing I ever wanted was for people to feel sorry for me – ‘Poor little Lise’ were not words I ever wanted to hear.

We were a lively family and there were lots of dos to dress up for. Nan and Grandad liked a good time and there were a few parties at number 15, spilling over from big family get-togethers in the pub. They used to put a board over the bath and put all the drinks in the bath. When I was a baby there was a scare because they thought someone had sat on me: it was one of my family’s favourite stories – even as a baby I was the butt of Nan’s humour. Apparently Alan’s friend Mickey lurched about drunkenly and had flopped down almost on top of me. When someone realised they couldn’t see me they thought I was squashed underneath him. They all thought it was hilarious.

Nan only ever expected one thing from me: if she was having a good time, I had to join in. ‘You’ve gorra have a laugh, int’yer?’ was her motto. She didn’t do misery. If anyone tried to burst her bubble, she’d say: ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!’ And she’d encourage me to get up and dance in the middle of the boozed-up adults. ‘Gorn, babe,’ she’d say, and as the spirit of Chubby Checker entered my body I’d dance and shout.

‘Is it a bird?’

Boozed-up adults: ‘No!’

‘Is it a plane?’

‘No!’

‘Is it a twister?’

‘Yeah!’ and the whole of number 15 would be up on their feet, twisting the night away, with Little Lise right at the heart of it.

‘Aw, in’t she lovely?’ people would say. I knew I was everyone’s favourite.

As Nan’s granddaughter it was no surprise that I was a born entertainer, and she and Mum encouraged me. She enrolled me for dancing classes when I was about three and a half at the Renee Hayes Dancing School in a church hall just off the Walworth Road. I had a little red leotard and white tap shoes, through which my mum threaded red ribbons.

I was walking there one day with Mum when I was attacked by a dog off the lead: it was only little, like a Yorkshire terrier or something, but it bit my leg and locked its jaws onto me. Mum tried to kick it off, then picked me up and tried to swing it off. Eventually, when it was off me, I was taken to hospital for a tetanus jab which made me scream and put me off injections, so that put paid to my dancing for a while. I refused to go again but I still danced around at home. I remember once climbing on top of the sideboard, which had a drinks cabinet in it. This cabinet was made of shiny, fake walnut wood – I know it was plastic because we didn’t have any real wood in the house. Suddenly it fell over on top of me and there was smashed glass all around. I was badly cut and Mum had to rush me to hospital again; luckily this time I didn’t need an injection.

I wasn’t just spoilt with clothes, I was given every toy I ever wanted: if I wanted a walking, talking doll the same size as me, I got one. When I asked for a Swingy Doll, with beautiful white nylon hair she could swing to and fro, it was the same. And when I wanted a whole suite of Sindy bedroom furniture, it was there. I don’t remember being denied anything.

I must have been a cute kid when I was at nursery school because the teacher chose me as her bridesmaid when she got married. Mum was so proud: she and Nan took me down to Brighton for the wedding, and she was thrilled when people kept telling her what a pretty child I was. I was the centre of attention, just as I was throughout my childhood.

In some ways, I think Mum loved me too much. I was nearly suffocated by her love and fascination for me. I was top priority. I know that often happens to only children, but even as a child I found the responsibility of being put on a pedestal almost too great: it didn’t allow me to fail.

Nan and Grandad adored me in a more straightforward way, but even that caused problems. Their other kids had children, too, and Mum remembers a bit of resentment. Nothing was ever said openly to me about my father, but I heard things. At family gatherings people would say: ‘She’s a chip off the old block. She looks just like her dad.’ And ‘She favours her father, not her mother.’

From an early age there was clearly a short gene in my mix but Mum always tried to pass it off by saying it was to do with an infection after I was born. I’m the only one with a little button nose, too. When Mum introduced me for the first time people would often say, probably just out of politeness, I looked like her. She’d reply, ‘No, she’s not like me, but she’s the spitting image of her father.’ This was in my hearing, but not to me.

All I knew about him was his name – John Murphy – and I didn’t like it. It made me think I was half-Irish and I didn’t want to be a different nationality from everyone else in my family. The kids on the Rockingham Estate made fun of Irish people. Sometimes Mum would say, ‘You could have been a Murphy,’ and I hated it because I liked being a Maxwell.

I never asked direct questions about my father; somehow I knew not to; but she’d sometimes say things, like he looked like Paul Newman and that he looked fantastic and wore a Frank Sinatra hat. From these snippets I built up my own image: for me, Paul Newman was the definition of a good-looking man and I’ve always loved the music of Frank Sinatra. Maybe that’s just coincidence or perhaps some deep-rooted influence from those days but don’t imagine I spent hours thinking about my ‘Father Unknown’ – I didn’t. I did a really good job of putting him out of my mind. Somehow it seemed an insult to Mum to harp after a father figure when I could see she was doing everything she could to make sure I didn’t feel abandoned.

Grandad was like a real dad to me although he wasn’t cuddly and warm and he didn’t seem to be part of my world as much as Nan. But he did the fatherly things: he took the stabilisers off my bike, taught me to ride it, and he made a game for me – a bit like jacks only with wooden cubes. Like lots of men of his generation, he always wore suits (usually brown) and stripy shirts. He got them on Club Row market, next to Petticoat Lane, and whenever he needed a new one he’d take me with him on a Sunday morning. To a child this was a magical place, full of colourful stalls and great characters. My favourite stall was the one where they sold puppies, and Grandad would take me there and let me play with them – we loved our trips together. Afterwards we’d go and see his brother (Uncle Dick) and his son Richard (Little Dick) and I’d get a cup of tea and biscuits, then he’d drop me home before going down the pub.

It was Grandad who reluctantly put up the money when Mum saw an advert for child models (I was seven or eight at the time). She took me along and the people running the ‘agency’ said we would need to buy a portfolio. This was a scam because they never found me any work, but the photos were great and Mum used them later on when she got me into the Italia Conti.

It was Grandad who brought home one of my closest childhood friends: Pierre the poodle. He was a French poodle, hence the name, who had belonged to Grandad’s sister Sarah (famous in the family because she once lived next door to Cliff Richard) but she could no longer keep him. I was thrilled to adopt him and apparently when I was very young I said that when I grew up I was going to marry him. I have to say, the name was a bit of an embarrassment – shouting ‘Pierre’ off the balcony really wasn’t acceptable on the Rockingham Estate – so Uncle Alan quickly renamed him Pete the Poodle.

Grandad was the boss in the house: if the news was on the telly and we were talking, he only had to say ‘Shush’ and we’d all go quiet. After two or three drinks he was more sociable and he’d have a soppy grin on his face. That’s when he would say ‘yes’ to buying any toys or clothes I wanted and, boy, did I know it.

Mum and me shared our room until I was about 10: I think this contributed to the impression I had from early on that Nan and Grandad were in the role of parents. Mum never grew out of being their child because she always lived with them and it’s only recently she’s had a double bed, not till after Nan died in 2009.

Running through those years was my ongoing fear of Mum having a life outside our family: I dreaded her going on dates, I felt she was going to do all the things that had given her a ‘reputation’ in the first place – shocking, horrible things associated with my birth. I remember with horror once walking in when I was about eight and finding Mum in Nan and Grandad’s bed with a man: it was terrible. I called her a ‘slut’ and other things, words I must have picked up from what other people said about her. As far as I was concerned, she wasn’t supposed to have a boyfriend or male company. The man had a beard and no one in our family had a beard. To me, he looked debauched, but then any man in a compromising position with Mum would seem that way. Much later, when I was about 14, she had another boyfriend (Bernie). I wasn’t going to cut her any slack and used to sit between them on the sofa. As Mum says, she had dates, not relationships.

I’ve got a picture from a holiday we went on to Portugal when I was a kid and Mum’s sitting on the back of a fisherman’s motorbike. I hated seeing that picture: he’s swarthy, and to me he looks like a highly sexual person. It was terrible for me because I think Mum was having a holiday romance with him and I hated that, I hated anything to suggest she was a normal, sexual being.

Uncle Alan played his part in my upbringing, too. He is only 12 years older than me (Nan’s youngest child) and in many ways I grew up thinking of him as a big brother: he used to look after me after school while Mum was working. He’d take me to Nan, who would be at the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre playing bingo, trying to win food vouchers for our tea. She was no good with money and so she had to come up with creative ways to feed us all, usually involving bingo, the pawn shop or the tally man (the man who collected instalments on money she’d borrowed). Looking back, I can see she probably had a real gambling problem: money always went down the betting shop or the bingo hall and a lot of the time I was with her when she visited there. Grandad never gave her money because he knew what she did with it. She always loved horse racing and followed certain jockeys, working out the odds. At one time she worked in a betting shop and if a punter came in with a bet she knew was hopeless she’d pocket the cash and not put the bet on. Thank God it never came down on her. Later in life she’d watch the racing on telly, screaming and shouting at her horse.

