Читать книгу Lorraine - Neil Simpson - Страница 6

‘Our next flat was luxury – it had an inside loo!’

Lorraine Kelly wasn’t supposed to be born in a tenement block deep in the heart of Glasgow’s infamous Gorbals estate. The tiny, one-room flat had no hot running water and the only toilet was several flights of stairs away in the brick-strewn backyard. Her parents, Anne and John, had moved in as seventeen-year-old newly-weds planning to use it as a stepping-stone to better things. They were so thrilled to be starting their new lives together that they didn’t care about their surroundings. So what if most of the people on the local streets looked as if they had just been released from the nearby Barlinnie prison? So what if the south side of the River Clyde had already become one of Europe’s biggest and most depressing slums? The Kellys were going to ignore all of that and turn their Ballater Street flat into the happiest and safest home in the city – and they succeeded.

John was an apprentice at a local electrical repair firm, specialising in televisions. There was plenty of work to be done and he was prepared to put in as many hours as necessary to learn the skills and make a success of his job. Televisions in the late 1950s were huge, unreliable and exciting beasts. John was going to have fun trying to tame them. Meanwhile, Anne had just got a job in a department store in the city centre – it was hard on the feet but it was a great place to spend the day. Always sociable, always ready with a smile and a laugh, she thrived on the relationships she was building up with her colleagues and customers.

Back in Ballater Street in the evenings the newly-weds couldn’t have been happier. They shared the stories of their days and dreamed big dreams for the future. Elvis and Bobby Darin were on the radio and Britain finally seemed ready to break out of its endless post-war gloom. The country was even taking on Hollywood with its own film-star heart-throb – a handsome young singer going by the name of Cliff Richard, who Anne had little idea she would one day get to meet alongside her grown-up daughter. As the months passed Anne and John saved up enough to buy some better furniture and even had the occasional night out.

They also bought and borrowed a surprisingly large collection of books. Both were big readers, happily alternating from popular fiction to the classics – and while many of their books were second-or even third-hand, none were ever thrown away. Married life was good and their tenement block flat had indeed turned into a happy home for two. But, of course, the couple weren’t to stay on their own for long. Within six months of getting married and walking up the stairs to the flat, Anne realised she was pregnant – she hadn’t even turned eighteen. Looking back she says she was surprised, scared and excited all at once, and fortunately, John was thrilled. Neither of them had planned to start a family so soon, especially while in their tiny first home when money was still so tight, but they vowed to make it work.

As 1959 drew to a close the doctors said the Kelly’s baby might be born on New Year’s Day, the first day of the new decade and a true child of the sixties. But Anne started to feel labour pains a lot sooner. Her waters broke on the last day of November and she was rushed to Glasgow’s Rottenrow Maternity Hospital. The same day, 30 November 1959, she gave birth to a daughter weighing just four and a half pounds – a child the family wanted to call Winifred. ‘It was Winston Churchill’s birthday,’ she remembers. ‘And my mother thought Winifred would be a fitting name to honour him with.’

But was that really the right name for the tiny little girl asleep in her mother’s arms? Her parents decided it wasn’t. Their daughter was to be Lorraine Kelly – and she has never stopped thanking them for the decision. ‘They reckon you grow into your name, but I don’t think I would have ever grown into a Winifred,’ she said years later, when the near miss had become a long-standing family joke.

Astrologers suggest that Winifred Kelly could still have been an entertainer, however, because they say 30 November 1959 was the perfect day for a future celebrity to be born – even one with a ridiculous first name. A combination of Mars and Scorpio gave her a ‘super-trouper showbiz aspect’ according to one reading Winifred had, while the linking of the sun, the moon and Jupiter meant a fun-loving but frank Sagittarian mentality. She would be the kind of person to soldier on no matter what, often putting her own needs and feelings last to please others. ‘Giving, generous and loyal, but not someone who suffers fools gladly – Mercury in Scorpio hinting of an acid tongue when crossed,’ said another reading.

Lorraine also had a clear sense of humour from the start. ‘I was a month early and weighed only four and a half pounds, but I’ve been making up for it ever since,’ she jokes about her birth.

