That's Another Story: The Autobiography (18 page)

‘Oh, then you can’t.’

And that was the end of that.

It was during my last few months of nursing that I had met and fallen in love with my first proper boyfriend, whom I shall call DT, on midsummer’s eve 1969. It was a sublime period in which I staggered about the wards, this time of the Children’s hospital, completely knackered after nights of unbridled shagging, even falling asleep during the morning note session on one occasion, after which I was taken aside by a concerned ward Sister and given a lecture on the restorative power of sleep. I had discovered sex, in a big way, but it hadn’t all been smooth going; it took me at least several days to lose my virginity because I was so tense: clamped shut, I suppose. At one point I seriously questioned whether I had a vagina at all and began to reason that perhaps this was how the vagina actually took shape: from the continual hammering at the door by the penis. However, after those three days, there was no stopping me.

Meeting DT was a revelation on every level. He came from a wealthy middle-class family, living in a big detached house in a well-to-do part of Birmingham. Entering his house for the first time was like entering an unknown foreign country. There was a big, spacious sitting room with a grand piano in one corner and french windows that opened out on to a large and, to my eyes, rather wild-looking garden, which was a far cry from the little rectangles of earth planted with a military parade of bedding plants, all standing to attention in pristine, weedless rows, that seemed to be the fashion round our way. No, this garden had a liberated, unselfconscious feel to it, more akin to parkland than any garden I’d ever known. It had a pond and a willow tree, and from the branch of a large oak hung a tyre suspended on a length of rope for people to swing on: for fun! It was a garden built for the pleasure of being outside, for people to truly use, rather than some kind of badge of neatness and respectability.

The kitchen had the wonderful, hitherto alien aroma of freshly ground coffee and garlic. It boasted a dishwasher, which in those days was referred to as a washing-up machine. I don’t think I came across another until they were actually called dishwashers, about ten years later. Next to the kitchen was the breakfast room: a room whose sole purpose was to sit and eat breakfast in! The dining room being another room entirely!

Upstairs, Mr and Mrs T had an en-suite bathroom, another luxury I didn’t come across for another ten or twelve years, and then only in a hotel. They read the
Daily Telegraph
, cooked and ate spaghetti bolognese and macaroni cheese, and spoke without a trace of a Birmingham accent. At dinner there was more than one knife to the right and more than one fork to the left, and they drank wine. The only wine I had come across at this point in my life was port, drunk out of tiny glasses decorated with a scratched ring of little gold and black roses. There always seemed to be half a bottle of it on the sideboard, along with a bottle of Advocaat, a bottle of Martini Bianco and some Johnny Walker Red Label, all of which were only ever opened at Christmas. They called dinner, lunch; tea, supper; while dinner itself was a more formal meal that you ate at eight o’clock in the evening.

The September of the year that we met, DT went up to Manchester Polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University, to study Sociology. I was heartsore and any will I had left to continue nursing completely disappeared almost immediately. Every day that I had off was spent getting to Manchester at the earliest opportunity, staying until the last possible moment and coming home miserable. On one such visit I confided to DT that I wanted to become an actress, whereupon he told me that there was a Drama course right there at the poly and why didn’t I apply? I duly did and an audition was set up for the following January. Now all that there was left to do, was give in my notice to the school of nursing and
tell my mother
of my plans.

Before I did anything I went home to talk to my brother Tommy, because, apart from Sister Ignatius, he was the only person who had ever said that I should become an actress. He was always full of praise, laughing at my impersonations of various relatives and the day-today characters that peopled our lives, and he crowed about my little acting debut at the church hall, claiming that I was the best, a moment in my life that I had held close to my heart. Once again, he was encouraging and said that I should go for it, especially while I had DT’s emotional support. I went to see my other brother, Kevin, and his wife Jill, both of whom reiterated Tommy’s sentiments, Kevin offering to come over and be there when I told my mother, a task I dreaded.

On the appointed evening, I took my father aside to brief him of my impending change of career and, as I thought he would, he said if that’s what I wanted, I must do it. Then he added shockingly that the principal of the school of nursing had rung only the day before to tell my parents that I had given in my notice and to find out whether they knew. My dad, God love him, told her that yes, of course they knew and that he was all for it. He added ominously, ‘Thank God it was me and not your mother that answered the phone.’ He had kept it to himself.

Finally with my brothers and my dad standing in between my mother and me, I broke the news.

‘Mum? I’m going to leave nursing.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘I’m giving up nursing. I want to be an actress.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! Has she gone mad?’

‘Well, if it’s what she wants . . .’ My dad as ever was trying to mediate, while drips from my mother’s underslip, drying on the pulley above, dropped down on to his head.

‘What are you talking about, Tom? Don’t talk so bloody daft! She’ll ruin her life.’

‘She doesn’t have to stay in nursing if it’s not what she wants. There’s no point.’

This was from Kevin, slightly aggressive and with a touch of the old teenage insolence. He and Mum had rarely seen eye to eye, especially through his adolescence. I can picture them on one occasion, chasing one another back and forth through the house, kicking each other up the bottom.

‘Oh, Gad, what have we reared? You’ll be in the gutter before you’re twenty!’

I thought she might lunge at me and then Dad said, ‘Well, the more you are against it the more she’s going to want to do it.’

And Tommy joined the fray: ‘Dad’s right, and there’s no point in her staying in a job that makes her miserable. She should go for it now, while she’s young.’

‘Oh Gad, I might have expected that from you!’