I remember hiding with Nan when the tally man came round (I don’t know how she knew it was him). Suddenly there’d be a knock at the door and she knew not to answer as if she could smell him. So we’d hide and I’d have to be really quiet, like a game. If we were in the passage when he came, we’d have to get down really low because he could peer through the letterbox. When he’d gone, she’d laugh about it and get on with the rest of her day. If he caught her out and she had to open the door, it would only be a crack, a few inches. I’d be hanging round her legs, trying to see him, but she’d always push me back. I could never put a face to the tally man but the thought of him scared me: he was like a bogeyman.

I don’t think Mum or Grandad knew about the tally man or the clothing club Nan paid into; maybe it was only Uncle Alan and me who were in on it. Alan got a leather jacket from the tally man money, which he has never forgotten. Nan told us to keep it a secret.

She was always trying to get money out of Grandad, but he knew better. Whatever excuse she used, he knew it would go down the betting shop or the bingo; they rowed about it a lot. When they were cleaning offices together in the City they would take me with them. I’d sit there making false nails for myself out of Sellotape (a skill used later in life) while they cleaned. She’d be having a go at him about money. Sometimes she’d forge notes from one of the other cleaners (a man), asking to borrow a tenner until next week, and Grandad would hand it over, not realising it was going into her purse. If she had money, I’d be taken to the betting shop and had to hang around outside waiting for her, even after the age of 11 when I was in my posh Italia Conti uniform.

Feeding us all was very hand to mouth: she’d count out the money, sometimes coppers, and go shopping every day. We all ate at different times: the only time we tried to have a meal together was Sunday lunchtime but because Nan and Grandad had been in the pub for hours it was often burnt. We had a drop-leaf table under the window that would only be pulled out on Sundays or at Christmas. Normal meals after I came in from school were egg and chips or ham, egg and chips if there was more money, a bit of brawn some days. I loved fish paste and used to eat it with a spoon from the jar. Nan would sometimes make shepherd’s pie and I loved her rice pudding with a skin on top, made in a bowl that looked about 100 years old. We all loved it when Nan brought pie and mash home: there was a real ritual to ripping the paper off, carving a cross and pouring in the bright green liquor from a polystyrene cup, then smothering it in vinegar and pepper. It was a real treat, bought from Arments in Westmoreland Road, off the Walworth Road. I think we only had pie and mash if Nan won a bit on the horses.

I loved the Joseph Lancaster School. When I started there at five, the head teacher remembered Alan and said he hoped I would do better: ‘Alan came in through the front door and out through the back and was home before your nan.’ But I was a good girl: my school reports are all great except every teacher said I was very chatty (nothing much has changed). We didn’t have to wear a uniform and, as you’ve gathered, I was always fashionably dressed. Mum used to buy me clothes in Carnaby Street, the trendy place in those days, from a shop called Kids in Gear. I loved my patent leather hot pants with yellow leather braces on them. In another shop (Buttons & Bows) she bought silk ribbons, buttons and bits and pieces to sew onto my clothes to jazz them up. The shopkeeper made a dress for me, crocheted in white with red satin ribbon woven through and a matching beret. It was for the wedding of one of Mum’s friends (they weren’t having bridesmaids but they wanted me in the pictures) so I was star of the show, my favourite place.

I wore the dress to school as well: there was never any of that saving your best for weekends in our family, I was always done up like the dog’s dinner. It was part of our thing. Look at us Maxwells: we’re not failures, we’ve got all the latest gear and everything we’ve got is on our backs. A lot of working-class people are like that. Nan had a ring on every finger, she’d bung it all on: it was about telling the world we didn’t need charity. There’s a pattern emerging when I look back at my life.

I was Miss Popular at school: bright, funny and loved by everybody except those I took the mickey out of. Putting the focus on someone else’s shortcomings meant no one got round to asking me the dreaded question: ‘Why haven’t you got a dad?’ Without thinking about it, I was always trying to recruit friends: believers in Lisa Maxwell, people who would think, isn’t she great? I’m glad Lisa is on the planet! One of the reasons why I liked being well dressed was that I thought it would make people like me more if I looked as if I came from a well-off family who could afford to buy nice things. Even as a kid I was acting out the philosophy that took me through a lot of my life and stopped me ever having to face up to myself: keep busy, stay at the centre of things, have a laugh. Whatever you do, don’t stand still long enough to be alone with yourself or to let other people ask too many questions. If I was funny and popular, who would care if I didn’t have a father?

Maybe the other kids did notice but they didn’t say anything to my face. Maybe the others clocked my background, but I was protected from name-calling and nasty comments because all the scary kids liked me, which meant no one else gave me any trouble. I was tiny, but I had this really tall friend called Delphine. Her sister Jackie could beat anyone up, including the boys. My loose tongue and ability to mimic people meant I was always taking the mickey, but I managed to duck out of trouble: if anyone threatened to meet me after school, I’d walk out with Delphine and the troublemakers would melt away.

Mum never admitted she was a single parent, deserted before her baby was born. At the offices where she worked she always said she was divorced or separated, and for years she told me my father had ‘died in the war’. I was too young to ask ‘What war?’ because it didn’t make any sense (there was no war when I was born, unless you count Vietnam) and what was an American GI doing hanging around South London with Mum? But it was something women always said, an excuse the previous generation had been able to use, so that’s what I told the kids at school. When I look back, I’m amazed, but they accepted it just as I did.

I found out my dad wasn’t dead from Nan, but not in a proper sit-down-and-we’ll-have-a-talk kind of way. We were in the pub when I was seven or eight and I said something about him being dead (I think a kid at school had asked me). ‘Oh, your dad ain’t dead, don’t be silly,’ said Nan casually, then turned to the barman: ‘Scotch and American and a martini, please, Jim. Oh, and can you tell the pianist to play “When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New” …’

It was just slipped in: it wasn’t explained, just a quick reference before ordering the next drink. I don’t remember being shocked or the news having a massive impact, so I think deep down I probably already knew but didn’t understand. Although I carried on pretending, the story changed: instead of saying Dad was dead, now I said he left when I was very young. It was a world away from being illegitimate because at least I had a father when I was born. If I had a dad, even for a day or two after my birth, it legitimised me being on the planet.

Secrets and lies and shame have had a profound effect on me. There was a big chunk of my life that I didn’t know about – ‘Father Unknown’ – but I also knew from early on that I mustn’t ask questions. Again, I don’t know how I knew this, but subliminally someone must have made me feel it was not a good idea: we don’t talk about things that hurt. It was a defence mechanism, I guess, filtered down to Mum from Nan and Grandad’s generation, who believed you put up and shut up.

As I grew up, I became adept at not dealing with things: I simply put my head in the sand. From a young age children pick up when something causes pain, and I didn’t want to put my mum through that agony. The bits of information I was given about myself were just snippets or downright lies; you become numb to the good stuff, the bad stuff, everything … Somehow you know some of it’s not true but you also understand the reason why they’re not telling you the truth is because it’s too hard for them so you never try to unravel things. Not that I went through childhood having deep thoughts about all of this; I was enjoying myself too much.

I was a bit of a star at school: the singing teacher (Miss Stokes) really encouraged me, telling me I was a natural. She gave me the role of Mrs B in our little production about Peter Rabbit when I was about six and I remember hearing my voice singing through a microphone, a song about Mrs Rabbit going through the wood with her shopping basket – I loved it. It was a massive moment in my life, hearing my voice amplified and performing to an audience.

I was clever at school but that didn’t matter in my family, they weren’t interested in academic things. For some reason, I had a reading age of 16 at 11 years old. We all took a test to see who should be on the school team for the Panda Club Quiz, an event started by the Met Police, and I was chosen. The four smartest kids took part in this quiz with all the other schools in London and we won, which made us celebrities at school for a while – it was a really big deal, everyone was very pleased. We had to answer questions about the history of the police, which is funny because many years later I would join the Force myself in The Bill – I guess my research started early.

Breaks and lunchtimes were spent playing and our favourite games were French Skipping, with girls jumping through a large loop of knicker elastic, and Two Ball Up the Wall – I always had two tennis balls with me and was a whizz at throwing them against the wall and reciting rhymes like ‘Holy Mary, mother of God/Send me down a couple of bob’. Blasphemous, but we never thought about the meaning. We weren’t a religious family, the Maxwells, although I was sent to Sunday school at the Abdullam Mission from about seven years old. I took a shine to a dog living next door to the room where Sunday school was held. I’d knock at the door and ask if I could take Teddy for a walk. A lady in an overall, just like Nan wore, would hand him over on an old chain lead with a worn leather handle.

‘Here you are, love,’ she’d say.

‘When do I have to bring him back?’

‘When you’ve had enough.’