After leaving Rottenrow and heading back into the Gorbals the Kelly family tried to adapt their tiny flat to their new situation. Anne and John slept in a slightly recessed area set into the wall of the one main room, Lorraine in a tiny cot right next to them. She learned to walk and talk surrounded by love and family. There was poverty all around them, but there were few happier or more cared-for babies.

* * * * *

When Lorraine was two her parents had finally saved up enough money for a move – they headed out to a new flat in Bridgeton, just a little further along the River Clyde. ‘It was luxury because it had an inside loo,’ Lorraine remembers, though she is keen to play down just how bad things had been in her childhood. ‘When I told one woman that I had spent the first two years of my life in the Gorbals before moving to Bridgeton, she thought I was talking Angela’s Ashes. I can assure you it wasn’t like that,’ she says. ‘In reality, it was a very ordinary, working-class environment. We weren’t well-off but we were better off than some, and we certainly weren’t so poor that we had to eat gravel.’

While Bridgeton was also one of the most disadvantaged areas in the country, Lorraine says it was still a wonderful place to live. ‘There were a lot of big families around, the kind who were very, very poor so yes there was a lot of poverty around us. But it was such a great community atmosphere where everyone helped everyone else,’ she recalls. It is the kind of spirit that she wishes could be replicated across all of the country today.

The Kelly clan in particular enjoyed nearly a decade of happy, stable years in their flat by the Clyde. Lorraine says her dad was always a grafter, and that she learned her own strong work ethic from his example. By the time she was ready to go to school, he was a fully qualified television repairman, and with ITV establishing itself as a huge rival to the BBC, and Coronation Street already becoming a national obsession demand for sets was rising as fast as people’s incomes would allow. John worked long hours, aiming to set up his own business and dreaming of a better home even further from the hard heart of Glasgow.

The whole family was in for a shock, though. When Lorraine was six her mother became pregnant again and ultimately gave birth to a happy baby boy, Graham. As the elder sister, Lorraine found she was no longer the centre of her family’s universe – and she is happy to admit that she didn’t like it. ‘It really was a shock to my system and it was certainly strange to have someone else around,’ she says. ‘I had been the princess until this point. But then along came this beautiful baby boy – and I do mean beautiful. He had blond hair, blue eyes, skin like a peach and he was adorable – people used to stop us in the street just to look at him and ask who he was. I remember him lying on the couch with cushions all around him, enjoying a tiny bottle with a teat on – full of orange juice – and me taking it and drinking it dry.’

That turned out to be just the first of many ‘battles’ the brother and sister would fight – though both would one day regret all the early tensions that arose between them. ‘At first I just treated Graham like a dolly, as any six-year-old girl would. But then I got bored with him. When he got a little older we just didn’t get on at all and we fought like cat and dog. I get cross with myself when I think about it because he was a really nice wee guy.’

At the time, though, Lorraine had other things to worry about. The woman who would spend so much of her career talking about weight, diet and body image was getting an early taste of how others saw the subject. ‘When I was growing up it was considered really healthy for a child to have chubby cheeks and a fat little body. A sign of good manners was cleaning your plate – and my mum made the best food in the world. Asking for seconds was a sign of being a growing lass – and that was a good thing because I certainly grew. I devoured more than my fair share of pies, cakes and sweeties, as well as my mum’s famed mince and potatoes.’

* * * * *

Away from home, however, Lorraine wasn’t given an easy time, however. Contemporaries say her first nickname at school was ‘Fat Belly Kelly’ and she faced some low-level bullying and backchat for another reason as well. ‘I got the mickey taken out of me for being a “poshie” because I was always well turned out for school and sometimes got battered because of it,’ she remembers. In the afternoons she also went to ballet class and, amazing as it now seems, she remembers herself as being shy and even tongue-tied.

School was still the focus of her life – because her parents had always been focused on education. Anne didn’t work while the children were very young and she was determined to prepare them for life’s challenges. ‘She stayed at home and played with us. She encouraged us in everything, but not in a pushy, hot-house kind of way. I could read and write by the time I was four and I would just eat books from then on,’ Lorraine says.

