Cheryl: My Story

One time Andrew and Gillian got caught smoking behind my Nana’s settee. They’d taken her ashtray and lit the old cigarette ends. My dad saw the smoke coming from behind the settee and went crazy. Gillian and Andrew were only small at the time so it must have been quite a few years before, but memories like that came back to me as I lay in my bed in the dormitory, feeling a million miles away from home.

I thought about my school as well. I went to St Lawrence’s Roman Catholic Primary, even though we weren’t Catholics. It was just down the road from our house and had a very good reputation; that’s why Mam and Dad sent us there. I loved it, and I’d even asked Mam if I could take my Holy Communion like the other girls because I wanted to wear the white dress and gloves. ‘You can decide your own religion when you’re old enough,’ Mam told me. Our head teacher was a nun and I felt peaceful in that school, and like I belonged. I had a go at playing the cello, the clarinet and the flute. It was fun and easy and not strict.

Mam would walk us to school every morning and I remember one day she suddenly made us stop in the street.

‘Look! There’s a hedgehog stuck down there!’

I peered down and saw this huge hedgehog completely wedged at the bottom of an open manhole. Mam made us run home and fetch a bucket and spade and rubber gloves, which we used to rescue it. We then took the hedgehog to the park to set it free. We were late for school but my mam explained what had happened and we didn’t get into trouble.

Joe was the one who usually got into trouble, not the rest of us. There’d often be a knock on the door and a neighbour would be standing there fuming and telling my mam: ‘Your son’s bashed my son.’

He was just like many of the other teenagers in the neighbourhood and Mam would wallop Joe when he misbehaved, even though she is only four-foot ten. I couldn’t remember a time when my big brother wasn’t taller than her, in fact. Mam was pretty strong for her size and we all got smacked by my mother when we were naughty, usually on the back of the legs. It always stung like mad and I remember we’d threaten to phone ChildLine whenever that happened, though we were never serious.

My dad would be more likely to shout when things went wrong, like the time when Joe broke his leg after getting drunk and falling down an open drain. Dad exploded and shouted really loudly, and I had to put my hands over my ears.

It was chaos a lot of the time, but it was home, and it was all I knew. Lying in this neat and quiet dormitory, surrounded by girls who wore Alice bands and spoke like the Queen, made it seem like Newcastle was in another world, or even another universe.

On my last day at the Royal Ballet my mam came to watch the farewell presentation. I was that happy to see her sitting there amongst all the other mothers that I couldn’t help waving and grinning at her. All the rest of the girls stood like little statues, as we’d been told to do, but I was so excited I just couldn’t help myself. Even when Mam tried shaking her head and mouthing at me nervously to stop, I carried on.

‘How could they all stand there like that?’ I asked her later that day, when we were finally heading home.

I’d skipped out of the gates as fast as I could, absolutely delighted to be getting out of that stuffy place.

‘It’s called etiquette,’ Mam said.

‘Pardon?’ I replied, not for the first time that day. I could see that word was annoying my mam but I couldn’t help using it, because it had been drummed into me all week.

‘Cheryl, if you pardon me once more I swear I’ll knock your block off,’ Mam replied. She wasn’t joking, either, but I was so happy to be back with my mam. It had felt like I’d been away forever, and I just wanted to get back to everything I knew and loved.

‘I want to give up ballet,’ I announced just a few days later, when I was eating a packet of crisps at home in front of the telly. ‘It’s not fun any more.’

‘That’s fine, Cheryl,’ Mam said. ‘If you don’t like it you don’t have to do it. That’s the end of it.’

I didn’t give up dancing altogether. I still did some other classes, but not as regularly, and definitely not as passionately.

I was in my last year of primary school by now, and so it was inevitable that my life was changing in other ways too. I was about to leave St Lawrence’s and go to Walker School. I was growing up, and it was a little bit daunting, but exciting too.

There was also another big change about to happen in my life, although this was one I definitely didn’t see coming. I was eleven years old; I can remember the day it happened like it was yesterday.

‘Tell me the truth! What the hell is happening? What’s going on?’

It was Andrew, and he’d burst in the front door in a terrible rage. I’d never, ever seen him in such a state and he started ranting and raving at my mam and dad. They both looked really worried and my heart started beating super fast in my chest.

‘I’ll explain it,’ Mam said. Her eyes looked sad and she had deep frown lines in her forehead. Dad had gone all quiet, which panicked me, as normally he’d have gone mad at Andrew for shouting and screaming like that.