Off I’d skip with Teddy, who wasn’t exactly pretty. He was part-Doberman and part-Whippet, and probably lots of other things in there as well: skinny, brown and black with a strange little stump where his tail should have been. I loved walking round the estate with him, pretending he was mine.

One day Teddy made a run for it, with me desperately trying to keep hold of him, which was difficult because the leather handle had snapped and I was grasping the end of the metal chain. Then the metal hook, which held the chain to the leather, pierced the skin between thumb and forefinger: the more Teddy ran, the more it bit into my hand. The pain was excruciating and I was screaming in agony. Somehow I managed to yank the hook out and ran home, yelling my head off.

‘All right, babes, calm down,’ said Mum. ‘Let’s have a look.’

I got on top of my breath slightly and became calmer, desperately hoping Mum wouldn’t take me to hospital – I dreaded having an injection.

‘We’ve got to go, babes. You might have lockjaw.’

‘What the hell is that?’ I wailed. ‘Am I going to get a stiff head and never speak again?’

‘No, you just need a little tetanus. Let’s just get you up the ’ospidal.’

By this time I was hysterical. ‘Do I have to have a needle?’

‘No, darling, they don’t give you needles now – they give you sweets nowadays.’

So we went to Guy’s Hospital, but I soon realised I’d been tricked when two nurses held me down and a giant in a white coat came towards me with a needle like a pneumatic drill. I screamed, kicked and wriggled and tried to punch, but in the midst of this maelstrom the needle went in without me noticing it.

‘There, there, it’s all over – calm down,’ I was surprised to hear the doctor in the white coat say. And then, ‘Now, I hear you wanted sweets?’ and he waggled a bag of Jelly Tots at me. So I got the sweets but it was not the way Mum said it would be. Lying was her first line of defence under pressure and I don’t blame her because all she was worried about was getting me to hospital. I would have preferred to know what was coming, though!

In my later years at primary school I used to bunk off a bit. We’d go round to the flat of a black lad called Jimmy Paul, who had the ‘Telegram Sam’ record by T-Rex, which we would play endlessly. Jimmy scared a lot of kids – he was a good fighter with a bit of attitude, but I was his mate and so was Wendy Donovan. I really liked her clothes and she lent me her Starsky and Hutch chunky-knit cardie. When we went on our one and only school trip, a week in Norfolk, she lent me her edge-to-edge cardigan for the whole time. A really thin knit that joined in the middle, no buttons or fasteners, worn with a thin knitted belt, it was beige and came down to just cover my bum: I wore it with platform shoes.

I don’t think I knew the word ‘chic’ then, but that’s exactly what I would have used. To me, that cardigan looked like it cost a fortune. I remember that I extended the loan period, keeping it for the whole trip, and it was out of shape by the end. That trip was the first time I ever fancied a boy – Gary Weston. I showed off by dancing in front of him, wiggling my derrière. It was the start of another pattern in life: I’ve always used dancing to attract blokes I fancy.

In those days there was a great deal of freedom for children. As soon as I was big enough, Nan and Mum would let me loose to play with the other kids on the estate. They’d call from the balcony when they wanted me and often it would be after dark and I’d still be running around. We used to run everywhere, hiding from each other; we’d even play on a rubbish dump. Although we never got in big trouble, we could be naughty. I remember we played Knock Down Ginger (knocking on the door and running away) on the door of a little round Irish man, who looked like a leprechaun (‘Thick Mick’) – the political correctness police would be after us today. But we never did any harm and he was lovely to us.

There was a sandpit in Jail Park, where we played endlessly. I once got a mouthful of bird pooh, which gave the other kids a good laugh. Even then, I was talking the whole time and I must have looked up with my mouth still motoring. Another time I was wearing a gold ring with a tiny diamond in it. (What was Mum thinking of, sending a six-year-old out to play like that? Typical of us Maxwells, all part of making me look high-end.) Anyway, I swapped it for a bag of Maltesers. Mum had to go round to the girl’s house to retrieve it.

My babysitter Sandra lived on the ground floor of Stephenson House: I used to play with her brother Raymond, who was a couple of years older than me, and his cousin Rachel. Raymond was mad about Elvis and we’d all be doing Hound Dog impressions on the bit of lawn at the back of his flat. I was keen on David Cassidy and Sandra took me to see him when I was about seven or eight at the Wembley Empire. Because I was only little and sitting on her shoulders we were allowed right through to the front, and he sang ‘The Puppy Song’ for me and gave me a rose. I was so in love – I remember crying and kissing the television whenever he was on. When he came back to London the next time I was so upset he was kept on a launch on the Thames to stop the fans stampeding him. He was the first person I ever saw wearing Yeti boots, and he was the coolest thing on the planet.

I rode around the estate on my bike, a red second-hand Raleigh that my mum bought from her friend Shirley Delannoy, whose name I loved because it sounded exotic and foreign. Shirley was a travel agent with bleached blonde hair. She was married to a man from Belgium so by the standards of my childhood she was exotic. It was sometimes a volatile union – they lived on the sixteenth floor of a Bermondsey tower block and she would joke that one day she would deliberately leave open the balcony door when he was out drinking in the hope that he might fall over in his drunken state.

I got another kind of education from Uncle Jim and Auntie Wendy. Jim had done well for himself, running a successful haulage company, and they had a big house with a swimming pool. He was always supportive of Mum and me and I used to spend part of my summer holidays with his family. I’d be put on a Green Line bus in London and they’d pick me up at the other end. It was there that I learnt to eat posh.

I remember four-course dinners at their house, everyone round the table. And I learnt how to eat in a restaurant – they took me for my first-ever trip to a Chinese. When I used to pretend I had a father to kids who thought my parents were divorced, all the information I gave about my imaginary dad was based on Jim.

When I was 10, Jim and Wendy took me to Devon for a holiday. I was with my cousin Samantha and there was this lovely-looking French boy playing near us. He looked like a mini Sacha Distel, with a navy blue jumper. Young as I was, my taste in boys was already refined – I’ve always liked the preppy French look (for a girl from a council flat, I have a taste for ‘a bit of posh’ in terms of looks). So Samantha and I kept smiling at this boy and eventually we got talking to him. I was a bit surprised by his high voice.

‘Lauren,’ he said, when I asked his name.

‘Laurence?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘No, Lauren – I am a girl …’

I was gutted but we still became pen pals and I think when I was writing to her I secretly imagined she was a boy.

When I was about 12, I was at Uncle Jim’s house, sitting in the front of the Jag that Auntie Wendy had parked in the drive. Their Alsatian was in the car with me and I was trying to get the Stylistics’ eight-track cassette out of their cassette player. Somehow I knocked the car, an automatic, into reverse and we started to roll backwards down the hill. I was a tiny kid so if anyone had seen this it would have looked really odd. The dog started howling – he knew this wasn’t right. We were heading towards the swimming pool but luckily I managed to grab the brake and pull it on. We stopped within a couple of feet of the pool. Thank God we haven’t hit anything, I thought, as I climbed out.

‘I’m sure I left the car under the kitchen window,’ said Auntie Wendy.

‘No, it’s always been by the pool, Auntie Wendy,’ I told her, all innocent.

The dog didn’t snitch but he looked a bit worried around me for a while.

We always had holidays and most years we went abroad: Spain, Italy and Portugal. Grandad paid for it all, putting money away every week. Usually it was Nan, Grandad, Mum and me, but sometimes Nan and Grandad’s friends Lil and Bill Holt came as well. They were always called Lil’Olt-and-Bill’Olt, like one word. Their daughter had a son – Gary – born in the hospital at the same time as me, so Lil was one of the first to see me after I came into the world. They were always part of our lives.

We went to Pontinental in Torremolinos a few years running – that’s Pontins, but abroad. It was two huge tower blocks, one next to the other. I loved it because they had a disco and a talent competition. It was always a big old booze-up and I was very spoiled. There were day trips to Morocco but the only one of us who would go was Grandad – the others just wanted to bake our tans. In one of my favourite pictures, he is sitting on a camel in Morocco. Years later, my friend Caroline Sargeant who lived in the block of flats opposite ours, Telford House, told me she thought we were a posh family because we always went abroad.

There was one time, however, when I really didn’t want to go to Spain. It was my last year at Joseph Lancaster and the singing teacher who I loved was putting on a production of The Wizard of Oz. Who do you think landed the part of Dorothy? I auditioned with a pretend American accent, which I’d been perfecting for years. For some reason I thought it was really cool and I would go round the Elephant and Castle asking grown-ups the time in this funny voice. I thought they would all be wondering why a little American girl was there, but probably they just thought I was a silly kid pretending. Anyway, I remember auditioning, saying ‘Where am I? This isn’t Kansas. Oh, Toto, Toto …’ – I loved Judy Garland and the part seemed made for me – I really felt this was my moment. Then I couldn’t do it because the show clashed with our trip to Pontinental. At this point I got in a real strop and told Mum I didn’t want to go, that I would stay with one of my friends to do the show. But I had to go and I cried at the idea of some other girl being Dorothy. I knew they’d give the part to a girl called Titia, who was very blonde and pretty. When I got back, I dreaded school because everyone would be talking about the show and how good she was.

