Читать книгу Sarah Millican - The Biography Of The Funniest Woman In Britain - Tina Campanella - Страница 7
Оглавление‘Can you imagine if he hadn’t left me? I’d still be in a job I hated, watching telly in a damp flat. I had to go really low to come back up.’
When she turned 21, Sarah was still living at home and working in the local cinema. But her spare time was filled to the brim with creative exploits and her ambition was raging.
She wrote plays and poems, edited short films and had even had one of her half-hour plays performed at Newcastle’s Live Theatre.
She didn’t know exactly what direction she wanted her future to take, but she knew that writing made her feel as if she was going somewhere. It was also an outlet for her vast intellect. In defiance at not being able to go to university, she was giving herself the kind of higher education she craved.
Leaving her school days – and those soul-crushing bullies – behind, she had blossomed into a feisty young woman with numerous friends and talents.
It was at this youthful peak that she met her husband-to-be, Andrew. A colleague at the cinema, he was first a friend, then a loving boyfriend, and a mere two weeks later, Sarah’s fiancé. It was, as she herself admits, a whirlwind romance. ‘He was my first love, I suppose,’ she explained in a recent interview. ‘I worked with him. He was funny.’
In her youth, Sarah had a very romantic view of love. She didn’t really understand one-night stands and believed that love was for life. Having grown up in such a close family, she had seen her mother and father’s strong marriage weather numerous storms and based her own relationship desires on their dedicated devotion.
She was limited in her dating experience and although she’d had boyfriends before, it was the first time she had really been part of a couple. She loved being part of something special.
Having only really just set out on her journey to self-discovery, with Andrew she found herself easily defined – as a wife. ‘I was under the impression that once you met someone that’s it done, that’s sorted,’ she told The Herald in 2010. ‘That’s the love life sorted. Let’s concentrate on my career. So when I met my ex-husband, that’s how I felt.’
Sarah always participates with her audience when she performs her stand-up shows – and regularly asks them personal and probing questions. One of her favourite things to ask on stage is, how do you know when it’s love? ‘You never know what you’re going to hear and it’s always unpredictable and funny,’ she told The Liverpool Post, early in 2013.
Over the years, the answers have been varied. During one show, one woman said: ‘A kiss before you go to bed…’ Her husband responded to the question by saying: ‘If she hasn’t changed the locks…’ Sarah told the couple, who revealed they’d been married for 30 years, that she loved the power balance between them. She quipped: ‘She just wants a kiss – you’re worried you’re never gonna see her again, or any of your CDs.’
One young man sweetly said of his girlfriend of three months: ‘I miss her when she’s not here…’ Sarah’s response was: ‘Aw, I can’t take the piss out of that – I really want to but I can’t.’
Others answered: ‘leaving the toilet door open’, ‘butterflies in your tummy’, ‘flowers’ and ‘presents’, to which Sarah responded: ‘Money-grabbing whore!’ One lad even shouted out ‘depression’, to which she replied: ‘You’re single, are you? You must be happy then…’
But for Sarah, it was enough just to be in the cosy world of coupledom, and after her wedding in 1997, she quickly settled down to married life. Moving out of her parents’ home and into a small flat with her new husband, Sarah was content. ‘She loved being married and she loved her little home,’ her dad Philip recalled in an interview in 2011.
Andrew was supportive of her writing talents and Sarah has always been keen to point out that he wasn’t oppressive or in any way a ‘bad’ husband. But whereas before she would spend her evenings and weekends scribbling away at some play or another, suddenly she had a new way of occupying her time – spending it with the man she loved. ‘He wasn’t all “do the dishes, woman”, but I was like – “I’d rather play out with you”,’ she has explained.
But the comfortable routines of marriage eventually took its toll on both Sarah’s ambition, and her self-image. She started working at the local job centre and spent her spare time watching the telly and cosying up with her husband.
Sarah spent her working days helping a steady stream of jobseekers to find work. Some parts of the role she found she very much enjoyed – boosting people’s confidence and putting them back on the right path. She enjoyed seeing them grow from being, as she describes it, ‘quite broken’, to getting a job and being back on their feet.
But overall, for Sarah, who admits she’s very sensitive under her sweary exterior, it was tough being surrounded by so much fear and sadness.
She would often come home crying, and worried that she would one day become hardened to the work. ‘I used to say, “I’m going to write my way out of this shithole”,’ she said in a 2011 interview with The Observer. ‘And I didn’t mean so much the place I was living or working, just the job I had. I never felt fulfilled, so that’s why I wrote, to get that out of my system.’
