Behind the Laughter

I can’t remember now actually how much profit we made on the day but it would have been a considerable sum and everyone believed they were doing their bit for charity. I, on the other hand, had only sherbet dips on the brain and went on to stash the proceeds in my dolls’ pram together with the remains of the previous haul. Ten sherbet dips, boxes of sweet cigarettes and many packets of wagon wheels later, I was one very happy little girl.

A couple of weeks on, a friend’s mother asked Mum how much money we’d raised. Being so busy, my mother assumed that Dad had taken care of the funds. As they say, the truth will out, and so it did, big time. Everything came to light: my tea-club member scam and of course the great Oxfam scandal. Now in my eyes I wasn’t stealing: this was enterprise. With the tea club the girls got treats, and the bring-and-buy would have been potentially worthy had I remembered to send the profit to wherever it was supposed to go. In fact, I had only borrowed a bit for the sweets, which I thought was fair enough given the hard work I’d put in, but that wasn’t quite the way my mother saw it. All was paid back, my tea club closed down forever and I was never made an Ambassador for Oxfam – another lesson for this wayward child to learn.

I never was very good at practical matters, perhaps because like Dad I was a bit of a dreamer. From the earliest age I lived much of my life in a fantasy world surrounded by imaginary friends. This wasn’t because I was a lonely child or didn’t have any other children to play with; it was simply a world of my own that I loved to be in. I used to carry on conversations with people who lived under the floorboards, or in the walls or underneath my bed – I would feel them tugging at my hand or leg, or hear them knocking on the floor. I’d talk to them for hours: there would be tears and laughter and arguments. It sounds strange but it was only the same as the little plays I would write and perform in my grandma’s house. I’d be every character, changing hats and voices as I swapped sides in a conversation.

I don’t think the adults around me were aware of this private world. While many children have highly creative imaginations, sadly as we reach adulthood we leave that innocence behind. And so I kept my secret friends to myself and chatted to them when no one else was around.

We were lucky to have a television at a time when many families were unable to afford one and I loved watching the children’s programmes because they fuelled me with yet more ideas, but books were my real passion: I am a bookaholic. My dream was to one day have my own library – I’m still working on that one. Back then, I would imagine the characters jumping out of the book and me being part of their world before they disappeared back into the pages. I loved all the animated shows and cartoons: I would have liked to work in the world of animation, given the chance. I adored going to the cinema and could well believe I was up there on that screen in whatever film it was: I might be Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Alice living in Wonder-land. At one time I even wanted to be John-Boy in The Waltons although that was more to do with the big-family thing than being a boy. Later still, in my teens, I fancied being Doris Day in all those films with Rock Hudson or Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire, and then of course there was Audrey Hepburn with the wonderful Cary Grant.

Pretending to be someone else was as natural to me as breathing. I couldn’t imagine a place where I just had to be myself, and so for me it was a natural progression from a make-believe world into the exciting world of acting.

Chapter Two

When I was six we moved to a large and beautiful house in the pretty village of Burton Joyce, on the other side of Nottingham. My mother had worked hard doing up our last house: walls were knocked down to create larger rooms and she then decorated and improved before selling on for a healthy profit so we could move up in the world. Our new home was detached, double-fronted and gabled; it had its own grounds, outhouses and driveway as well as an impressive flight of steps leading up to the front door. Inside were six bedrooms and spacious living rooms, perfect for the lavish parties my parents loved to hold.

The house cost £8,000, which was a vast sum in the early fifties, but Mum and Dad worked hard and had also been enterprising, plus they’d had a major stroke of luck. My father bought a clothing firm that had gone into liquidation and he inherited all the stock, which filled ten enormous lorries. He saw an opportunity to make a lot of money selling the stock on. At this point my mother held a very senior position at the French cosmetics firm Orlane but she chose to sacrifice her career to help run the business. And so they rented a three-storey factory with a shop underneath, which they named Joy’s Boutique.