It was no wonder I was the natural choice for Dorothy: from the age of eight I’d been going to stage school every Saturday. When I left Joseph Lancaster I attended full time, but that’s a story worth a whole chapter of its own.




CHAPTER 3

Italia Conti Girls


My stage career happened almost by chance. I was lucky because among the other kids on the Rockingham Estate were the three Sargeant girls: Caroline, Lynn and Elaine. Caroline, who was about four years older than me, spoke differently to the rest of us, a bit like a BBC announcer, and Mum was very impressed. She and Nan spoke fluent Rockingham, but Mum reckoned if I ended up talking like the rest of my family then I wouldn’t get anywhere in life; if I had a posh accent it would give me a start in life.

‘Why does she talk like that, Liz?’ she asked Caroline’s mum, who was also a single mum. She went on to explain about Italia Conti.

‘My Lisa would like some of that! How do you get her in?’ asked Mum.

It seemed a charitable trust had helped out because 11-year-old Caroline had talent. The trust found a sponsor, a photographer called Alan Olley, who helped pay for her to attend the fee-paying stage school. It was the first time Mum or any of us had ever heard of Italia Conti. For years my mum called it ‘Italian Conti’ and most people round our way thought I was learning Italian. I was eight then, too young to go full time. Mum rang the school to ask about elocution lessons, but they said they weren’t doing them any more. They told her they were giving speech and drama lessons on Saturday mornings and this was just as good for teaching me to speak properly. So I was enrolled, and every Saturday morning she would take me to the school in Clapham. Her ambition, as she told me often enough, was for me to marry Prince Andrew so she needed to make sure I could talk proper and was prepared to make sacrifices.

I used to love going round to Caroline’s flat because she had The Monkees’ album and we’d mime to ‘Daydream Believer’ and ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ and put on our own plays. Because she was at Italia Conti full time, she had scripts of real plays: we especially enjoyed putting on Billy Liar because every other word was ‘bloody’ so we could swear away in her bedroom all day and say, ‘It’s all right, it’s in the script!’

Her sisters and me would play at auditioning for the lead roles, but because Caroline was the eldest and went to stage school she always won. We’d be Charlie’s Angels and she was always Farrah. Once we’d established the game, I’d play it with other kids – I remember doing it with my cousins out at Uncle Jim’s house in Buckinghamshire. That was great because then it was my game so I could be Farrah and, believe me, I was Farrah like my life depended on it. I’ve always had thin hair, so it did wonders for my confidence pretending I had this big mane to flick. We’d run around the house hiding behind rubber plants, then leap out and shout ‘Freeze!’ with our fingers shaped like a gun.

From the word go, I loved Italia Conti. We learnt to enunciate properly and memorised speeches from Shakespeare, taking exams run by the London Academy of Speech and Drama. Soon the other girls were staying on for dancing lessons after drama and I joined those classes, too: doing tap, ballet and modern dance.

I made friends straight away: Laura James was one of my best friends, Karen Halliday was another and Amanda Mealing, who went on to a big role in Holby City. We four were working-class kids, so I didn’t feel out of place. Laura and Karen knew each other as they were both from Stockwell and Amanda came from Lambeth. We all spoke pure South London, but within weeks I was talking like Princess Lisa of Rockingham with this perfect cut-glass accent.

Soon it was time to move on from primary school and all I wanted was to attend Italia Conti full time. Of course it cost money: Mr and Mrs Sheward, who ran the school, told Mum that the Inner London Education Authority normally gave four scholarships but they’d cut it down to two that year and so we had to audition. There were about 20 of us, all there with our mums, who were probably even more nervous than us. I auditioned with a modern piece, a ballet piece, a speech and a song: I didn’t have a serious acting piece so I did a poem called ‘Worms’, which was short and silly. Looking back, I didn’t do myself justice but I wasn’t at all nervous – I never had a problem walking into a room and showing off. I had three ‘parents’ putting me on a pedestal, who thought I was the bees’ knees, so my self-esteem was pretty high.

We had to wait for two weeks for the results (Mum says they were two of the longest weeks of her life). When Mr Sheward rang it was not good news: I’d come third. My friends Laura and Karen got the scholarships. I was offered a place but the fees were well beyond our means. At a meeting with Mr Sheward, he told Mum, ‘She’s one of the most talented kids we’ve come across and we have to find a way to get her into this school.’ He had a book called The Directory of Grant Making Trusts and gave her lots of numbers to ring to see if they could offer any help. They were mostly single-parent charities but because we lived with Nan and Grandad we didn’t really qualify. Nobody could help – I guess they had far more pressing problems than a kid who had a decent home but needed the money to go to stage school. I remember thinking, why does everything come down to the fact that I haven’t got a dad? Why doesn’t Mum just get the money, couldn’t someone leave it her in an inheritance or something?

It wasn’t looking good but Mum was determined not to give up. She was the receptionist at Gaskett, Metcalfe & Walton, a firm of solicitors, and approached her boss, Michael Harris. Mum volunteered to work lunch hours and longer hours so that she could save the money (she had already surrendered an insurance policy to help but was worried about further payments). Michael could see there was no way she would save enough by the time I had to start and so he came to an arrangement with her: the firm advanced my fees and they stopped £25 a week from Mum’s wages to pay them back. I’m so grateful to him for help when we needed it, and later on he became a trusted friend and handled several legal matters for me.

His firm also helped Mum get more money from my dad, John Murphy, although at the time this wasn’t properly explained to me. I remember, when I was about 12, being taken to a court near Tower Bridge in my school uniform. The whole experience didn’t gel – I think I’d have rather done without the money. I didn’t like the role of poor kid outside court with a begging bowl: they needed to recast the part for another child, I thought, not one who went to stage school, had a posh accent and believed she would one day be a big success. I stood outside the court building with a strange sick feeling in the bottom of my tummy because I believed I must have done something wrong. Courts were for criminals, weren’t they?

One of the clients at the firm where Mum worked was Bruce Forsyth’s first wife, and when she heard about me going to Italia Conti she gave us her daughter Debbie’s old cape. Some of my uniform came from Dickens & Jones, the official school supplier, which to me was a really high-end shop up West and I know it cost an arm and a leg. Mum got a lot of it from a second-hand shop in Battersea, though. The cape was dark blue with a collar like Mary Poppins’s cape, a bit like the ones nurses wear; there were silver buttons each side with chains going across. Underneath we wore a royal-blue blazer and then a blue jumper and grey skirt. Later on, little kilts. In winter, I had a blue velour hat and a straw boater for summer.

But the uniform was only the start: I had to have a bag containing The Complete Works of Shakespeare, which I never used because we’d have the parts printed out on paper. I also needed loads of ballet shoes, tights, a leotard and all the other accessories a dancer has to have. Imagine me walking from Stephenson House to the Elephant and Castle tube station done up like something out of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I was so proud because it was obvious I was going to a fee-paying school.

Grandad thought Mum was mad to be paying out all that cash. ‘You’re wasting your bloody money! Why don’t you send her to Pitmans?’ he used to say. Learning shorthand would be more useful, he thought. Meanwhile, Mum fought her corner.

‘No, it’s what she wants to do,’ she insisted.

‘Are you sure it’s not what you want her to do?’ he said.

And it’s true: I was living out Mum’s dream for her, but it was also my dream, my lifeline, my chance to be someone different. Mum saw that, too: she felt that I wouldn’t end up like some of the other girls round there, marrying a gangster or a petty criminal or even becoming a single mum like her. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, we were making a point to my absent father: trying to prove he’d made a big mistake when he turned his back on us.

In those days the Italia Conti building was so imposing. Years later, when I was doing The Bill, I used to drive past it, and it doesn’t look anything special now – I guess that’s normal when you look back on things from an adult perspective. Back then I was very impressed by the vast entrance hall. On the first day, Mum and the other mothers came with us and there was a real excited buzz about the place.

I don’t ever remember not fitting in: if they’d all been talking with Geordie accents I’d have adopted one, too. As a kid I was a complete chameleon. It was a useful skill in my working life but one that came, I believe, from my upbringing: I always had to put whatever trauma we were going through behind me. Don’t think about it too much, just get on with it, was the family philosophy.

