That's Another Story: The Autobiography (6 page)

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Authors: Julie Walters

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As I sat on top of the bus as it bumped and swayed its way along the Bearwood Road, the tears began and they never really let up for about a month. My parents never once challenged my red-eyed silence or my staying off work for four weeks, dragging myself around the house, my eyelids swollen and puffy, and I had no inclination to discuss it with either of them, thinking that neither would understand or realise the magnitude of my feelings. I was bewildered: under any other circumstances my mother would have harangued me for taking to my bed and not going to work, and at the time though I didn’t understand it I was grateful for her silence.
I questioned her about it much later in my thirties, wondering whether she remembered and what on earth she had made of the whole thing.
She said, ‘Oh yes, we knew what had happened. We guessed that you had a broken heart, but we didn’t like to say anything. We thought it best.’
I’m not sure why I was immensely touched by the fact that they had known all along. I know that their silence was born out of an inability to deal with ‘feelings’, as it wasn’t the done thing to talk things out then, but it was also born out of recognition, sympathy and, of course, wisdom.
The main advantage of the back bedroom was that just below the sash window there was the roof of the back place. This could be seen very clearly from both Wigorn and Long Hyde Roads, and as the Boyle family were not only devoid of motorised transport but also lacking such a roof, it was another useful source of agony to be heaped upon the unfortunate Dermot when so needed, simply by doing a bit of sunbathing. However, this was not easy nor, may I say, comfortable as not only did the roof slope at quite an angle but it was also corrugated. There once existed a photograph, long since lost, of me lying flat on my back on this roof, my eyes tightly closed, my mouth clamped shut, lips pressed together in a thin line, arms and legs straight and rigid, a picture of endurance; instead of lapping up the sun, I looked as if I was braced for a cold shower. But I’m sure that if we were able to widen the shot out to the left and down a bit, we would come upon Dermot sitting in the gutter of Long Hyde Road, eating his mother’s cake and trying not to look. The roof joined on to the garden wall, which was about six feet high and separated us from number 68. This meant that it was possible to get out of the back bedroom window, down over the roof, on to the wall, down on to the dustbin placed conveniently beneath, and out into the world. It was also possible to do the thing in reverse if, as sometimes happened, the key to the middle door hadn’t been left out amongst the jumble of junk on the shelf in the back place.
At around sixteen or seventeen, I started going to clubs with Chris, my best friend from school. She was strikingly beautiful, with a mane of dark-brown hair and blue eyes fringed by almost doll-like thick lashes, causing male heads to whip round to look wherever we went. My mother knew nothing of our Saturday-night forays into town and thought that I was just spending the evening round at Chris’s house, watching television or listening to records. We would head to Birmingham, dressed and made up to pull, or at least impress, the thought of pulling a stranger in a nightclub being a little too scary for either of us. Once on the number 9 bus, we would go straight upstairs and, if it was free, on to the back seat. Then a small, silent ritual would follow whereby Christine would open her handbag and take out a bottle of Este’e Lauder’s Youth Dew. She would first spray both of our necks just below each ear and then, employing a huge circular movement, she would totally enshroud us in a cloud of the stuff. Next out of the bag came a little pack of Beechnut spearmint chewing gum, out of which two tablets would be dropped into our waiting palms and tossed with practised ease through the air on to our similarly waiting tongues. Then to finish off and complete the ‘style queens of the number 9 bus route’ image, out would come the Peter Stuyvesant’s or Consulate menthol cigarettes. We were good at the silences and expert at communicating solely by gesture or look. This was mainly down to the fact that Chris had a not insubstantial stutter. Conversations would go like this:
‘J-J-J-Julie . . . have you s-s-s-s-s-seen m-m-my b-b-b-b—’
‘Biro?’
‘N-n-n-no, m-my b-b-b—’
‘Brush?’
‘N-n-n-
no
! M-m-m-my b-b-b—’
‘Bum?’
‘N-n-no. Errr, . . . s-s-s-stop i-t! M-m-my b-b—’
‘Bag?’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
And so it went on, with me finishing off by guesswork whatever sentence she had started. On the day of her wedding, not many years later, she went through the whole ceremony without a single stutter.