While Mum organised and ran the new shop, Dad (who could never have stayed in one place for a whole week) hired a team of people and set them up with vans full of stock to visit various markets in the country. On Saturdays I used to go with him. I loved standing behind the stall selling the clothes to shoppers, but we didn’t make as many sales as we might have because we would stop for a long breakfast on the way. Mum used to tell me, ‘Make sure your dad gets to the stall by seven – you must get there early.’ We’d both promise to do so and then Dad would drive us to his favourite transport café, where he would enjoy a full English while I had tea and baked beans. We’d tuck in and Dad would say, ‘Don’t tell your Mum.’ Afterwards he’d play the one-armed bandit while I watched and we’d eventually get to the stall around midday.

Inevitably Mum found out, probably because the takings were not what they ought to have been, but in any case Dad was bored by then and so he let other people take over that side of the business. I don’t think he was a lot of help: he would go off in search of new stock or on some other escapade, leaving Mum to do most of the work. She must have felt impatient with him because so much of the responsibility for our lives, our home and our income fell on her shoulders. They did have rows and on one occasion I remember her throwing a boiled egg at him, but it missed and hit a very hot radiator. Fortunately it was painted yellow, as the runny egg stuck like glue and stayed there for a long time.

My parents didn’t actually spend a lot of time together – at home they were often at opposite ends of the house and during the day Dad would disappear on some mission while Mum would be left running the shop. She made it into a really successful business and now not only did we live in a beautiful house with a swimming pool, stables and a mini golf course but we had a gorgeous pink and white Cresta with wings on the back, a Mercedes coupé, a violet MGB (custom-built for my mother) and a Jaguar. Little wonder I had a passion for cars when I grew older.

Mum’s determination was awesome. We always had a house full of dogs, and one day she decided to breed them. We mainly had poodles so she bred a miniature version, which turned out to be another success. I adored the poodles, especially the puppies, which I would tuck into my dolls’ pram and then pet and fuss over for hours. I’m not sure if they enjoyed this quite so much because I was fairly strict and would insist they stayed put, shoving them back into the pram whenever they dared to try and escape.

Dad was a bit of a soft touch around the poodles. When one little white puppy was born with deformed legs, the vet told us that it ought to be put down, but Dad insisted on keeping her as a family pet. We called her Dinkum and although she had to walk on her elbows she managed just fine and lived to the ripe old age of 20.

At the tender age of seven Brett was packed off to a boarding school called The Rodney, a few miles away in a village called Kirklington. I was six when he left home, and after that I only saw him when he came back for the holidays and so for much of the time I felt as if I was an only child. I missed my brother very much when he went away despite the fact that he and his friends often teased and tormented me. They were rough-and-tumble little boys and, although a bit of tomboy myself, I was an easy target. And, to compound the problem, Mum often told Brett to keep an eye on me so I had to tag along with him and his friends. Unfortunately, the ‘games’ they thought hilarious frequently left me petrified.

One day they took me to the local recreation ground, where some distance from the swings and roundabouts was a large tree covered in gruesome-looking fungus. I had been extremely wary of this tree ever since Brett had told me that the fungus was poisonous and whoever touched it would die a horrible death. Clearly desperate to dump me so they could run off and play, the boys decided to tie me to the tree. They knotted some belts and ties together and after a brief Indian war dance with plenty of whooping, they bound me to the tree. But I wasn’t touching the fungus (they had left a small gap and this meant that if I stood up straight I could avoid it) and before they ran off and left me they warned that if I shouted or struggled I would touch the fungus and die instantly.

More scared of the fungus than anything else, I stood straining at my bonds, desperately hoping they hadn’t meant it and would come back, but too scared even to shout out. It was Dad who eventually found me, what seemed like hours later. By that time my knees were sagging and I was in serious danger of collapsing against the fungus so I burst into floods of hysterical tears.

Brett couldn’t sit down for a week after that incident but it didn’t stop him from planning more assault-course tortures whenever he wanted to get rid of me. He used to climb up trees, haul me up after him and then clamber down and leave me sitting on a branch, too high up to get down on my own. Sometimes he remembered and came back for me (once after a game of football, I remember), but on other occasions he forgot all about me and it was some astonished adults passing by underneath who spotted me clinging on for dear life and helped me get down.