Looking back, going to stage school should have been daunting, but it wasn’t at all, and this is a testament to the self-esteem Mum had given me. As a child, you could throw me in at the deep end in any situation and I’d swim. Besides, what was there to be scared of? Laura, Amanda and Karen were going, too. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t impressed: we first years shared a dressing room with the older girls and I remember being bowled over by Leslie Ash, who was a fifth former. I was mesmerised by her beauty and sophistication; she was the most stunning girl I had ever seen. She wore drainpipe jeans tucked into her boots, had feather-cut hair and always seemed to be carrying a large portfolio, probably full of gorgeous 10” by 8” headshots. We all wanted to be Leslie Ash.

The whole place was magical. In the loos were slim white paper bags with a picture of a crinoline lady on the front. We four thought they were there for our ballet pumps (one shoe fitted perfectly in each bag) and we lined them up in the dressing room. I’m sure the older girls must have been in fits of laughter. We were also convinced there was a ghost in one of the classrooms (we called him ‘Ghost Boy Blue’) and left notes out for him. They always disappeared, which meant he was real. Years later, when Karen and I were revisiting the school, we discovered the teachers had been nipping in to take them – they thought it was very funny.

Italia Conti was run by the Shewards, whose four children had all been taught there and now helped out: I got to know the youngest, Graham, really well. They are a brilliant family, dedicated to the school and the kids who go there. I think I was the smallest in our year, but from the beginning it worked out well for me. Even before I started full time in the summer holidays we got a call from the Conti Agency (when you attended the school you were automatically placed on the books). The BBC were casting a TV show (Ballet Shoes, based on the book by Noel Streatfeild) and they were looking for girls under 4’6” to play extras. We had to be aged 11 or over to be allowed to work, yet most girls that age were too tall. I was nearly 12, but only 4’ 2


/2”.

‘Oh, bless her!’ said the girl from the agency when Mum told her how tall I was, and we could hear them laughing in the background. She then had to check with the casting director that I wasn’t too small, and luckily I wasn’t. I was thrilled to be working and being paid about £50 before I’d even started at stage school. But it wasn’t all happy memories, and this was also my first experience of something that would haunt me throughout my time as a child actor.

In order to work, all child actors had to go to the Inner London Education Authority and jump through hoops put in place to ensure we weren’t being exploited. We were weighed and measured, then had to prove our schoolwork was up to date and a third of our earnings was being saved. For me, the worst part was that I had to produce my birth certificate every time, and whenever I pulled it out there it was in big bold letters: ‘Father Unknown’.

Why couldn’t Mum just make up a name? Why does everyone have to know? I would think to myself. We lie about everything else in our family, so couldn’t she have told ‘just a little fib’? The school would ring up to say I had a job, adding casually, ‘Make sure Lisa brings in her birth certificate.’ Of course it was no big deal to them, but my heart would sink. If only one person could have put it in perspective. I wish someone had said, ‘Your mum had a really shit time because everyone judged her but actually they got it wrong, it doesn’t matter – she and your Nan and Grandad should stop worrying about what other people might say and accept the situation.’ But no one did, and it was years before I could tell myself the same thing. As it was, I couldn’t be in the same room when they looked at the birth certificate, I couldn’t bear seeing someone else’s eyes reading ‘Father Unknown’ – it made me feel physically sick. The worst thing was people feeling sorry for me. I can’t stand pity.

For most of the filming of Ballet Shoes I was at the barre doing exercises. I was never the best at ballet and the teacher in the film would come up behind us and whack my backside, which was always sticking out. When the programme was finally broadcast on television it was hard to spot ‘class member number three, second from the left’ with my hair scraped back and the same clothes as everyone else. Then again, had I stood out I wouldn’t have been doing my job properly. We didn’t have video in those days to pause and freeze frame, but Mum, Nan and Grandad all went along with it, claiming they knew me. Although I was only an extra, it was still exciting to be in front of the cameras, and the experience gave those of us taking part a bit of prestige when we arrived at the beginning of term. My friend Laura was in it with me and we felt like the chosen ones.

And the parts kept coming in. Next, I was in a TV sitcom called The Many Wives of Patrick with Patrick Cargill, who was very upper class. With my Italia Conti vowels, I could also play posh. Around this time I also did a pilot for The Gender Gap with Judy Parfitt and Francis Matthews, and again I was supposed to be from the top drawer. I think they got a surprise when I muffed a line and suddenly said ‘Oh fuck it!’ Not just the sound of a 12-year-old swearing, but a real Cockney accent when I was acting so terribly, terribly proper. Just after that I landed another part in a kids’ series: A Place Like Home. It was great, not just because I loved acting: it meant that I could secure my full Equity membership (in those days it was tough to get into the actors’ union and impossible to secure work unless you happened to be in it).

A Place Like Home was about growing up in a foster home (Pauline Quirke from Birds of a Feather played one of the other kids). I had a lead role: a sweet little kid with my hair in plaits, always planting things in the garden. However, I caused real problems by catching chicken pox in the middle of filming and they had to rewrite the scripts around my absence. Years later, when I worked with Pauline again, she told me she was cursing me at the time because she had to learn a lot of my lines as well as her own. She even had to play a game of Monopoly on-camera, playing my part, too! When I went back, the make-up girls worked hard to paint out the last three spots on my face.

Having these jobs so early on was a huge boost to my confidence because everyone there wanted to work. The school were very kind to Mum and me: they knew how much of a struggle it was for us financially and so they put me up for any job going. I was very happy at school, although I know some of the other pupils weren’t – you’ve got to remember every kid who goes there is the best in their local dancing school, and then they get to Conti’s, where they meet 15 or so other versions of themselves, some more talented and more confident. This can have two effects: either it boosts your confidence and sends you on your way, reaching for dazzling showbiz heights, or it can do the exact opposite and make you realise you’re not so talented or as special as you thought.

For me, it opened up a wonderful escape. Italia Conti was completely classless, with working-class pupils like me and other kids from well-set-up, middle-class backgrounds, who lived in the suburbs in houses with gardens. Most of them had brothers and sisters, and to me this meant they were not accidents – their parents had wanted to have them and that’s why they had more kids afterwards. I always felt being an only child was part of the shame of my birth, and for years I was under the impression only children were unplanned and unwanted.

Although the friends I knew when I first started were other working-class girls, soon I was mixing with others from privileged backgrounds and they spoke nicely (without pretending) and lived in big houses. I was always self-conscious about where I lived, and if anyone gave me a lift I’d be dropped off round the corner in Bath Terrace (which sure didn’t sound like a council estate). Later, I found that the well-to-do kids didn’t have an issue with where I was from. I had a South African friend called Renee who used to stay and her family were fine about it, even though they were wealthy. I was forever borrowing her clothes (she was the first girl in school to wear trousers) and I kept a pair of her grey flannels for months. To me, her Mason & Pearson hairbrush seemed like the height of posh and I swore I’d have one of my own as soon as I could afford it.

Today I’m embarrassed by the young Lisa who was ashamed of the Rockingham Estate because I’m a very down-to-earth person, the complete opposite of a snob: at the time I was so self-conscious about being out of wedlock it made me feel bad about my whole background. What I loved was being able to blag my way through to convince everyone I had the right to be there. Deep down, I felt like a pretender. Then again, a lot of actors admit they are always afraid someone will come up to them and say, ‘You’re not actually very good at acting, are you?’ They always think they’re going to get found out. That’s how I’ve felt all my life, but not about my acting – about me: ‘I know who you are, you’re that little kid who hasn’t got a dad, who comes from a council estate at Elephant and Castle,’ they’ll tell me. Confident in my acting, I was also comfortable with walking into a room and talking to anyone. I wasn’t scared of anything … except the truth coming out.

I used to lie about the most stupid things. There was a school fête and Mum’s friend Margaret made some lovely cakes but I pretended Mum had made them – I wanted the teacher in charge to think I came from the sort of family where the mother bakes cakes. The teacher was really pleased and said, ‘I must thank Mrs Maxwell’ (Mum was always ‘Mrs’ Maxwell at school). And to my deep shame I even denied knowing my mum when I first started at Conti. She took me to the tube station every day and waited until I was on the train: I always wanted her to go because on the platform would be lots of other kids in the same uniform as me, all looking like we belonged to some secret society. It was a bit like Harry Potter and his friends waiting for the train to Hogwarts.

‘What’s going to happen between now and the train arriving?’

‘You never know, there are some funny people about,’ she’d say, and all the while I’d be thinking, one of them is you …

Perhaps she was right to be concerned: we were almost all girls and we looked like everyone’s idea of typical schoolgirls, which attracted a fair few dodgy types. We were all very blasé at the time and I can’t remember any of it being a real threat, but looking back I guess she had a point. But I was very self-conscious about Mum being there and shouting ‘Love you, Babes!’ when everyone could hear.