The atmosphere felt much more chaotic than I’d ever known. It was like a big bomb had gone off. I didn’t know how or why, but it felt like another bomb was going to explode any moment.

‘Is Dad my real dad?’ Andrew screamed in my mam’s face. I swear the clock stopped for a second when he said that.

‘I want to know the truth – all of it!’

Andrew was shaking now, and shouting that someone had told him in the street that my dad wasn’t his real dad. He’d asked my aunty if it was true.

‘How do you know?’ my aunty had said. ‘You’d better ask your mam!’

Andrew was going so berserk that he looked like a crazy person, but however mad he looked, this was sounding horribly realistic.

I was listening to every word, trying to make some sense of it all, but I wasn’t sure what the truth was, or why this was happening. Gillian was in the room, and she was going mental now too.

‘Sit down, everyone,’ my mam said eventually. ‘Will everyone calm down and sit down, please!’

We all sat round the kitchen table: me, Mam, Dad, Gillian and Andrew. My dad looked absolutely shell-shocked, I was sitting there panicking so much I wanted to be sick and Gillian and Andrew were still shouting and just going into meltdown.

‘Be quiet and let me tell you,’ Mam said, shushing Gillian and Andrew. At last there was silence, total silence, and Mam spoke softly.

‘I was 21 when we met, me and your dad.’ Mam nodded towards my dad, to make it clear she was talking about him. ‘I already had Joe, and you two.’ She looked at Gillian and Andrew now, but not at me. My brother’s and sister’s eyes were on stalks, bulging out of their heads.

‘I was married to your dad, to your real dad,’ she told them. ‘But we broke up not long after we had you both. Andrew was only a baby. Your dad, Garry, was very young when I met him. He was 17. And he took me on, with three kids. Then we had Cheryl and Garry together.’

Mam took a deep breath and we all just stared at her.

I think it took us all a few minutes to take in what she had said. What she was telling us was that Joe, Gillian and Andrew were only my half siblings.

‘Is that what you mean?’ I asked her once I finally felt able to speak. ‘Gillian and Andrew aren’t my real brother and sister? They have a different dad to me and Garry?’

Gillian and Andrew were asking loads of questions too, shouting and stomping around the room. I don’t know where Garry was, but he was only seven at the time so was too young to hear all this anyway.

‘Our Cheryl and our Garry are only our half brother and half sister?’ Gillian screeched. ‘Is that what you’re telling us, after all these years?’

‘Yes,’ Mam said, in a quiet but firm voice.

My dad had lost all the colour from his face. ‘When did you and Mam get married?’ I asked him.

‘Actually,’ he replied, looking anxiously at my mam. ‘We’re not married.’

I think it was the first time he had spoken. I was stunned into silence again, but Andrew was shouting and getting more and more angry.

‘How come we’re all called Tweedy then?’

‘Well, your mam just uses my name, so we’re all the same.’

‘The same?’ Gillian screamed. ‘I don’t think so!’

I can remember a lot of sadness, falling right down on us like it came out of the ceiling and just surrounded the whole family. Andrew and Gillian’s faces were filled with confusion; devastation, in fact. They were asking more and more questions and shouting and screaming a lot, at each other and at my mam and dad. I was just staring at my dad and thinking, ‘How could you know all these years and say nothing? How can this possibly be?’

I don’t think anyone got an explanation as to why this secret had been kept for so long; at least I certainly don’t remember hearing one.

Garry doesn’t remember any of this chaos at all, and Joe wasn’t there either. When I thought about it later, I wondered if Joe already knew, or had at least suspected something. I mean, I eventually worked out that my dad would have been about 13 when Joe was born, as my dad was four years younger than my mam. Maybe Joe had worked things out for himself already.

At this point Joe was 18 and my dad was 32. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember Joe being a part of that day. Maybe he just didn’t need to hear this.

‘I’m going and I’m never coming back,’ Gillian yelled. She slammed the front door so hard I was afraid the glass in the windows would break, and I started to cry.

Gillian had gone from being my sister to my half sister to not being there at all in the space of about 30 minutes. The police came knocking on the door later that day and I remember seeing nothing but anxiety etched on my mam and dad’s faces for a very long time. Gillian didn’t come home that night or the night after that and soon the days became weeks. I felt sick with worry every day, from the minute I opened my eyes in the morning until I eventually fell asleep, exhausted, hours and hours after getting into bed and staring at Gillian’s empty bunk bed each night.

Joe was out looking for her every day and night, going crazy. He used to fight with Gillian a lot and they had some terrible arguments in their time, but if anyone or anything outside the family threatened her he was on it, straight away. He was combing the streets, doing all he could to track her down. He always had that same super-protective attitude towards all of us.