We both purported to be Mods, which meant that we wore leather jackets over twinsets and pearls, below-the-knee pencil skirts and clumpy shoes, usually brown suede Hush Puppies, which would nowadays be worn by sensible old ladies with bad feet. On our nights out in town, however, we donned more slinky evening attire and Chris would often do our hair. One of the hair fashions of the day was a soft set of bubbly, bouncing curls and on a Saturday night Chris made a valiant effort at achieving this look for the two of us with the help of a set of rollers and a couple of litres of cheap hair lacquer. This sticky, sickly-smelling liquid set the curls into rigid little pompoms all over the head, so that not only was the soft and bouncing quality of the style never quite brought off but the whole thing was also rendered highly inflammable. There were terrible tales of girls bending their heads to light a cigarette and their whole hair catching alight instead of the cigarette, burning it down to the scalp and reducing it to a frizzled, stubbly mass.
There was an occasion once, after I’d started work, when I went out to one of Chris’s dos on a Sunday night. As a result there wasn’t time on the Monday morning before I went to work to comb out the stiff curls with their solid lacquered finish. After I had slept on it for several hours, my hair had taken on a very odd shape, completely flat on one side, whilst wildly frizzing out in all directions on the other. At the end of about twenty minutes in the toilets I felt, after much tweaking and despite its having a certain Brillo Pad quality, that my hair was in an acceptable state, so I slipped into the office at the insurance company where I worked - my first proper job on leaving school - and sat at my desk. Within minutes the boss was at my elbow, hissing in my ear: ‘You’re late! And take that silly wig off your head!’
On these nights out we frequented several different clubs: the Rum Runner, La Dolce Vita, Club Cedar, the Metro, but we would most often end up at the Locarno, a large club in the centre of Birmingham. In my memory at any rate, it was enormous and was divided, I think, into several bars and a couple of dance floors, each playing a different kind of music and so each appealing to a different age group, one of them for what we thought of as middle-aged people but who were most likely folk in their early twenties. Here the music was live and the band, usually something like a five piece, tended to play rock and roll, Elvis Presley, Frank Ifield, Tom Jones, the Beatles. No matter what, it always seemed to finish off at the end of the night with couples, some the worse for wear, draped over each other, in various stages of pre-coital foreplay, moving slowly round the room to ‘I Remember you’ by Frank Ifield and, later, ‘Hey Jude’. These were played solo by a bespectacled chap, sitting on a low stool, with a huge red-and-white electric guitar. At some point midway through the evening we would usually look in on our way to the toilets but mainly with the intention of mocking the ‘aged’ dancers.
On one of these occasions I was asked to dance by one of them, a tall, gaunt-looking Irishman with an engaging smile. After a few minutes jigging around he started to have a coughing fit and during the course of it something flew down the front of my dress. Whatever it was had gone down with complete ease of passage and had disappeared. Then I remembered the cigarette in his hand and, seeing that it was no longer there, began to jump up and down, frantically shaking the front of my dress. By this time the man was on the floor, flailing about amongst the feet of the nearby dancers. I shouted down to him not to bother about his fag, that my friend had some, but he was having none of it, eventually getting up and rudely lurching out of the room without a word. I thought no more of it. Later that night on the bus home, I reached down to adjust the handkerchief padding of my ill-fitting bra and entangled in it was a pair of false teeth on a little pink plate. The poor bloke must have gone home, his engaging smile disfigured by a big black gap in the front of his mouth, and talking with a lisp to boot.
The other room at the Locarno was presided over by a DJ and was dark and crowded. In here they played mainly Tamla Motown, the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers and the Supremes, which was our kind of music. ‘This Old Heart of Mine’ by the Isley Brothers along with ‘The Harlem Shuffle’ by Bob & Earl never fail to summon up the Locarno for me. We would throw our bags down between us and, fag in hand, coolly shift from foot to foot, our shoulders lifting and dropping to the beat in a kind of lazy shrug.