I can remember so clearly one of my first days at the school: I got into the carriage and became aware, as the train started moving slowly off, that she was running alongside it. The tube went a bit faster and when I glanced out the window she was still there. But now she was shouting: ‘Help, my coat – it’s stuck in the door … Open the bloody doors!’ The guard noticed and so the train quickly stopped and her coat was released, but I’m deeply ashamed because when one of the Conti kids who’d seen it asked ‘Who was that woman?’ I shrugged and said, ‘No idea.’ With that, I turned my back on Mum. All she was trying to do was protect me, but I was embarrassed and ashamed – I hate the fact that I was like that.

Later on, everyone would get to know my mum and they’d all be shouting, ‘Bye, Lisa’s mum!’ when she did her big ‘Bye, Babes, I love you!’ routine (she took me to the tube every day until I was 16). On the train it was a wonderful little bubble. Because we were stage-school kids we were naturally noisy, and we’d sing songs and recite bits from plays – I felt extremely special and happy as soon as I entered that bubble.

The arrival of Bonnie Langford in our class at school a year later was a big event. We’d been told she was coming and couldn’t wait. She’d been a big star on Broadway in Gypsy (Noël Coward reputedly said about the show: ‘They should cut the second act and the child’s throat’) and we’d seen her in the film Bugsy Malone, but I don’t think any of us anticipated what a consummate pro she was. Twelve-year-old Bonnie arrived at school every day as if she was going into rehearsals: her hair was fabulous, bright red and teased into a million ringlets, every single one immaculate and held back by a headband that matched her school uniform. Everything about her was ‘finished’ – that’s the only word I can think of. We were all learning, works in progress, but she was already the complete deal: the perfect package.

Her pencil case had her name on it and all her pencils had her name in gold letters along the side. Over her leotard and tights she’d wear a black T-shirt with her name in diamante and a big star with lights shooting out of it. She was good at everything, could put her leg up by her ears without wobbling and she was also clever, getting straight As for all subjects. Bonnie was a few months younger than me and already famous; I couldn’t believe we were in the same class. We wanted to criticise her to make ourselves feel better because she was such a high achiever, but we just couldn’t because she was brilliant at everything, also lovely to everybody else. She had black eyelashes that she told me were dyed – it was the first time I’d heard of anyone doing this.

Laura James was my best mate at this time: so pretty and super talented, I was always proud she chose me. If anyone should have been the next Liza Minnelli or Barbra Streisand, it had to be Laura (she’s now happily married to Jonathan Ross’s younger brother Adam, with two lovely girls). A right pair, we bonded over our sense of humour. We were a bit mean to Bonnie: she sat in front of us in class and we used to dip her ringlets in the inkwells. I’ve never owned up to this before and when I meet Bonnie – we are good friends – she may go off me, now she knows!

Laura and me would slip into Frank Spencer impersonations and keep it up all day (the older girls used to get us to do it; I think they thought we were a pair of freaks). She lived just three or four stops up the Northern line from me in Stockwell and I loved going to her house. It was my idea of what the perfect family should be: a mum, a dad and an older brother. I hardly ever invited her to mine, but I think she worked out that it was because I was ashamed of our flats. She was always very sensitive and never asked why.

We used to spend hours together at the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre, pulling faces in the photo booth and buying Snoopy and Holly Hobbit pencil cases and rulers. At least, Laura was buying hers and I was demonstrating how good I was at nicking them. I got away with quite a few and shared the spoils with her – luckily, I was never caught. We’d also buy our favourite magazines: Bunty, Jackie, My Guy and Photo-Love. At 16 I made it onto the cover of Photo-Love, in my eyes one of my greatest achievements.

It was while Laura, Karen and I were mooching around in the school holidays that we were flashed at in the street. A man walked towards us with a coat over his arm, and when he moved it, ‘Run, he’s got his willy out!’ Laura shouted. We weren’t scared – we just thought it was funny. Laura and Karen started running but I was laughing so hysterically that when I tried to run I wet myself so I had to stop and cross my legs. We went to Laura’s house and then her mum and Karen’s mum took us to the police station to report it. Being 12-year-old stage-school girls, we loved the drama – I think we thought we were in an episode of Dixon of Dock Green. ‘Oh my God, you should have seen it! It was right down here …’ we babbled, gesturing down towards our knees.

The policeman asked the mothers if we knew what ‘erect’ and ‘flaccid’ meant. When they said no, he asked us whether it was pointing North or South. Finally Laura drew it for him by pointing towards the South. I’ve always said it was Karen who wet herself, but this book is about the truth: it was me who had to walk around in a pair of wet jeans and I’ve only recently apologised to her.

Meanwhile, back in the school dressing room we would play performing games: our favourite was Grease after Mum took a group of us to see it at the Elephant Odeon. We took it in turns to be John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Bonnie didn’t always join in our games but she loved playing Grease and if she was Danny she would leap off the table like the Russian gymnast Olga Korbut, singing, ‘It’s electrifying!’

Danielle Foreman was also a good friend at Conti’s, although like Bonnie she started a bit later than the rest of us. She’s the sister of the actor Jamie Foreman and their dad was Freddie Foreman, a well-known gangster (Jamie used to babysit me when Mum was going out – Danielle would come over and he’d be left in charge of us at our flat). The family lived in Dulwich and their dad wasn’t around some of the time because he was in prison but I can remember the thrill of him turning up at school to pick Danielle up in his sky-blue Rolls-Royce Corniche. Freddie was part of the whole gangster scene going on in London: he knew the Krays and the Richardsons and he was involved in a couple of murders as well as some big heists. I didn’t know any of this at the time but I think I was savvy enough to know he didn’t get his Rolls working down the market.

When 50p was nicked from Bonnie Langford’s moneybag, the finger of suspicion was unfairly pointed at Danielle and me for some reason: it wasn’t us. About six of us had been in the dressing room at the time and we were interrogated by Mrs Sheward. Afterwards Danielle and me were kept behind, probably because we refused to allow them to search our bags. It wasn’t because we had anything to hide; we were just being difficult.

A girl in our year had already started her periods and she seemed to be excused almost everything. She was always missing things because of her period – blimey, when you start your periods you become practically disabled, I remember thinking. So when they wanted to search our bags we told them: ‘You can’t search our bags! We may have personal things in there, like Pantie Pads.’ It was an invasion of our privacy, we said. We didn’t even know the right name for sanitary protection – we just thought it sounded good.

Being taken to Mrs Sheward’s office was a bit frightening. There were two offices: one for the agency, where everyone was chatty and the walls were covered in pictures of us all; and then her own, which was formal and contained a big desk with an embossed leather top. Mrs Sheward was a small woman, with lots of hair piled up on top of her head, like wedding hair – Marje Simpson could have been modelled on her. I always thought she got up at about 4 a.m. every day just to get the hair right. If you were called into her office, it was serious (I only went there twice). Anyway, she interviewed us separately, trying to get us to grass each other up, but we refused to do so.

I’m certain Danielle didn’t take the money. And I didn’t take it either, but it meant we were late leaving the school that day and Danielle’s dad was meeting us in the Rolls.

‘Don’t you ever let me catch you thieving, you little toe-rags! I’ll burn your fucking fingers off if I catch you at that game,’ he yelled at us. Looking back, it was funny coming from a man involved in all sorts of crime, but I can see he was just as determined his kids would have a completely different life. We never heard any more about the 50p at school.

At the weekend he’d sometimes pick me up in the Rolls (which I loved) to take Danielle and me out. I liked the neighbours in Stephenson House to see me, and Mum loved it, too. One Saturday we went on one such trip. We drove up the Old Kent Road with the roof down on the Rolls, even though it wasn’t that warm, but I didn’t care about being cold – I loved sitting in the back of the car with everyone looking at me.

Then he said: ‘We’re going up West now’. So we went to Ronnie Knight’s drinking club, which was called J. Arthurs. Because Danielle was Freddie’s daughter everyone made a big fuss of her: the barmen and all the staff treated her with real reverence. When they asked Danielle what she would like to drink, she said: ‘I’ll have a Harvey Wallbanger.’ So I said I’d like one of those, too, even though I had no idea what it was.

‘Why are you talking funny?’ asked Mum after Freddie had dropped me back home, and my speech was slurred (she knew I might be drunk but because I wasn’t ill she didn’t say anything). I told her I’d had Harvey Wallbangers. I think she thought they were some kind of hamburger.

‘Oh he’s lovely, that Freddie!’ she said.

For some reason Mum always thought Freddie was a saint. I used to rollerskate round the Elephant and Castle and about 8 p.m. one night I was skating in front of the Charlie Chaplin when he came past.

‘What you doing here, you little so-and-so?’ he asked. ‘Bet your mother’s worried out of her life about you. Go on, clear out of it! Clear off home and get some sweets.’

