Читать книгу Behind the Laughter - Sherrie Hewson - Страница 8

Chapter Three

The problem was that I’d failed my 11 Plus. Well, to be fair, I didn’t even know the test we took one day was all that important. I’d sit through most lessons gazing out of the window, not listening. To this day, I still have nightmares of sitting at that desk, not having done my homework, with not a clue as to what anyone is talking about. I always blame the teachers and too many kids to a class. It was a shame, though it meant I couldn’t get into any of the good local schools, so it was the secondary modern or boarding school for me.

My parents took me on another visit to Brett’s school (it was a boys’ school, but they were just starting to allow female siblings in) and it was 300 boys to 20 girls. I was shown the dormitory in the small girls’ wing, which had been placed as far away as possible from the boys’ section of the school.

One look at that dorm settled it: I wasn’t going to share a room with several other girls I didn’t know. I’d always hated school, so how on earth could I go and live in one? My parents agreed that I could attend the school as a day pupil; it involved an hour-long journey each way, but for me this was a much better option. And so it was that in the autumn of 1962, just before I turned 12, I set off for The Rodney School in my smart red and grey uniform. I loved the uniform and the ballet lessons, and once in a while we would have dances in the big hall. The boys would sit on one side of the room, the girls on the other; the boys would have to come over and ask us to dance and it was all very formal but we got to wear pretty party frocks, which was the bit I liked.

The grounds were absolutely beautiful and on hot summer days our school fairs were fantastic. I also remember having choral concerts outside. It’s funny how the summers seemed longer and hotter when we were young. It was an amazing school and I wish I could have appreciated it more and enjoyed my time there, but I didn’t. In fact, I used to do everything I could to get out of school, including perfecting the art of making myself ill. I was so good at it that I could even throw up when occasion demanded it. I’d then be allowed to skip school – or be sent home if I’d actually made it thus far – and would be put to bed, clutching my stomach and gently moaning. Once I was safely installed and the coast was clear, I’d settle down with a comic or the TV and enjoy my day, then make a miraculous recovery in time to go out and see the horses in the afternoon.

Eventually realising that they were wasting their money, my parents took me out of school and placed me in the local secondary modern. The classes were huge, so I could sit at the back and do nothing, and that’s exactly what I did: nothing. My best friend was a girl called Sue Maddern, who was strong and full of self-confidence. I was bullied when I got there because I’d come from a posh school, so I teamed up with her and became a bit of a smart arse. It was self-protection: I’d never forgotten the beating I had as a 6-year-old and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. Having said that, I made a few lifelong friends there and have some good memories of those days.

While school felt like a waste of time, once I joined the local theatre club at the age of 11 I absolutely loved it. The club, which was based in the aptly named Shakespeare Street, was great fun and I couldn’t wait to go there every week. I also joined a drama class at Clarendon College in Nottingham, run by a man named Allen Tipton, who became a mentor and friend to me. He was a brilliant teacher, who got us kids organised into one production after another and managed to bring out the best in all of us. This was, coincidentally, where Robert Lindsay (who was my boyfriend at RADA) started his drama education, although we didn’t know one another there.

By the age of 13 all that mattered to me, apart from my horses, was drama. I was also a member of the Burton Joyce Players in our village and had my first female lead in their production of The Seventh Veil, based on the famous film starring Ann Todd and James Mason. I played a young girl – Francesca – a pianist, with an obsessive Uncle Nicholas (played by the vicar, who was brilliant). When she tries to run away, he smashes his cane down on her hands and virtually cripples her, so she is a broken woman.

At the same time I joined the Midland Academy, a local drama school run by a wonderful woman called Miss Audrey Albrecht. This was the beginning of my formal training, in readiness for an eventual audition for RADA. Miss Albrecht was passionate about poetry and insisted I enter all the Poetry Society as well as the many LAMDA examinations, and while this seemed like hard work at the time it stood me in great stead.

After leaving school I attended the Academy full-time, from 16 to 18, and during that time I passed numerous poetry and drama exams. I adored Miss Albrecht, who became in some ways like a second mother to me. She was firm and extremely demanding, but I never minded because she believed in me, and along with Allen Tipton she played a big part in shaping my future. At the same time, my own mother insisted I attend finishing classes, where I learnt how to sit properly and walk beautifully, how to close a door behind me without turning around, how to get out of a car elegantly with no knickers showing and, of course, how to speak properly.

With all this going on my life was incredibly full – I think maybe it was Mum’s way of delaying my interest in boys. I had the Theatre Club, Allen Tipton’s classes, school, the Burton Joyce Players and the Midland Academy, so I was almost always rehearsing for or appearing in a production. It was a wonderful grounding, and by the age of 15 I was determined to make a career on the stage. Actually, it was seeing Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music that finally nailed my decision.

