Not that Kinda Girl

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.