He gave me a £50 note – the highest note I’d ever seen. I gave it to Mum, who said: ‘God love him, he’s like the Pope – a god! He picks ’er up in a Corniche, buys ’er Harvey Wallbangers and sends her home in case something dodgy happens …’

My friend Danielle was beautiful, with lovely dark hair: she wore mascara and bright red lipstick, and to me she looked just like Snow White. Her mum had an antique stall on the Bermondsey Market and she gave me a keeper (friendship) ring. She was very into horoscopes, mediums and reading the future. I was once in Danielle’s room when I watched a lamp fly off the windowsill without anyone touching it. Oh God, her mum’s going to think I broke it! How was I going to tell her it just came off on its own? All she said was: ‘Don’t worry, darling – it’s only Danielle’s poltergeist.’

Danielle and me used to spend all our time together talking about boys – we even practised kissing just to know what it felt like. When I was 14 I really fancied this boy called Lee who used to sell newspapers at the Elephant and Castle. He looked cheeky and funny, like a squashed version of Mike Reid, and would call out the newspapers in a singsong voice, which I found very attractive. Danielle passed a note to him saying I fancied him and he arranged to take me out on a date. I remember he turned up in a little beige suede bomber and wore gold chains. We did have a kiss, my second ever, and I seem to remember it lived up to expectations. Funnily enough, I have clearer memories of kissing Danielle – what does that mean? But I didn’t see him again: I remember thinking myself a bit above him, which sounds snobbish, I know. I’d been brought up to believe only Prince Andrew was good enough for me.

Danielle pursued acting for a while, but family life took her in another direction. Her brother Jamie, however, in my opinion became one of the best actors of his generation.

Another of my really good friends was Suzy Fenwick, whose cousin Perry plays Billy Mitchell in EastEnders. When we were kids, Perry was appearing at the Shaftesbury Theatre in a production of Peter Pan as one of the Lost Boys. Suzy and I used to hang around with them. She fancied one of Perry’s mates, a lad called Nick Berry. We were mucking about at my flat one day when we found his phone number. Suzy rang and asked, ‘Is that Nick Berry?’ When he said yes, she replied: ‘I went through the phone book and I only found one berry, so I picked it!’ Suzie had to put the phone down – she couldn’t speak, we were laughing so much: it was really silly teenage girl stuff.

Back home, life wasn’t all rosy, though. When I was a teenager, Mum and I used to fight a lot in the way that I think sisters sometimes fight; Grandad would have to tell us to calm down. Both of us knew (and still know) which buttons to press. Our fights would be about trivial things but underlying them would be pent-up feelings about each other.

Mum never did things by half. I remember she was on tranquillisers and decided to come off them abruptly after hearing on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life that you shouldn’t take them for more than three weeks or so. By then she’d been on them for six years. She just threw the whole lot down the toilet and went cold turkey, but you’re supposed to come off them gradually. I remember having to hold her in the night when she was freaking out – I was about 12 or 13 at the time. She was shivering, sweating and rocking her body backwards and forwards. Even after that first terrible night I’d still hear her whimpering and moaning, but she did it: when Mum decides on something, she is very single-minded.

She gave up cigarettes in the same way. When I was 18 she went to see a doctor about a cough, and when she came back she said: ‘He told me I’ve got very thin airways.’ She used to smoke 40 Consulate menthols a day but gave up there and then at the age of 40. I wish I could have had the same self-discipline: it took me several attempts to quit.

Whatever was happening at home, I still had my escape route: the train that took me to my beloved school every day, where I could sing, dance and be with my friends all day long. For me, schooldays really were among the happiest of my life.

It wasn’t always wonderful, though.




CHAPTER 4

My Secret Shame


I’d been nursing a secret for a whole week after I was summoned once again to the principal’s office. On this occasion Mrs Sheward stressed it was nothing to worry about but the staff had noticed I’d put on a bit of weight and they didn’t want it to get any worse. She told me to be careful with what I ate and said they would keep an eye on me. By then I was 13.

Afterwards I was so upset and embarrassed and I couldn’t understand it. I knew another girl who had been put on a diet but she was really fat – how could I have let myself get that big without noticing? When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see fat, but if they thought I was fat then I must be so. I kept the conversation to myself, but then it got worse, far worse: I was about to be outed as a fattie.

‘Lisa, will you come here, please. I just need to check how you’re doing with your weight.’

Having been called to the front of the class, I had to stand on some scales next to the teacher’s desk. I was mortified, more embarrassed than I’d ever been in my whole life. Now all my friends and classmates knew: I was officially fat. And that terrible feeling, as I walked from my desk to the front of the classroom, has never left me: with one massive blow it seemed to destroy the image I had of myself. No matter how many times my friends told me that I was nothing like the other girl on a diet, the damage was done. I think I was a little bit chubby. My body had started to change and fill out; I remember lying down next to one girl in jazz class doing floor exercises and just coveting her hipbones, thinking how cool it was to have your bones sticking out like that. For dancers, all the moves look better when you have thin arms and legs. In ballet classes the boys had to lift us, and this was another reason why we were more aware of what we weighed: some boys didn’t half make a meal out of it, groaning and carrying on as if they had to lift a ton of coal.

At stage school you’re in front of a mirror every day in a skimpy leotard and tights. How we looked was a big thing: we were performing children and the school made it clear from the word go that casting directors could come round at any time, picking kids for jobs or to appear in advertisements, so you always think they will choose the most beautiful and you buy into the idea that thin is beautiful. I was worried because I thought if I was chubby then when I was doing all that dancing and exercising I’d be massive by the time I left school.

I still didn’t tell Mum I’d been put on a diet. Years later, when I gave interviews about being told to lose weight so young, I described my mother going up the school to object, but this was just one of my fantasies. I never gave her chance to protest – it was my problem to deal with. Also, I never really talked to my friends about it and I didn’t cry: I just took it on the chin, absorbed it and kept any hurt buried inside me in the same way that I always dealt with difficult feelings.

Somehow, I lost the extra pounds. I’d skip school lunch, which wasn’t difficult. Mrs Stooks, who served in the canteen, always had a fag in her mouth so we’d all be focused on whether that tower of ash was about to drop into our Spag Bol. Often it did, which put us off eating there. Instead I’d head straight for the chocolate machine in the hallway. I’d get a Bar Six and a hot chocolate, then dip the Bar Six into the drink and suck the chocolate off until all that was left was the crispy bit; often that was all I had.

I think I must have developed some kind of body dysmorphia: I no longer trusted what I saw in the mirror because in my mind I was fat, end of, but that’s not what the mirror said and so what I was seeing must have been wrong. Body-conscious ever since, I can’t help but feel thin is more beautiful, although as I get older I know it can also be ageing. However, this view is deeply ingrained and although I would not become one of the anorexic ones at school I can easily see how it happened to others because it’s a very fine line.

One of my Italia Conti classmates was the brilliantly talented Lena Zavaroni, who died of anorexia just weeks before her thirty-third birthday, having battled the condition all her adult life. I was deeply sad when I heard the news of her death but, like everyone else who knew her, not surprised. I’d heard she got married and I hoped she had her life back in shape, but eating disorders are not always easy to defeat.

Just three weeks older than me, Lena had already won the Opportunity Knocks talent show and was a big star when she joined our class, but she wasn’t like Bonnie, who could handle her fame. Lena was very quiet (I remember her hardly ever speaking) and she always seemed to be on her own. No end of pupils were eager to be her friend because she had the two things we all craved, success and fame, but she was withdrawn and seemed to prefer her own company. Lena had an amazing voice (she was a good old-fashioned belter) but she was not cut out to be so far from her Scottish home and she didn’t fit in at a London stage school. She was very thin, with a head that looked far too big for her body, and massive hair.

I’m not blaming the school for Lena’s anorexia – there were plenty of other reasons in her sad life – but it’s easy to see how any girl might slip into an eating disorder. Somehow I managed to avoid it, although the demons still moved in and would come back to haunt me years later. It was drilled into us that how we looked and presented ourselves was very important. My friend Caroline was told she should always have a full face of make-up because you never knew when you might bump into a casting director. She was mortified one day when she finally met one and didn’t have her face on: she wanted to hide, but the woman commented on how pretty she was without make-up.

Despite the emphasis on looks, we did have one girl in my class who stuck out like a sore thumb. She had very irregular teeth: someone once described them as looking like ‘a row of bombed houses’. No one could work out why she was at stage school, but I thought I knew. ‘She’s probably here because they need people to work in horror movies,’ I explained, and I meant it sincerely, genuinely thinking this was a nice thing to say. Kids can be so cruel, but she played up to it, pulling faces to frighten us. I don’t think she stayed in the industry and I’m sure she grew up looking great because you can’t always tell what girls will look like at that age.