Their grandmother, Margaret McMahon, was equally influential. She had a favourite book that she passed on to the young Lorraine. Called Van Loon’s Lives and written in 1943, it tells the life stories of great historical figures and describes imaginary dinner parties between them. Lorraine read and reread it endlessly, finding herself hugely inspired by the stories. And when she was ready to read other things she had plenty of choices. ‘Granny had hundreds of books and had instilled a great love of reading and letter-writing in my mother. Mum writes wonderful, mad letters and she then passed that habit on to me,’ she says. This love of words would ultimately lead to a passion for news – and to Lorraine’s desire to defy her working-class upbringing and become a journalist.

Before then she was also having her eyes opened to the world beyond their tough Glasgow suburb – through the power of television. ‘We were one of the first people in our block of flats to ever have a colour television,’ Lorraine says, though in truth this was more to do with her father’s job than the fact that they had any more money than anyone else. One of the shows she and her dad were often glued to while Anne looked after Graham was Star Trek – which first aired in the UK in 1969. Having been given a telescope for her fifth birthday, Lorraine happily admits she had a real daddy’s girl and tomboy phase – and while she grew out of that she never lost her love of astronomy and sci-fi. Nearly forty years later her producers on GMTV weren’t quite sure if she would pull on a tight, shiny Star Trek jumpsuit to film a mock episode with a bunch of die-hard fans. As it turned out she couldn’t agree quickly enough.

Another hobby she shared with her dad as a child would also last a lifetime. He took her on a day trip to the Andersonian Museum in Glasgow, where she saw an Emperor penguin egg and started to dream that one day she would visit Antarctica. Again, four decades later she would be ready to jump at the chance to do just that.

* * * * *

When Lorraine was fourteen the Kelly family were finally ready to move again. They headed a few more miles south to East Kilbride, the fast-growing overspill town designed to offer a fresh start to families from Glasgow’s inner city. While it never had the cachet of other new towns like Bournville or Welwyn Garden City, it was everything that the Kellys had been hoping to find. ‘I had a smashing time living there. We had a lovely, lovely house and I had great pals. It was brilliant,’ Lorraine remembers.

Having more space was wonderful – for the first time the family had a house with a garden rather than a tiny flat without even a window box. But Graham says he and his sister still struggled to get along – though he proves that Lorraine had already discovered the gift of the gab that would make her fortune. ‘We were always fighting as children and I couldn’t really compete because she would talk rings round me. Who watched what on the telly was always a sore point: I’d want to watch cartoons, she’d want Top Of The Pops, probably because she was such a big David Bowie fan.’

Hard as it might be to imagine today, Lorraine also had a year-long phase as a black-clad and gloomy Goth – though she also admits under pressure that ‘Maggie May’ by Rod Stewart was the first record she bought when she was twelve. The family went to huge efforts to celebrate birthdays with big parties for friends and neighbours, but at Christmas Lorraine and Graham again proved how different they were. ‘On Christmas morning we always had a Cadbury Dairy Milk selection and I – greedy pig – would eat the whole box before lunchtime, whereas Graham would have one chocolate and put the rest away. It was the same with pocket money: I would spend it as soon as I got it and he would save it,’ she remembers.

But for all the minor battles and differences a near tragedy was about to bring brother and sister closer together. A couple of years later, a second crisis would reinforce this closeness, putting down the foundations for a deep friendship that now shows no sign of ending. The first incident happened just outside the family’s new home when Graham was eight and Lorraine fourteen. ‘We were all outside playing and Graham just stepped on to the street and this car, speeding, came from nowhere and hit him,’ says Lorraine. ‘He could have died – he was very seriously injured with a broken leg and internal injuries. It brought it home to me that I really did love him.’

‘Lorraine was the first person on the scene to help,’ Graham says. ‘She was banging on the car bonnet in hysterics because I was half under the car. I was very badly injured and in a state of shock. Lorraine accompanied me to the hospital, where I had to have my spleen removed, and she was so upset because I think she knew how close I had come to being killed.’

The next wake-up call came when Graham was eleven and Lorraine was a self-confessed stroppy teenager on babysitting duty. Graham, who had always suffered from asthma, had one of his biggest attacks to date, forcing Lorraine to phone the doctor’s and to try and comfort him until he had been given a nebuliser and an injection of adrenaline to calm the fit. Once more, the crisis made her realise how much she would miss him if he wasn’t around – though once again she made sure she didn’t show it.

