Not that Kinda Girl

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.