At Italia Conti there were boys, too, although they were far outnumbered. We locked one boy (Paul Gadd) into a darkroom with five or six of us and made him kiss us in turn. He rushed around in the dark, air-kissing everyone, but when it was my turn he tripped and fell onto me, so we did touch faces. Does that count as my first kiss? When he got to Danielle Foreman he lingered a bit too long for my liking, and that’s when they started going out together. By the way, I should explain Paul’s dad was the glam rock star Gary Glitter, which might explain why he was quite a troubled boy with a penchant for letting off fire extinguishers in ballet classes. I can remember Mr Sheward stomping through a tap class, yelling, ‘Either that boy goes or I do!’ Really, Paul was just mischievous and we all liked him.

Gary Glitter turned up and bought everything at one school fund-raising auction, which he then donated back to the school. Everyone thought, what a lovely generous man. We had absolutely no idea, and I feel sad for Paul now.

It must have been harder for the boys there. One, Peter, had a really fabulous soprano voice and he was a great dancer. Our singing teacher gave him hell one day when he was doing a solo because he started out as a soprano and ended up as a tenor – his voice was breaking. ‘Get out of here and work in Woolworths!’ he screamed, his standard threat to any of us who seemed to be not putting in enough effort.

I really want to apologise to a boy called Philip, also in our class: I’m ashamed to admit we bullied him horribly. It wasn’t done maliciously, we just thought it was funny, but that’s the thing about bullying – you don’t think how it feels to be on the receiving end. Philip was attractive (and straight) with thick curly hair, but girls of 12 or 13 don’t know how to behave around boys and just the fact he had an extra toilet part made him the focus of our attention. We’d sing ‘More Than a Woman’ from Saturday Night Fever with the words: ‘Philip’s a woman, Philip’s a woman to me …’ When it came to the ‘shuddup bah’ chorus we’d go ‘bah’ right in his face, then do jazz hands and dance around him. We were evil girls. In the end, his mum came up the school to complain about us and we were called in by the head of the academic side. We felt really bad, especially as Philip was moved to another class. It was such a female-dominated environment and all I ever wanted was to make people laugh, but how cruel it was.

We were given pep talks to prepare us for a life in show business. One really savage piece of advice was this: ‘You may think certain girls are your best friends, but they’re not really. If you are up for a part, and it’s down to the last two and it’s between you and your best friend, would you want your friend to get it?’ It was a way of preparing us for a tough business: more than once the staff told us only the tough would survive. I remember thinking, no, I wouldn’t like it if my best friend got a job I was after, but then I felt really guilty for even thinking it. Our school celebrated competitiveness, and it makes me laugh when I hear about schools nowadays where they don’t even have sports days because it’s not fair on the losers. We were bred to be competitive. But I don’t want to make the Italia Conti sound bad – I think girls in ordinary schools get just as many hang-ups, different ones sometimes. Conti’s was a fabulous place, a really good establishment for me to grow up in, and I can’t imagine enjoying another school anywhere near as much.

At first, being so small seemed a disadvantage. Often I was not selected for dancing jobs because they usually wanted all the dancers in a troupe to be roughly the same height. For acting, it turned out to be a plus, especially as I could play children until I was in my early twenties. And I loved acting the best – I like changing into someone else. Mum had set about changing me and I was happy to carry on with it; not just on stage or in front of the cameras, I was acting every day as if my life depended on it, and I was good at it.

Laura and I were two of the girls recruited by Dougie Squires (a top choreographer of the day) to be in The Mini Generation, a dance troupe. Back then, the New Generation were very big and we’d come on stage after them, a group of kids performing the same sort of dances. We’d dance to ‘Crazy Horses’ by The Osmonds, all bouncing around as if we’d been plugged into the mains, and we’d do another routine with umbrellas to a Shirley Temple song. We appeared at corporate events and were on TV a couple of times.

Laura, who was so talented, went on to dance with Hot Gossip when she was 16. She was touring the country doing raunchy dances and her mum was still sending her copies of Bunty! I remember she came back to school and seemed to have grown up – she had become sexy and glamorous. She could have been a megastar. Bonnie agrees with me that Laura was the most talented girl in our class, but she’s opted for marriage and a family instead. Who can blame her?

When it was announced in 1977 that a new production of Annie was being put on at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London with Stratford Johns and Sheila Hancock in the leads, there was a mass audition for the orphans. Literally hundreds of us kids turned up at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and queued down the street with our mums. It felt like every stage-school kid in the country was there. One by one we had to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ – quite a tricky song because there’s a real leap to get to the top note. It was a deliberate choice: they didn’t want typical performing children with their pieces all prepared, they wanted natural-sounding kids.

We were whittled down to smaller and smaller groups and then called back for the moment when they line you up and announce who has got the parts. I was to play one of the orphans, but on the first day of rehearsals I was ill and when I travelled up the next day one of the other girls told me that I hadn’t got a part after all. I was ‘alternative orphan’, which meant I had to cover performances when one of the others was away: as children we were only permitted by law to do a certain number of shows each week. I knew then what they meant when they told us at Conti’s that you really don’t have friends. Perhaps I was being over-sensitive (I’d have found out as soon as I got there that I was an alternative), but I still felt the girls who landed named parts were ever so slightly gloating.

Actually, being an alternative was harder: I did three shows a week, but had to learn different parts. After a few months I was given the role of July, one of the orphans. The lead, playing Annie, was an American girl (Andrea McCardle, who had taken the part on Broadway). When she had to go back to the States we were all in tears, begging to be pen pals. I was sticking my fingers in my eyes to make tears come – I wanted to be part of the big, over-emotional farewells going on, but even though I liked Andrea I wasn’t that attached to her.

Annie was a happy time. I remember our chaperones taking us to the first McDonald’s to open in London for Big Macs. The kids who didn’t live in the city stayed in this big flat in Kensington and we all went there for parties. There was a massive sunken bath and wallpaper with shiny silver bamboo trees on it: for a long time this was my definition of posh.

Mum and the other mothers would pick us up after the show wrapped at ten o’clock at night. She would travel on the 21 bus, often with her hair in rollers to set before work the next day. We even had a Royal Command Performance in 1978. The Queen came along the row and stopped at me, asking how old I was. Even though I could imitate Received Pronunciation perfectly well, I really couldn’t understand her strangulated vowels: to me it sounded like she was speaking Dutch or something. Every time she asked the question, I said ‘Pardon?’ It was getting embarrassing, and in the end the girl next to me said, ‘She’s just saying how old are you.’ ‘Four’een,’ I replied, managing to drop the ‘t’ out of the middle of the word.

The American directors were generous to all us kids in the show, giving us presents and jewellery, usually with a cartoon of Sandy the dog on it (I’ve kept everything to give to my daughter Beau). Sheila Hancock used to meditate before she went onstage, which I later heard her say in an interview was to help calm stage fright although she never gave any hint of nerves. She bought us all a little silver disc with ‘Annie’ on it.

I kept the bust binder that I was issued with during Annie – it was to flatten our boobs so we looked like young children. I’d wear mine all the time at school because I thought it made me look thinner.

I was in the first run for six months when I was 14 and went back into the show again at 16, playing the lead role of Annie with a different cast. Onstage, we would go into school at odd times and we were put into a classroom to catch up on our academic work because by law we had to do three hours study a day. I’d be with Laura and we’d just natter, though. There was a tutor on set for the children who couldn’t get back to their schools, but we always said we were going back. I never paid much attention to schoolwork, something I deeply regret now because there are great gaps in my education, but the performing side was so much more fun.

Yorkshire Television did a documentary about the girls at the school. Of course they were interested in Bonnie and Lena but they also followed Rudi Davies, who was the daughter of the author Beryl Bainbridge. They filmed our classes, culminating in the end-of-term production. I was in the film, though not in a central role.

Rudi went on to appear in Grange Hill, the TV series about school kids. I was chosen to be in the series but, unlike her, I didn’t have a big role and was only in three episodes. That’s where I first met Todd Carty (Tucker Jenkins), who has been a mate ever since. Filming for the part came up while Mum, Nan and Grandad were away in Spain, so I had to stay with a professional chaperone. She took the job of chaperoning very seriously and would even stand outside the loo when we were in there. Whenever Mum rang from Spain she’d stand next to me, which made it hard to say how much I was missing her without sounding as if I was complaining. I remember her rather suddenly waking me up one day by dribbling cold water onto me when I wanted to keep my head on the pillow.

When we were 17, Yorkshire Television came back to see what had happened to us all (they got us together in the pub next door to Conti’s). I was one of the ones still working, so I figured more prominently in this programme.

In 1978 there was a big event for my family: the council transferred us to a house. We’d been on the list for ages and may have told one of our ‘little fibs’ about Nan and Grandad struggling with the stairs at the flats. Anyway, it worked because we were given a three-bedroom near the Walworth Road. We almost got a maisonette in a typical seventies development – all white panels and windows, clean and new looking. I was disappointed when we didn’t get it, but the house was better in the long run.




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