‘Graham had pretty good teenage years without too much angst but I went through the usual phase of “hating” everybody, like Harry Enfield’s teenage character. But we obviously had strong feelings for one another, which is probably why we used to fight so much. I only started to appreciate how special Graham was when I stopped living in the same house as him. Even if he wasn’t my brother I would really like him. I feel lucky to have him, and proud, because he’s a decent person.’

Lorraine’s other challenge as a teenager was to keep her schoolwork on track at a time when the conditions weren’t always ideal. At home, her parents were as keen as ever to see their children get the kind of qualifications that they had themselves missed out on. But Lorraine’s school, Claremont High, didn’t always make it easy. With about 2,500 pupils it was one of the biggest schools in Scotland at that time, and it didn’t have a great reputation back then. ‘Claremont was a tough old place – the school magazine had an obituaries page,’ jokes former classmate Allan Brown.

Lorraine also suffered some more of the low-level bullying that ultimately made her a whole lot tougher than perhaps she looks. ‘I still used to go to school with ringlets and pink ribbons in my hair so I suppose it wasn’t really a surprise that I was bullied. But trust me, I was able to stick up for myself,’ she says now, with a surprising touch of steel.

Whatever happened in the playground or on the way to school she says she was blessed with some wonderful, dedicated teachers. Her parents were still encouraging her to question everything and had given her a love of learning that would never leave her so she was one of the most enthusiastic pupils in her year.

‘I just loved school, I thought it was fantastic. My favourite lesson was English and we had a fantastic teacher called Miss McPhendran and she was real old school. Some of the teachers there were a bit trendy and “Hey, call me Dave,” but she was never like that. She had iron-grey hair and you knew there was no way it was ever going to move; it wouldn’t have dared. She was big – not fat, sort of Amazonian – and wore a big black cape. She was strict, but you knew where you were with her and I liked that. She was good on the basics and gave us a really good grounding in spelling and grammar, which has stood me in such good stead. She was giving us spelling tests even at the age of thirteen or fourteen – and I still correct the spellings on my scripts to this day.’

* * * * *

Several other people also seemed to thrive on the Claremont High experience in the 1970s. Despite being in an area with huge social problems it seems to have produced far more than its fair share of success stories. Top international hairstylist Alan Edwards was one of them, Sunday Times journalist and author Allan Brown another. Then there was Four Weddings And A Funeral star John Hannah, a boy who Lorraine took under her wing when she was made house captain. ‘In my sixth year I used to take the first years for morning registration. One of them was John Hannah and I still remember exactly where he used to sit. He had this perfect little face and great big dazzling blue eyes. He looked like a wee Furby. He was lovely.’

The other person she remembers plainly from those days is Joyce Woodrow, the former classmate who would end up being her closest lifelong friend. ‘We met aged thirteen on a day Lorraine was dressed as a Bay City Roller,’ Joyce recalls, to Lorraine’s obvious embarrassment. ‘But I soon found out that was unusual as Lorraine was more of a David Bowie fan. She was trendy and she loved his records, his style, everything about him.’ The other thing Joyce noticed about her new friend was that she was a voracious reader, someone who hated to go anywhere without a book and who spent more in bookshops than she did in record stores.

After becoming firm friends in the classroom, the two were soon ready to venture further afield – on a youth hostelling trip to Edinburgh. ‘We were quite naïve in many ways so it was a real adventure,’ says Lorraine. ‘I remember being terribly jealous of Joyce because she had a rucksack and I thought that was terribly sophisticated.’

Having survived that first trip, Lorraine, Joyce and two other school friends bought Inter Rail cards for a month-long holiday around Europe a couple of years later. As the most methodical and organised of the bunch Lorraine was put in charge of the kitty. She loved it – though the others took a while getting used to her rules. ‘We weren’t allowed any money to buy biscuits or things like that because Lorraine knew that if we started we would end up blowing the lot,’ Joyce says.