Christine was a good few inches taller than my five foot three and a half, and could easily peruse the periphery of the dance floor over the top of my head, where groups of young men lurked and perused us back. I would watch her face and await the signal that meant we were being approached by two eligible contenders; this would be an excited widening of the eyes and the hint of a smile with the tip of her tongue literally in her cheek. If, on the other hand, we were being approached by two chaps that she considered inferior in some way, she would throw me a look of horror that befitted the heroine in a silent movie, then drop her head and look to one side.
She was very conscious of her height and of the height difference between us. If, for instance, we were walking along a pavement that sloped to one side, she would drag me across to the higher side, in order to lessen the gap. However, it was guaranteed that if two blokes came over, one tall and the other short, it would be the short one that made a beeline for Chris, as if her height was a challenge, something to be scaled, like Mount Everest is to a climber. She would generally ignore them by staring imperiously into the middle distance above their heads.
On one occasion, however, a particularly small man suddenly appeared from nowhere, right in front of her, and started to cavort about in a horribly frenzied fashion. It appeared to be some sort of awful homage to Mick Jagger, with much leaping up on to the toes of one foot, bringing the other knee up and clapping his hands above his head in a completely abandoned way, and all done side on to Christine, like a matador with a bull. It was as if he were trying to show how physically liberated and virile he was, yet at the same time proving the exact opposite. ‘I am anally retentive, probably an accountant and don’t get out much,’ was writ large in neon above his head (no offence to accountants, especially mine). This, of course, we found irritatingly uncool and embarrassing, and Christine, who could blush for Britain, went purple. Then finally, having had enough, she stopped dead and stood there, staring down at him, arms folded across her chest; but to heap insult upon insult, the man didn’t notice, too wrapped up in his hip-thrusting, bottom-shaking, toe-curling dance. Finally he threw his hands up into the air above his head in order to clap them together. Christine caught hold of them with one hand and shouted directly down into his face, ‘Can’t you see I’m taller than you!’ And, in unison, we turned and left the floor, cackling cruelly as we went.
On these nights we would most likely get home somewhere between midnight and one o’clock. My parents, having gone to bed at about ten-thirty, assumed, because it is what they were told, that we had got in not long after that and that, after a night spent listening to records at Chris’s, she had walked me home and stayed the night. On many occasions when they had forgotten to leave the key out I scaled that wall up on to the roof and in through the bedroom window in evening clothes and high heels, having downed several rum and blacks. My mother never questioned why I had got so dressed up, just to stay in. I still don’t know whether she thought it was innocently done for the sheer pleasure of dressing up, as little girls do, or whether she secretly guessed but didn’t want to know. I suspect an exhausted mixture of the two.
Across the yard from the back place was a double garage, built by my father, that opened by way of a set of yellow sliding doors on to Wigorn Road. It housed my dad’s car and that of Reg Wood, his sometime partner who lived up the road. There was a poignant little echo when, twenty years later, I teamed up with Victoria for the Granada television series,
Wood and Walters
. As well as the cars, the garage was home to the guinea pig, which after much thought and debate was imaginatively named Guinea.
Guinea lived in an open cage; that is, with no front on it. This meant he was free to wander wherever he pleased. He pottered around the garden and grazed on the lawn during the day, going back into the garage at night, usually when my dad came home from work. Indeed, my dad missed him after he died because Guinea always ran out and watched as my father drove his car in, returning to his cage when the parking was complete. My father said that had Guinea lived much longer, he would have started shouting, ‘That’s it! Left hand down a bit! You’ve gorrit!’ For six years he led an uneventful, peaceful life until we introduced him to a female guinea pig called Janet. He went berserk, making a hitherto unheard-of noise, chasing and trying to mount this poor creature in a very agitated fashion. After only a few hours during which I left them, thinking that things would calm down in due course, I went in to check on them, only to find Guinea stone dead and Janet lying exhausted and spent in the corner. (My father said there was a lesson in that for all of us, so that when he died in 1971 of a heart attack whilst in bed, purportedly chatting to my mother, I did wonder whether he had quite taken that lesson on board.) However, it was a good long life - the guinea pig’s, that is, not my father’s - and goodness alone knows how long it would have gone on for, had it not been cut short by Guinea’s frenzied lust for Janet.