But, as the years of married life passed, she stopped writing altogether. She said later: ‘I just stopped doing it for a bit while I carried on living, having a job and being married and all those sorts of things.’
Slowly her feistiness disappeared, and she became quiet and almost mouse-like again. But she liked being married and was content with the lifestyle she had. For her, the seven married years passed by very happily. She wasn’t looking for adventure or thrills – she truly believed she had everything she needed.
The couple bought two cats, and Sarah thought her life was complete – even if somewhere deep down, she knew something was lacking… ‘I was too quiet, too meek and mild,’ she has since said. ‘I’d go out with my sister and her friends but I’d make them go to an Italian and I’d have a margherita pizza. Maybe potato skins as a starter if I was feeling posh.’
Together the couple planned out their future, right down to their retirement plans. Sarah hated her job, but she was counting down to the time when they would both finish their working lives and could just be together, unfettered by responsibility. In reality, she was coasting. But it was only with hindsight that she could see her twenties for what they really were: a life on hold. And sadly that hindsight would come about very painfully.
After seven years, Sarah was used to her married life and still loved her husband dearly. But without her even noticing, the couple were growing apart. One day, without a word of warning, Andrew finally told her the truth: he wasn’t in love with her any more.
There was no one else, but he wanted something more from his life and Sarah wasn’t making him happy any more. ‘I wasn’t expecting it at all,’ she recalls. ‘It came quite out of the blue. And it was emotionally shattering.’
That day was Mothering Sunday, 2004.
As the rest of the country was sleeping soundly, in her small, damp Newcastle flat, Sarah’s world was ending. At 2am, Philip received the most heartbreaking phone call of his life. His daughter was sobbing in the street, wandering listlessly outside her once happy home. ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Can I come home?’
‘Anytime you like darling,’ he replied. ‘You’ve always got a home here.’
Safe in the bosom of her family, she fell apart.
Her feelings during that time have been much documented, both as part of her stand-up routines and in countless interviews with national newspapers.
‘We had plans for the rest of our lives and it’s just like somebody has rubbed everything out,’ she told one newspaper. ‘I was 29 and I had thought my marriage was fine,’ she told another. ‘So it was an odd time because I’d never been properly broken-hearted before and for a while I didn’t want to do anything except cry my eyes out all day.’
For a long time, that’s all she did.
Being the ultimate ‘home-girl’, Sarah felt she’d had everything ripped out from underneath her. After all, she’s a woman who still takes a photo from the view of her sofa away on tour with her, and still likes nothing better than to curl up on the sofa, with a blanket across her feet. But now her home was a place of sadness.
‘I bullied him into going to Relate, where I paid £70 for a man to tell us he could do nothing for us. They were the most expensive tissues I’ve ever snotted into,’ she recounted on a Radio 4 show in 2008.
Despite her husband’s devastating admission, the couple had to remain living together until they could sell the flat that they had once planned to make their family home. Now estranged from her husband, Sarah couldn’t bear the thought of going back each night after work. So she turned to a once familiar outlet to occupy her time – writing.
Searching around for something suitable, she enrolled in a new writer programme at her local theatre. ‘I would go there straight after work. It got so the staff knew my name. They kind of saved me in a way.’
Flexing her writing muscles once more, the next few months were a mixture of pain and exhilaration. Some days her life felt utterly broken and she thought she would never recover. On others she felt alive again, and free to do as she pleased. ‘I had what I call my She-Ra moments,’ she has often explained, referencing the popular eighties cartoon figure – a symbol for girl power long before The Spice Girls existed.
‘If somebody said, “Climb that mountain”, I would go, “Well you’ll have to get us the right shoes but I could probably do that.” I’d never felt like that before. I had only ever had the middle ground – and to go from so low to so high was exhilarating.’ She cut her long hair soon afterwards, an act that many people associate with a break-up.
Sarah stored up her painful memories of that time and retreated into the comfort of her family’s arms, as she tried to make sense of what was happening to her life. The house went on the market and eventually sold. Finally the day came when she and her husband had to say their last goodbyes. Packing up the last of her things into a small box, she handed over their cats and shut the door on her once cosy life.
Sarah would have loved to take the pets with her, but her parents were allergic, and it was to their house that she was now headed.
As she walked away, she was understandably reflective. She had lost her husband, home and feline family and was moving back in with her parents, aged nearly 30. She wandered through the park near their home, crying yet more exhausting tears. Then her phone rang and the simple conversation that followed would prove to be the catalyst for a career change that would soon transform her life.