The school had other ideas, though: when I told my careers teacher that I wanted to be an actress she just laughed and told me to stop living in dreamland. Who did I think I was, Doris Day? Well yes, actually. Careers advisers were like that then: they advised the boys to go into engineering and the girls to train as secretaries. They made me feel so ridiculous that I thought, OK, I will go and train as a secretary just to prove that I can do it.

Mother was ambitious for me and I’m sure she only agreed to the secretarial training as an insurance policy. She found a private course held in a large Edwardian semi. On the first morning I turned up at the address I’d been given and was shown into a room by a small, rotund lady – not very happy, really quite odd. There was a long table in the middle and six big black typewriters on either side. Three girls were already on one side, two on the other, and I was shown to the empty place. A very tall and sinewy-looking man with a face like thunder walked in, obviously in charge. He stood at the end of the table and lifted one hand up while glancing at a watch on his other wrist. As a clock chimed, he brought his hand down hard on the table, which made me jump and giggle. He then came over and without saying a word showed me what I was supposed to do, and left me to it. I remember he smelled of camphor oil, like bandages.

I started, but the big black keys were very temperamental: you’d hit them and they would shoot back or get stuck. The Lurcher look-alike came over and without looking at me uttered his only word that day: ‘Rhythm.’ Furiously pulling out all the keys now jammed in the machine, he repeated himself. I did my best to hold in a giggle but as he was walking away he turned sharply and flashed his eyes at me, which stopped me in my tracks. During the allotted two hours I’d asked to go to the loo (which was apparently not allowed), I’d asked for a drink of water (also not allowed) and now my keys were permanently stuck in a criss-crossed heap inside the machine. By this time I was hysterical with suppressed laughter and the other girls were trying hard not to join in. ‘Lurch’ was red-faced with anger and the small woman who had shown me in (presumably his wife) hustled me out of the room and sent me home, telling me as she did so that I was disturbing the other girls.

Five days later I went back for another try. The small woman opened the door and stared at me with anger in her eyes. She then told me that her husband had died due to stress and the lessons were cancelled, as if it was my fault. After that, I gave up the quest to become a secretary.

It was my one and only attempt to learn a practical skill. Afterwards I told my mother that I wanted to go to drama school and she backed me 100 percent. I’m not sure which of us was more determined that I would make it, but while I gave my all to acting, other distractions threatened to derail my efforts: boys had arrived on the scene.

I always got on well with boys and seemed to attract them, but until I was 15 I had no romantic interest in them at all. I was a bit of a tomboy and as far as I was concerned boys were pals. They could be fun, sometimes they were noisy and smelly, but mostly I just enjoyed having them around.

My closest male friend from school was Gordon Lewingdon. We got on really well and often he came round to my house. I thought of him as a mate, so it only dawned on me much later that Gordon loved me. I was horrible to him, thoughtless and mean, flirting with all the other boys from the village who used to congregate at my house, but I adored him too. Oh, the fickleness of youth! We both fooled around and kissed a bit, but nothing more – I’m not sure I knew what ‘more’ was at that stage.

Years later, when I bumped into Gordon, he agreed that I’d treated him badly. He told me he had a doll that he used to pretend was me and he would stick pins in it! He was, and still is, a lovely man and we will always be friends.

But Gordon wasn’t my only suitor (I had several) and when I was just 13 he and three other boys actually followed me on holiday to Wales. Gordon had told me that he couldn’t bear to be away from me for a whole week and I was happy for them to come along. They wanted to cycle all the way to Wales from Nottingham but their parents insisted they went part of the journey on the train. They arrived soon after my family and me, setting up tents in a nearby field, but a deluge of rain swamped their camp. Late that night they turned up at our hotel looking like drowned rats. Mum couldn’t leave them with nowhere to sleep, so she paid for a room, but put them on the train home the next day.

We were a proper gang in Burton Joyce and went everywhere together but mainly hung out at my house because I had the pool. There was Gordon, Chas, Dave, Steve, Ian and John, plus a few others over the years. Every now and then I was asked out by each of them in turn, but I wanted a gang, not a boyfriend. I’d ride my horse and my little entourage would follow on their bikes. I did go on a couple of dates with a boy from school called Dave (because he looked like Paul McCartney) and then there was Rob, whom I adored. Rob had a guitar and was in a band, which was a definite plus. He was a Mod (you were either with the Mods or Rockers and I was a Mod girl), so he was perfect for me, but sadly, young love faded away.

My first real boyfriend was Robbie Tate. Blond, blue-eyed and gorgeous, we met when we were both 15 and I was immediately smitten. We started seeing each other as much as we could and I would often skip drama or ballet classes to be with him. When my mother found out, she did her best to stop the romance, telling me that I mustn’t see him because classes were more important. Of course that only encouraged me all the more: seeing Robbie in secret was even more fun, although I didn’t dare miss too many classes. He would wait for me outside class and we’d go for a walk, then stop for a kiss and a cuddle.