Back in East Kilbride the girls were still inseparable. They would sneak nervously into pubs, where Lorraine would have a half of cider and Joyce a half of lager. ‘For us, that was really daring,’ she says of their so-called teenage rebellion.

However, while she didn’t drink much, Lorraine had another vice at sixteen. When her schoolwork got harder she started to eat for Scotland. The puppy fat she had lost over the past few years piled back on with a vengeance. And with typical honesty Lorraine admits she had no one to blame but herself. ‘It was getting on towards exam time and I took solace in jumbo-sized packets of crisps and giant chocolate bars.’

Despite this, Graham says his sister never had any trouble finding boyfriends (he remembers her thumping him when he laughed at the first of them and called him a long-haired hippy). For her part Lorraine admits she was never cut out to be a wild child. ‘I had my first date at seventeen when I went to the swimming baths with a boy from school and we had a cup of tea afterwards. We went out once or twice after that but I preferred going to the disco in a gang,’ she says demurely.

Still, at the age of seventeen, her only major act of rebellion came when her parents went to Greece for a holiday – and it ended in disaster. ‘I threw a party while they were away and some gatecrashers did a lot of damage, such as cigarette burns and broken windows. I cleaned up but I knew I had let them down and I still feel guilty about it,’ Lorraine says. ‘I knew Mum was very disappointed in me. If she had shouted at me I’d have felt better, but she just sort of took one look at the cigarette burns in her new carpet and cried. I felt so small and horrible.’

In a bid to make amends she offered to pay for proper cleaning or even a new carpet. Her parents said no, but by then Lorraine had the kind of work ethic that meant she could have found the money, had she needed to. She got her first Saturday job just after her fourteenth birthday and was soon collecting £1 a shift working in the Chelsea Girl boutique. After that she moved onwards and upwards, seeing her pay rise up to and beyond the princely sum of 25 pence an hour. And while working at BHS in the city centre she also did a one-day stint at Glasgow’s famous Barras market.

‘My friend Janice and I got up at 6am one Saturday to bag a pitch. We were selling off bric-a-brac from our mums’ houses,’ Lorraine says. But at seventeen, she admits, she didn’t quite have the confidence to win sales the traditional way. ‘In those days the market was full of pitchers doing their stuff with all the amazing patter and we were far too shy to try and shout above those guys. But we sold everything so cheaply that we shifted it all in no time. We went out that night and had a brilliant few days on our profits.’

Back at BHS she was saving up for her first expensive haircut at a trendy Glasgow salon – though she reckons she could have done a better job herself. ‘It was the most disastrous haircut of my life, just horrifying. I wanted a fringe but the stylist gave me something short with a huge V at the back. It looked like it came from Henry V – in fact, I looked like I was Henry V.’

Ultimately, though, Lorraine says her whole childhood could hardly have been better. The girl from the Gorbals thrived on the city’s poorest streets. She had been loved all her life; she embraced her education and had her eyes opened to all the possibilities the world had to offer. She says she had also been given the kind of grounding that allows her to cope with all the vastly different people she now meets and all the different experiences she now enjoys.

‘Basically I was lucky to have parents who really took the time and trouble to look after me. They taught me the essential things like saying “please” and “thank you” and respecting others that perhaps we don’t have enough of today. And although we were poor my parent always had very high expectations of me as a child, which I then tried to live up to.’

* * * * *

John and Anne’s big dream was that their daughter would make it to university – being the first in her family to do so. After only half joking that she wanted to join the RAF and become a fighter pilot, Lorraine had some serious talks with her teachers and picked a tough degree course – she wanted to study English and Russian literature and ultimately become a teacher herself. ‘It is the most important job in the world, apart from being a parent, and it makes me furious how undervalued teachers are,’ she said, years later. But as her schoolmates started to talk about colleges and courses Lorraine was increasingly distracted. Four years at university sounded wonderful, but she was a girl in a hurry so shouldn’t she just go out there now and get a job?

Her love of words, appreciation of history and thirst for knowledge had long since been pushing her in only one direction – journalism. Teaching could wait, she thought. If she couldn’t hack it on a newspaper then she could always go back to college later. Suddenly she felt she had to stretch and prove herself. She had big dreams and at just seventeen-years-old Lorraine Kelly was ready to go to work.