Tommy had had a couple of stabs career-wise before embarking on his degree in Theology at Birmingham University, one at teacher training college and the other when he entered the Jesuits, staying only a matter of weeks. My mother had wept bitterly on the day that he left home to join, thinking that she would never see him again, and then she had gone totally mad, calling him every name under the sun, when she’d heard that he’d packed it all in and was coming home.

‘Acting!’ This was said with the downturned mouth that she used to convey utter contempt. ‘You’ve been watching too much television! May the great God look to me!
Acting
!’

And that was it, it was all over bar the shouting. I then announced that as soon as I had worked my notice at the hospital I would be moving up to Manchester, where I would get a job for a year before hopefully getting into college to study acting. The course I had applied for was also a teaching course, which went a long way to assuaging my mother’s anxiety, but it also left her disappointed, in that she could no longer live out her own ambition to be a nurse through me.

I moved to Manchester in November 1969, after a nursing career that spanned all of eighteen months, to live with DT, and I stayed at first with an old friend from school, whom I had been put into contact with by a mutual friend in my nursing set. After a week or two, we found a bedsit in Maple Avenue, Chorlton-cum-Hardy. It was in the attic of a Victorian house, with a tiny separate kitchen tucked into the eaves where anyone standing at the stove had to bend double in order to cook. Downstairs, on the first floor, we had the use of a bathroom that we shared with the rest of the house, which I think comprised two more flats, one on each floor.

I remember one evening, a matter of just days after we had moved in, I arrived home, thrilled at having found a job, to see that a small envelope had been posted under our door. At first, on opening it, I thought it was empty but then I saw down in the corner a small square of folded paper. When I opened it out, it contained a little clump of dark pubic hair and on the paper was written in neat, small handwriting the words, ‘Found in the bathroom. Yours, I believe.’ It was unsigned. I was mortified. It was obviously meant for me as DT had gorgeous, bright-red hair. Someone must have used the bathroom immediately after me and . . . Oh, it was too awful to contemplate. After this incident I didn’t use the bathroom for about three months, choosing to wash standing at the sink in the freezing kitchen rather than ever exit that bathroom again where I might bump unknowingly into the anonymous writer of the note. Leaving and entering the house also proved to be potentially shaming experiences. On coming in I would mount the stairs two and three at a time, to arrive sweating and panting at the top.

My parents, even my father, thought that I was still living with the friend from school and that DT was living elsewhere. It would have been too much, on top of abandoning my respectable career in nursing, to tell them the truth. When recently I played the role of Mary Whitehouse, who hailed from just down the road in Wolverhampton - the self-styled moral campaigner who was very much in the news at that particular time because of her monumental battle with the BBC and its lack of censorship - it brought my rebellious, angry, anti-establishment, nineteen-year-old self into sharp focus. My mother might not have been religious but she was of the same generation as Mary Whitehouse, although she thought her a ‘bit of an old fuddy-duddy’, when it came to sex before marriage she virtually shared the same views as this woman. Mrs Whitehouse was more or less universally loathed and ridiculed by our generation, representing everything that we balked at and rejected. ‘Living in sin’ felt like one in the eye for her and her ilk; we were, after all, the ‘Make Love, Not War’ generation with a whole new philosophy and a strong and vivid identity. Of course, playing her at the age of fifty-seven, I saw her differently and, having a daughter of my own, I understood her fears for her children in the face of such a whirlwind of a cultural and sexual revolution. Although she went too far in many instances, without her we wouldn’t now have the much needed nine o’clock watershed.

After I’d been up in Manchester for just over a year my parents finally came to visit me. I had started my first year at college and there was a frantic hiding of all things DT, but what I failed to do was put away my birth pills, which my mother’s hawk eyes spotted straight away. She never said anything, or even remotely hinted at it; it was my brother Tommy who told me years later how she’d seen them on the bathroom shelf and was somewhat miffed at me, thinking I’d pulled the wool over her eyes.

Once I settled into living with DT, I began to realise that there was something wrong with my sleep. I would frequently shoot up in bed in the middle of the night, often screaming, my heart banging, my face and the top half of my body covered in sweat. Although this would wake DT, I would not always remember it. As the years went on it became increasingly worse. Every single night I would have a disturbance of one sort or another. On a good night, it would be a brief and sudden panic that would cause me to wake. This would be followed by a second or two of confusion, whereby I would try to work out the meaning of some jumbled, dreamlike logic that suggested an imminent disaster of some kind, and usually I would sort out that it was a dream and then go back to sleep fairly quickly. However, on a bad night, this waking could happen every hour and, weirdly, the hourly interval would be just that, exactly an hour.

These night terrors were not like a normal nightmare. First, they would take place at the beginning of the sleep period and I began to time them; sometimes it would be just a half-hour after I went to sleep, sometimes one or two hours, but it was always exactly the half-hour or hour, give or take a minute or two, never forty minutes or one hour twenty, and it was never at the end of a sleep cycle, which apparently is when the classic nightmare takes place.

There was no story to them; it was more like a terrifying image presenting itself to my psyche, like a snapshot being flashed up, and I would wake, quaking with terror for my life. The image, or sometimes just a single thought or feeling, would often involve dark water and drowning: the house, for instance, sinking down into deep water. I would suddenly see the water rising up the bedroom windows and I would wake with the certain knowledge that I was the only one who knew and who could do anything about it. I would then often get up, pacing around, trying to work out what was going on, staring hard out of the window, and then beginning to not know why I was doing so, as the night terror and its awful image slipped from the grasp of my memory into a muddled and puzzling conundrum. The remnants of this conundrum would sometimes filter into the next day, leaving me with the troubling sensation that something vital had been left undone.