Not that Kinda Girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Italia Conti was run by the Shewards, whose four children had all been taught there and now helped out: I got to know the youngest, Graham, really well. They are a brilliant family, dedicated to the school and the kids who go there. I think I was the smallest in our year, but from the beginning it worked out well for me. Even before I started full time in the summer holidays we got a call from the Conti Agency (when you attended the school you were automatically placed on the books). The BBC were casting a TV show (Ballet Shoes, based on the book by Noel Streatfeild) and they were looking for girls under 4’6” to play extras. We had to be aged 11 or over to be allowed to work, yet most girls that age were too tall. I was nearly 12, but only 4’ 21/2”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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