And it was another kind adult who came to my rescue on the day when Brett couldn’t resist pushing me, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. Mum loved to swim, and long before we moved and had a pool of our own installed she sometimes took us with her to the local pool. On this occasion, aged four, I was standing beside the pool and wearing a pretty cotton dress when Brett gave me a shove and I hit the deep end. I remember the water closing over my head as my skirt floated up around me: I sank down and down until, thankfully, strong arms grabbed me and I was hauled out, choking and spluttering.

The incident so terrified me that I could never bear having water over my head and I refused to take a shower until I was 15, prefering baths. I did eventually learn to swim but despite my best efforts, the phobia has remained with me and even now I won’t go in the sea, if I go to the beach.

Of course Brett, who was only six himself at the time, had no idea how much this would affect me. He probably didn’t even stop to wonder whether I could swim: he himself was a good swimmer and he and his friends would push one another into the pool without a second thought, to emerge laughing and splashing. I’m sure he expected me to do the same. When my father built our swimming pool in the back garden (which was in itself hilarious as he and a gang of my boyfriends dug the foundations), it was all done to the right specifications but Dad didn’t bother to seal it and although it was quite a large pool we would often come down in the morning to find half the water had disappeared. We’d fill it up again and again, but half the water would be gone by the next day – no one ever worked out where it was going. Despite this, the pool gave us a lot of joy and we had many noisy parties.

Funnily enough, my father hated water and never went swimming, so perhaps my fear was genetic and being pushed in simply made it worse. He built the pool for Mum – it was she who loved swimming – and she was an excellent swimmer and even took part in synchronised displays. You know, the kind where you put a peg on your nose and perform a graceful underwater routine in perfect synch with others.

After the swimming-pool débâcle, Brett turned his attention to acrobatics and insisted I join in as his assistant. He liked to make me stand on his shoulders or balance on his knees as he floated on his back and he would also spin me round, faster and faster, by my wrists or ankles. I was always wary of this but he was my brother and so I had no choice. Usually, I would become terrified halfway through the trick, at which point he would insist I carry on.

Things came to a head, literally, one day as I attempted to balance with one foot on his knee. I wobbled about, lost my balance and came crashing down, hitting my head against the sharp corner of a wall. My forehead was sliced open and blood gushed everywhere, but even as I sat howling with pain, I knew Brett was for it and I would get all the sympathy. Most probably terrified, he tried to mop up the blood on my face with the sleeve of his jumper. Mum came running in from the kitchen to witness this gory scene while I of course lapped up every minute of it.

She rushed me off to our local doctor, whose name happened to be Hutchinson (the same as ours). In those days you had the same doctor for most of your life and all the family went to him. As Brett cowered in the corner, the doctor cleaned me up and decided my injury looked far worse than it was. I had to have stitches, though, and I still have the scar. The doctor made sure Brett was well and truly sorry while I revelled in the drama of it all.

Although I liked our doctor (who was stern but friendly), the dentist was altogether another matter. The first time my mother took me to see him I was placed in an huge black leather chair and there were shiny instruments everywhere. A man in a white coat opened my mouth – which I closed again very sharply, catching his finger. He shouted something at me and then the next thing I knew there was a hissing sound and an enormous black mask loomed in front of me. I tried to get out of the chair but an ugly fat woman, sweating profusely, held me down and the mask was put over my face. Then came the smell of the gas – a metallic stench that made me feel quite sick.

The next thing I knew I was waking up with the fat woman poking at my shoulders. As the dentist bent down and peered at me with his foul breath and strangely bad teeth, he said, ‘Come on, girl – open your mouth,’ and tried to prise my lips apart. The projectile vomit hit first him and then the wall in front of me with such velocity that it must have been the equivalent of a turbo-charged paint stripper. Disgusted, they threw me out and told my mother not to bring her ungrateful little brat back. The whole episode was truly a Little Britain nugget.