Joe eventually found Gillian after six weeks of sheer hell at home. She’d been staying with a friend and I heard she had taken drugs, trying to block out what had happened. Joe literally barged into the friend’s house, got hold of Gillian like his arms were a straitjacket and carried her home, kicking and screaming.

‘I’ve met my real dad,’ I heard Gillian tell my mam. ‘I’m gonna keep in touch with him.’

He was called Tony and lived not far from us in Newcastle but Mam had not kept in touch with him after they got divorced, which was about 13 or 14 years earlier. I don’t know how she found him, but Gillian had marched right up to his front door and hammered on it until a woman answered.

‘Is Tony there?’

‘Who’s asking?’

‘His daughter. Who are you?’

‘His wife. You’d better come in.’

Gillian was 15 years old when she did that – maybe the worst age possible for something like this to have happened. It must have been a terrible ordeal for her, but she waited for Tony to get home from work and met him that same day. It turned out he was a tattoo artist, which fascinated us all when we found that out, because Joe had always been very artistic and amazing at drawing cartoons. We’d often said: ‘I wonder where he gets that from?’ and now we knew.

‘You’ll have to meet my dad,’ Gillian told me. ‘You won’t believe it. He looks exactly like our Andrew.’

‘So … do you like him?’

‘I think I will.’

I didn’t know what to say or how to react. It was a hell of a lot to take in. I’d suffered major anxiety when Gillian was missing and now I began to worry constantly about everything, every day.

Andrew started running away a lot too, and whenever the police knocked on the door I’d panic, imagining all kinds. I was aware that Andrew had started sniffing glue, though I couldn’t tell you exactly when his habit started, or whether it was already a problem before the bomb went off in the family. All I know is that I’d lie in bed waiting for him to come home, not being able to sleep until I knew he was safely back in the house. I’d look out of the window, watching for him coming up the street, sometimes right through until five or six o’clock in the morning. When it was time for school I could never get up.

‘Are you awake, Cheryl?’ Mam would shout. ‘Yes, but I’m just resting my eyes,’ I always replied. I was late and tired all the time.

One night, Andrew had been out with no key and so he smashed a window to get back in. I nearly jumped out of my skin, and I listened as a huge row kicked off between him and my dad.

I didn’t care about the shouting; I was just glad Andrew was home, even though the whole house started to stink of glue once he was inside. The fumes rose up the stairs and hung in the air, and to this day I still feel sick at the smell of glue.

‘Get to bed, go on with you!’ Mam would shout, and I’d lie there wide awake and on red alert for a long time after the house fell quiet.

This wasn’t the first time Andrew had been in trouble. He was done for thieving when he was 13, which was a year or so before all this kicked off with my mam and dad, but to be honest I don’t really remember that being a big hoo-hah. The bizzies, as we usually called the police, were always knocking on doors all over our estate. If someone got arrested or even sent to prison the neighbours were more inclined to sympathise and ask if there was anything they could do to help the family, rather than to judge or look down their noses at you. It was practically an everyday occurrence, which must be why Andrew’s early problems with the police really didn’t stick in my mind.

‘Who’s that now?’ I remember my mam snapping whenever the police hammered on the door.

‘Can’t you tell?’ I always thought, because to my ears the ‘bizzie knock’ was instantly recognisable. It always made my nerves tense and my stomach sink as I wondered what would happen next.

Andrew became more and more volatile and unpredictable after he found out about his real dad, and before long he was completely unrecognisable as my funny brother who used to tell silly, exaggerated stories and make us all laugh.

‘I got struck by lightning,’ he told us once, when he came home soaking wet in a rainstorm at the age of about 10. ‘Really, Andrew?’ we all asked. ‘Really,’ he replied with wide, serious eyes. I remember we all laughed our heads off because he actually thought we would believe him, but that Andrew just seemed to vanish from our family, almost overnight.

My mam and dad split up not long after the family history had been laid bare. My dad had an affair and my mam tried to take him back, but they couldn’t make it work any more. I was still only 11 years old and that’s about all I knew. Mam went absolutely crazy for what felt like a long, long time, understandably so with all the trauma she had gone through. She was still only in her mid-thirties but the stress of bringing up five kids on her own, with the police banging at the door all the time, must have been very hard to cope with.

It was around this time when I first noticed my mam starting to become what you might call ‘spiritual’. She was always floating round the house being unbelievably calm when all hell was breaking loose, saying stuff like: ‘things happen for a reason’ and ‘live one day at a time, that’s all anyone can do’. Even if there was absolute hell going on in the house, with Andrew off his head on glue, ranting and raving, she’d stay incredibly calm.