Many years later my daughter had a couple of guinea pigs of her own, a large grey male called Robin, named after the decorator, and a tiny chestnut one called Rosette. Remembering my own experience of Guinea’s right-to-roam lifestyle, I suggested that Robin and Rosette should also roam free and graze to their hearts’ content, on the little lawn at the back of our house. It seemed to make sense, as Robin wasn’t a sex pest as Guinea had been. They got on fine for at least half an hour, whereupon Maisie came screaming into the house, ‘They’re dead! They’re dead!’ I ran out into the garden, expecting them both to be prostrate from shagging, only to find that Plato, our big, gentle, black-and-white tomcat, had savagely attacked them, having Rosette for first course and Robin, which he couldn’t quite manage all of, for second. Of course I was wholly responsible for this and suffered many years of ‘You saids’ from Maisie, but I honestly thought all would be well. It remains a mystery to this day how Guinea survived all those years unmolested when he was surrounded by a neighbourhood full of cats, not to mention our own formidable Nelly.
The garage was also the venue for my first theatrical triumphs. These were shows, for want of a better word, put on by my brother Tommy with me very much in a supporting role. We bullied local children into getting threepence and some sweets from their mothers, then proceeded to lock them in while we terrorised them with our made-up dramas, mainly inspired by some television play or other and involving a lot of my mother’s old lipstick and a couple of her cast-off dresses.
It all came to a stop during one of my brother’s magic acts. He would stand there, in a magician’s cape and hat that he had been given for Christmas that year, and tell the audience that he was going to make me disappear by putting me in the special cabinet. This he had made himself out of bits of old wood that were stored in the corner of the garage. We had rehearsed and rehearsed, and all that I was required to do was to step into this cabinet. Whilst waving his wand about, Tommy would declaim in a high, moany sort of voice some mysterious incantation, which generally involved the words hocus pocus and abracadabra. Then touching the top and sides of the cupboard with the tip of his magic wand, he would close the door. After this there would be more incantation and magic-speak, rising in speed and volume to increase the dramatic tension. Meanwhile inside the cabinet I was simply meant to slip behind a bit of old red blanket that was hanging down at the back, so that when my brother at last opened the door I would have ‘disappeared’. The blanket was supposedly there as decoration, but of course its real function was to conceal a secret chamber or, in lay person’s language, a gap between it and the back wall of the cupboard.
However, one summer holiday after a long and successful run of the magic show, the act did not go to plan. We had gone through the usual procedure of my brother talking up the sensational nature of the act, then introducing me as his assistant, whereupon I would leap out and parade about with much waving of arms, dramatically indicating the various facets of the ‘amazing magic box’ and, at the same time, hopping from foot to foot and pointing my toes. Of course I wasn’t allowed to speak and was given a good whack once when I had offered - for just a few extra pence or, if people were short, sweets would do - to tell them where I had actually gone during the period of my magical disappearance. On this particular day, I dutifully got into the cabinet as usual. Whether my brother was rushing matters too much and I simply didn’t have time, or whether I was feeling mutinous, as the whacking incident had rankled, I don’t know, but I suspect I was simply bored and the thought of pricking the bubble of my brother’s theatrical pomposity as he preened and strutted about the ‘stage’ was terrifying, exciting and, above all, funny.
The door was duly whisked open with a grand flourish, Tommy announcing with great assurance that, as everyone could see, I had vanished. He didn’t notice for what seemed like an age that I was still standing there, rigid, in the same stiff pose as I had held when he had closed the door. It was only when the children began to titter and point that he cottoned on. He wheeled round on the spot and I can still see his face to this day: the shock in his little brown eyes, somehow made more vivid by the bright-red hieroglyphics painted on his cheeks and forehead with my mother’s lipstick. I can still feel that sublime surge of power as I watched him. Then the look of shock changed briefly to one of hurt, followed, in a second, by a flash of anger as almost in slow motion he came towards me. I jumped out of the box and ran, cutting a swathe through the audience, children falling off boxes this way and that, out across the yard and into the back place, where I locked myself in the dreaded, spider-ridden Lah Pom.

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