As for Brett, he could be my tormentor but he was also the big brother who looked out for me. So when he went away looking so small in his smart red and grey uniform, with a big trunk stashed in the back of the car, I felt very sad. Without him there to thump up the stairs or shout down from the landing, the house fell silent and still. More than ever, I began to rely on my imaginary world, having endless conversations with make-believe friends.

I could have asked friends over, and sometimes I did, but mostly I played on my own. And there were always adults around: my grandparents came over a lot and often looked after me when Mum and Dad were out, but they tended to leave me to get on with my own games.

I adored my grandparents. My maternal Grandma Nancy (whom I called ‘Nanna’) was always very elegant and dressed beautifully. I remember her in a blue dress with a little collar and cuffs, pearls around her neck, her pure-white hair neatly permed. Her skin was baby-soft and remarkably unlined, probably due to the healthy additive-free food they ate plus the fact that she didn’t smoke, drink or sunbathe. She was kind and loving and adored dancing, while Granddad was tall, creative and very emotional.

When I stayed with them for dinner Nanna always gave Granddad his meal first. Like the three bears, he would have the biggest dinner, then Nanna and then me. If it happened to be something I really liked, such as mashed potato, I would look longingly over at Granddad’s huge portion until Nanna went out to the kitchen, whereupon he would quickly spoon some of his mash onto my plate and wink at me as she came back in. I loved their bed: it was a proper sprung one and when you were in it you rolled into the middle. And I also adored their open coal fire – I have lovely memories of nestling in Granddad’s lap in my woolly dressing gown on a winter’s night and listening to the sounds of Nanna knitting, the fire crackling and cheeky schoolboy Jimmy Clitheroe on the radio.

Mum was always close to her parents so they came to us almost every weekend and often I would go to their house in the school holidays when she had to work. Nanna and Granddad also came with us to our caravan, which was on a permanent site on the East Coast, between Skegness and Mablethorpe. I absolutely loved that caravan: to me, it seemed the perfect home with everything we needed packed neatly into tiny spaces and seats that turned into beds at night. For me, it was heaven – a proper grown-up dolls’ house.

Later, we started to go abroad for holidays and Mum once drove the pink-and-white Cresta all the way to Spain – which took a few days and was quite something then. We used to go and stay in Tossa de Mar, north of Barcelona. At that time it was just a small village with one hotel so they certainly hadn’t seen anything like this enormous flashy car with wings on the back driving into the little sandy bay. I think they believed we were aliens because the villagers would simply stand and stare. Our hotel was a gorgeous 1920s building, very glamorous, which was used as a location in an Ava Gardner film. I’m glad I got to see Spain when it was so unspoilt.

When we moved to our house in Burton Joyce, I had to leave Dorothy Grants (which was some distance away) and instead was enrolled in the little village primary school, where I stayed until I was 11. Though saddened to leave the school where I’d been so happy, one consolation was the fact that we now had stables at our house and I soon developed a life-long passion for horses. Indeed, I was crazy about them and lucky enough to have a horse of my own. My first horse was a sturdy mountain pony called Tinto, a bay with a black stripe down his back, and I loved him dearly. Patient and friendly, I felt he was my best friend and, yes, I would talk to him for hours. On very hot days he would sometimes lie down in the paddock behind the house and I would go and lie on his tummy.

I quickly learned to ride, and before I turned 7, I was a competent bareback rider, using only a rope halter and no rein. By then I thought nothing of going off alone on Tinto – in fact, I would often ride him down to the village shop, buy some sweets while he waited patiently outside and then ride back.

When I was 10 my parents took me to visit one of their clothing suppliers, a lady who lived in a village some distance away. She showed me the paddock behind her house and introduced me to her little racing pony, Whiskey. He was very young and hadn’t yet got used to a saddle but she let me ride him and we got along fine. Of course I fell in love and begged my parents to buy him for me. Generously, they agreed, and Mum said we could come back the following day with the horsebox to take him home. Typical me, I was having none of it: I didn’t want to wait, I was eager to take him home right away.

