That's Another Story: The Autobiography

Table of Contents

 

 

By the same author

 
 
 

 
That's Another Story

 

 
JULIE WALTERS

 
 
Orion

A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

 
First published in Great Britain in 2008
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

 
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

 
© Julie Walters 2008

 
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.

 
The right of Julie Walters to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

 
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

eISBN : 978 0 2978 5748 8

 

 This ebook produced by Jouve, France

 

 
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

 
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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For Maisie

Acknowledgements

Firstly, my brother Tommy for introducing me to the sheer pleasure of reading and for his encouragement, enthusiasm and delight in my early ‘literary’ efforts at school. My sister-in-law, Jill Walters, for putting me right on the geography of my home town, bits of which I had long forgotten; and Professor Carl Chinn for putting her right on the bits that she’d forgotten. David Thompson for providing me with precious photographs and memories.

Paul Stevens for getting the whole thing off the ground so brilliantly and my agent Paul Lyon Maris for his tremendous support, inordinate good sense, but especially for his words of wisdom.

Alan Samson, for whom ‘thanks’ just doesn’t seem enough and without whose Albert Hall-sized knowledge of just about everything, gentle encouragement and necessary sense of humour, I would never have had the courage to write this book in the first place.

And last but by no means least, my husband Grant and my daughter Maisie for being there and listening patiently to my fears, moans and long, protracted readings of roughly written passages from this book; in short, for being who they are.

‘Five years ago today . . .’

It’s my mother’s voice. She is at the foot of the stairs, calling out the story of my birth, as she did on so many birthdays.

‘Ten years ago today . . .’

It is Irish, a Mayo voice worn at the edges, giving it a husky quality, which, she told me once, some men had found alluring.

‘Fifteen years ago today . . .’

Now it is soft with memory and buoyant with the telling. I was the fifth and final child to be born, each delivery producing its own particular trauma.

The first, my brother Tommy, arrived during the war in 1942. He never slept and continually scratched at his face, until eventually he was taken into hospital where his tiny hands were bandaged to prevent further harm. When Kevin, the second, was born three years later, my mother’s screams of ‘Put him back!’ apparently reached the outskirts of Birmingham. This, according to my mother and much to our amusement, was due to the inordinate size of his head. The third, a girl called Mary, was stillborn, and in order to get me to eat eggs my mother had told me that it was Mary’s refusal to do so that had caused her demise. This went on for some years until one day I challenged the assertion, pointing out that a dead baby wouldn’t have been able to speak let alone have much of an appetite. And anyway, I went on, where is she? Where is her grave? My mother went quiet. I was beginning to think she had made the whole thing up, that there never was a Mary, until my father chimed in with awful innocence, ‘Well, she was incinerated, wasn’t she? She didn’t have a proper funeral. No! That’s it! She was buried in, like, a job lot.’ That was the first time I ever saw her cry and I didn’t understand her grief, at least not for about another thirty years.

The penultimate birth was a late miscarriage, a boy, of which very little was said. Then after she was told it would be too dangerous to have any more children, I came along in 1950 on 22 February, apparently at three o’clock in the afternoon.

‘My waters broke . . .’ A slight vibrato begins. ‘Your father and I got on the bus.’ She knows I need to know and that she needs to recount it; again and again. ‘I was passing your motions.’ Well, perhaps I don’t need to know this, but I’m not sure, and no matter how many times I ask, this last detail is only ever explained by further increasingly impatient repetitions of it. Now, of course, I know and see its significance: I was shitting myself. ‘They should never have given me that big fish dinner . . .’ I am now standing in the room in St Chad’s Hospital, watching my mother, the said fish dinner having been thrown up over the pale-yellow counterpane. She is huge, about to give birth. ‘The cord was around your neck.’

‘God, Mum, I know this so well I feel as if I was actually there.’ She ignores this.

‘They got in the priest.’ I can see him, well, not really. I cast Father Sillitoe in the part, our parish priest from St Gregory’s church, round and avuncular, his red face testament to his fondness for altar wine. My brother Tommy, an altar boy himself, tells how Father Sillitoe would slip a hand under his elbow, forcing him to pour a lot more wine into the chalice than the usual mouthful. ‘They could save only one of us . . . Your father had to choose.’ My mother’s incomparable sense of drama now removes all vibrato from her voice and this last statement is made with a terrible flat resignation. Like the best of actors, she knows that less is more.

‘I chose you.’ My father chipped in on this only once that I remember. His voice is gentle and unassuming with a big, full, Birmingham, inner-city accent. He is sitting, his hair full of plaster dust, exhausted and weathered far beyond his years, in the kitchen at 69 Bishopton Road, wet shirts dripping from the pulley above him, smelling of turps and house paint and years of cigarettes. The cigarettes weren’t just in his clothes; they were in his skin, in his sweat. He had smoked since he was ten. Even though he died in 1971, I can summon up that smell in an instant.

‘He chose you.’ Her voice is that of a sad, bewildered child. My mother’s father never chose her.

‘Yes but it doesn’t matter. It was all right in the end,’ my father soothes.

‘The priest had to give me the last rites.’

‘Yes but you were all right in the end.’

‘Extreme unction.’

‘Yeah but—Oh blimey . . .’ He knows when to give up and does so with an ironic, forgiving little laugh.

‘They took you away. I didn’t see you for a whole week.’

No one speaks.

‘Happy birthday, Julie.’

Number 69 Bishopton Road was a big, draughty, end-of-terrace house. There was a song around in the fifties called ‘This Old House’, with lyrics like, ‘Ain’t got time to fix the windows, ain’t got time to fix the floors.’ Whenever it was played on the radio my mother sang along with such gusto and empathy that as a small child, whose universe began and ended at our back gate, I presumed that it was being sung specifically about our house.

Similarly once, whilst I was watching
Watch with Mother
on my own, aged about three, a kindly lady sat there holding a teddy bear and waving its paw straight at the camera, saying, ‘Look, Teddy, there is a little girl watching us and she’s got a teddy just like you!’ I was off that sofa and into the kitchen before you could say Andy Pandy, screaming at my mother that the lady on television could not only see me but she had spoken to me and she knew about Teddy as well, and there might be a damp patch on the sofa; but that was Teddy, not me. My mother simply replied mysteriously, ‘Don’t listen to Grandma.’ It was only when I asked my father why, when there were Tom cats, were there not any Kev cats, and he explained that Tom cats were not named after my older brother, that it began to dawn on me that the sun didn’t shine out of my arse.