I worked for several months backstage at the Nottingham Playhouse, helping out with productions and as an usherette. As well as the joy of earning £3 10s a day, I got to see the stars backstage. And there were real stars there because the artistic director was John Neville, a former leading member of London’s Old Vic, who had played many big classical roles before becoming a director. He had immense pulling power and brought a series of established actors to Nottingham, turning it into one of the finest repertory theatres in the country. Among many others, I got to meet Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, John Huston, Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston. Young and hungry for success, for me it was magical. I remember sitting on the floor in a discreet corner of the stage completely spellbound while watching Judi Dench rehearse her part as St Joan in Joan of Arc.

Our junior Theatre Club was also extremely busy, producing a stream of plays and musicals, and I was still involved with Allen Tipton’s drama group. The most successful production of Allen’s that I was in was West Side Story when I was 15. I played Anita, one of the lead roles, when we took it to London in a drama festival, where we beat dozens of other groups to win the Lawrence Olivier Shield.

Soon afterwards we took the play to the open-air Minack Theatre in Porthcurno, West Cornwall. The theatre is constructed above a gully with a rocky outcrop jutting into the sea, and it’s a truly spectacular location. We arrived in Cornwall during a hot summer and I remember getting very burnt and phoning home to tell Mum the sun had wrinkled my face so much that I looked really old, probably at least 25, and I was thrilled. Considering my later fascination with cosmetic surgery, it seems ironic that I was so desperate to look older.

All this was immense fun and the perfect backdrop for my budding romance with Robbie, which culminated when I was 16 in me losing my virginity to him in a passionate clinch on the kitchen floor of our house! You have to be 16 for that to seem romantic, but to us it was. After that we’d sleep together whenever we could, though sadly the opportunities were few and far between.

The only experience of sex that I’d had before was at a late-night party my brother had reluctantly taken me to, where a boy asked me to go upstairs with him. We went into the bathroom and he got out some sort of balloon-type thing, then fumbled around trying to undo my bra while reaching down to release the waiting wriggling worm, at which point I just thought, I don’t want that thing anywhere near me – and made a run for it!

I thought my romance with Robbie was perfect. He even gave me a ring, which I wore on my engagement finger. Then one day I walked into a bar to see him sitting on a stool, kissing a blonde girl. It wasn’t even a peck on the cheek, this was a full-on snog, and at that moment my heart broke. I stood watching them, consumed with the pain of his betrayal.

When Robbie turned and saw me, he had the gall to come over and tell me that I had imagined it. But I hadn’t, and for me the romance was over. Loyalty means a great deal to me: I’m a fiercely loyal person and I expect those I love and care about to offer the same loyalty. If I’m betrayed, that’s it: there’s no second chance, a brick wall goes up and then it’s over – I don’t even want to be friends.

From then on I barely spoke to Robbie. Deep down I still loved him, but I just couldn’t forgive him. One day, a couple of years later when I was at drama school, he turned up. He told me he missed me and asked if we could get back together again, but by that time I had met someone else and I wasn’t interested. He then asked for his ring back, but I told him I’d lost it. I’d actually sold it, for a couple of pounds, when he broke my heart. After that I didn’t see him again.

There was one other boy I went on a couple of dates with when I was 16. He worked in a shop down the road from Mum’s boutique. I used to help out in the boutique on Saturdays and he would walk past the window and stare in. Like Robbie, he was blond, blue-eyed and handsome, but I found his stare slightly unnerving and would look away or busy myself folding clothes. One day he came into the shop, introduced himself and started chatting to Mum. She liked him and invited him to tea at our house.

‘Why did you do that?’ I asked, after he’d left.

Surprised, she looked at me. ‘He seemed like a nice boy,’ she explained. ‘He’s only 19 and he’s all alone here, his family live miles away. I thought he might be missing them.’

When he came round, a few days later, he was polite and charming. So when he asked me out I said yes. However, there was something about him, an intensity with which I felt uneasy. But still bruised and suffering over Robbie, I thought it might make me feel better to go out with someone else and so we went to the theatre. After this he continued to come to our house and ask me out. Mum couldn’t understand why I didn’t take to him.

One evening he arrived and told her that he’d had to leave his lodgings and so she offered to put him up until he could find somewhere else. I was furious, but Mum told me: ‘He’s only here for a few days – you don’t have to go out with him.’

What she didn’t realise was that he would come and meet me after rehearsals and performances, telling me that she had suggested he should walk me home, just to make sure I was safe. He was pleasant enough, but somehow I still didn’t feel at ease with him. I would say, ‘I’m not your girlfriend,’ but he’d completely ignore me. Being a nice girl, I politely put up with his attentions, and this was something I would come to bitterly regret.