‘I’ll ride him home,’ I announced.

‘But it’s 22 miles,’ countered Mum. ‘That’s too far for you and for the pony.’

I wasn’t giving up, though, and eventually my parents agreed to let me ride him home, with them following behind in the car. We did it, but what a crazy stunt – it took so long that it grew dark. Whiskey and I plodded along in the car’s headlights. Home at last, Whiskey was bedded down in the stable, thankfully none the worse for his adventure because a ride that long might have damaged his legs. As for me, I was jubilant at having made it back with him, but completely exhausted.

The next day I set out to introduce Whiskey to Tinto (who was in the field behind the stables). As we approached, Tinto looked round at Whiskey and then at me. Nostrils flared and eyes blazing, he began galloping towards us. I backed out of the field fast! Tinto was jealous and most definitely not coming over to make friends with Whiskey. In fact, I think he had murder on his mind.

From then on, Tinto was like a spoilt child whose nose has been put out of joint. He was so aggressive towards Whiskey that it was months before we could put them in the field together. When we eventually did so, Whiskey held his own with Tinto (who stopped trying to bully him) and the two became partners in crime. Together, they escaped from their field and destroyed the graveyard next door, something that got them – and us – into all sorts of trouble.

One evening, a couple of years after I got Whiskey, I was mucking out in the stable when I heard a loud thud, followed by a deep shudder and sigh.

‘What was that?’ I asked the friend who was with me, too scared to look.

‘It’s Whiskey,’ she told me, after peering into his stable. ‘He’s lying on the ground and he doesn’t look right.’

I rushed in to find Whiskey lying down, which was unusual as horses seldom do this. Immediately, I convinced myself that he had a twisted gut (which can be fatal) and so I ran back to the house to phone the vet, certain my beloved pony was dying. The vet told me that he wouldn’t be able to come out for some time and so I settled down to wait beside Whiskey, gently placing an arm around him and resting my head on one side of his rib cage. He remained perfectly still, not moving a muscle, and after what seemed hours I fell asleep and was oblivious to Mum, who came in every now and then to check on us.

When the vet eventually arrived, early the next morning, I got up to tell him what had happened, and to my amazement Whiskey suddenly stirred, blew through his nose and got up.

After looking him over, the vet said: ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this horse.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘He was so ill and he didn’t move a muscle all night.’

‘How could he?’ he laughed. ‘You were lying on top of him and he was clearly too much of a gentleman to disturb you.’

I was so happy to learn that Whiskey was fine that I didn’t even mind feeling a complete idiot for calling out the vet to a horse who was apparently just taking a nap.

Not only was Whiskey totally fine, he continued to be in the best of health for the next few years. I rode both him and Tinto almost daily, rushing in after school to see them and take them treats. And I was a totally fearless rider: I loved jumping and would career around the paddock, going over our homemade jumps or take off for long rides in the local lanes.

Sadly, my riding career came to an abrupt end when I was 16 years old and had an accident on Tinto. He had a bad habit of stopping every now and then, lowering his head so that I slid off down his neck. He’d done this a few times, but never when he was moving fast, and so I’d simply scold him and climb back on. This time, though, we were riding by the river when something spooked him. From a gentle trot, he launched into a madcap gallop but suddenly stopped and lowered his head so that I shot straight off him and hit the ground hard. I might have got away with a few nasty bruises, had my foot not been caught up in the stirrup. Meanwhile, Tinto took off again, dragging me along the ground with him. No doubt realising something was wrong, he didn’t go far, and once he’d stopped I was able to disentangle myself.

I was hurting all over but somehow I managed to get hold of the reins. Limping and in pain, I very slowly and carefully led him home. Once he was safely in his stable, I told Mum what had happened and she took me to the doctor. Luckily, no bones were broken: I was just grazed, battered and bruised. Unfortunately the accident made me fearful in a way I’d never been before, and although I did ride again I was never able to recapture the same fearless joy. Now I was cautious and the horses could smell my fear and subsequently played up.