Mam’s got lots of sisters and sometimes I’d hear her saying to one of my aunties, ‘Eee, there’s no good telling the kids what to do or they just want to do it more, don’t they? What can you do but hope they’ll grow out of it?’

When Andrew was 15 he stabbed someone in a fight. This guy had punched Gillian in the face in a pub and so he stabbed him. That’s what Gillian told me when she eventually came home, crying and in a terrible state, and without my brand-spanking-new trainers she’d borrowed from me that night.

‘Sorry about your trainers, Cheryl,’ she sobbed.

‘When will I get them back?’ I moaned, telling her I wished I hadn’t lent them to her because I wanted to wear them that weekend.

‘The police took them away for forensics. They got splattered with blood. Could be six months.’

‘What? They’ll be out of fashion by then. Anyway, as if I’d want them, after they’ve had blood on them.’

I was 12 years old and by now I was well used to Andrew being arrested regularly for thieving and stealing cars. That meant the seriousness of what he had done this time round didn’t hit me at all until I saw the rest of the family just crumbling in front of me. Everyone was in pieces and it was so painful to see. Mam cried a lot. People were talking about sentences and prison, and I was lying awake yet again, worrying myself sick.

‘We’ll go and visit him as much as we can,’ my mam said after the court case. ‘He’ll not serve the full sentence years, I’m sure.’

I hoped not. My brother had been sentenced to six years and was being locked up in a young offenders’ institution to start with as he was too young for an adult prison. I’d be 18 by the time he was released, so I felt like part of my childhood was taken away that day too.

By now Joe had left home and me, my mam, Gillian and Garry had moved into a three-storey house in Langhorn Close, Heaton, which was not far from our old family home in Byker.

Once a week I’d pop over and see my dad. I’d either get a bus over to his new house, which wasn’t far away, or I’d see him at my Nana’s. There was never any formal arrangement in place or anything like that; I was old enough to see him whenever I wanted to. Whatever my mam thought of my dad after their split, she never tried to poison our minds against him and I don’t really remember my relationship with my dad changing that much; he just didn’t live with us like he used to. ‘Want to listen to some Level 42?’ he’d ask, just as he used to when he lived with us.

It was my relationship with my mam that changed more, probably because she altered so much in herself. Without Dad there, I think me and Mam started to become closer, like friends as well as mother and daughter, and it’s more or less stayed that way ever since.

***

Throughout all this upheaval I carried on dancing every week. Whatever was going on in the rest of my life I always smiled when I was performing. It wasn’t my way of escaping the bad things that happened at home or anything as deep as that; dancing was just a part of my life I really enjoyed, while the family problems were something I accepted and got on with, because I had no choice and that was the way it was.

‘There’s a panto coming up, I’m gonna audition,’ I said to my mam one day.

‘That’s nice. We’ll go and see Andrew after.’

I’d go on my own to shows and auditions now, taking buses or getting lifts from other parents, because Mam couldn’t drive and we never had a car. Sometimes I’d still be in a sparkly costume when we visited Andrew in the young offenders’ institution. It was like a kind of foster home, with a lounge and a place you could play pool, but I knew Andrew was locked in his bedroom at night, which was a horrible thought.

‘Tell Andrew about your next show,’ Mam would say. She never seemed to get upset, blame Andrew or ask him why he had committed crimes, and we’d just talk about normal stuff, as if we were sitting in the kitchen at home like we used to.

‘It’s a panto but I haven’t got the part yet. I’ve made up my own dance routine, though, and I’ve done a tape of the music for the audition.’

‘What have you picked, Cheryl?’ Andrew asked.

‘“No Limit”, from 2 Unlimited. I got it off one of them “Best of” tapes my dad got me for Christmas. You know the one: “No, no, no, no, no, no, there’s no limit!”’

I sang the words a bit too loudly, which made everyone smile. Then we said our goodbyes and went home to have chips and egg for our tea. With Andrew inside, life seemed a lot more simple, and once I got used to the idea of him being away, I was glad I didn’t have to worry about what he was getting up to or what time he would come home.

‘Good luck, Cheryl,’ Andrew said, and I told him I didn’t need luck. ‘Thanks,’ I shrugged. ‘If I don’t get this one I’ll get another one.’ My belief that I was going to succeed as a performer was the one constant in my life. It was not a question of ‘if’ I was going to make it, just ‘when’.

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