‘There was a lot that we kept from my mother. My dad would say to me as a teenager “Don’t tell your mother.” We couldn’t face the disapproval.’
Sue Johnston always seemed to be disappointing her mother. As a girl she never stayed clean and tidy like her cousins. As she grew older, she spent all her piano lesson money on drinks for her mates down the pub, and when she discovered the Cavern she was never at home. The final straw was when Sue left her steady job at a St Helens factory to try her hand at that unsteadiest of jobs: acting.
Yet when Sue was bringing up her own child alone, her mother was always there to help. And playing her much-loved characters Sheila Grant and Barbara Royle – although her mum wouldn’t say she was proud as such, she certainly seemed to approve. And in her mother’s final months, it was Sue she needed by her side.
The relationship with your mother is perhaps the most precious and fraught of any woman’s life. When she began writing, Sue set out to record ‘all the big things, and all the small things. Everything I wanted to tell my mother but felt I never could.’ The result is a warm, poignant and often very funny memoir by one of Britain’s favourite actresses.
Sue Johnston’s many much-loved roles include Sheila Grant in Brookside, Barbara in The Royle Family, Sal Vine in Jam & Jerusalem and Dr Grace Foley in Waking the Dead. Born in 1943 in Warrington near Liverpool, Sue has stayed true to her Northern roots – she has been no stranger to picket lines and is a staunch supporter of her beloved Liverpool Football Club. Sue has a son, Joel, and in 2009 she was awarded an OBE.
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Copyright
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First published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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To my mum and dad.
And my son Joel – who will never read it!
And Gemma – who will.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. The names of some people, places, dates and sequences, or the details of the events, have been changed to protect the privacy of others.
ENA SHARPLES ONCE famously said of her mother’s death, ‘She just sat up, broke wind and died.’ My mother would have definitely considered herself to be a cut above the fictitious Mrs Sharples and her mother. But as she lay in her bed, in the home where she’d been living for the past year, she did make one last Herculean effort to sit up, reaching out to be helped. Then she sneezed, lay back in bed, and I felt the life leave her, like someone had flicked off a switch.
She was ninety-two. I was sixty-three. These were her final moments, but the preceding weeks and even months had been long and exhausting.
As I reflect now, nearly four years after her death, I miss her. This may seem unsurprising; of course I should miss my mother. But things were far from plain sailing between her and me; our relationship was often difficult and fraught.
My mother began to sharply decline when I was filming Waking the Dead. Any time that I wasn’t filming I would be making my way up the M6 to be with her. Then I received a call early in September 2007 saying she had taken a turn for the worse and that I should get there as soon as I could.
When I arrived in Warrington my mother had rallied and was sitting up in bed, alert and ready for me. She looked me up and down in my on-screen make-up and asked scathingly, ‘What have you come as? You look like a bus conductress.’
This used to be quite a common insult when I was younger, as bus conductresses were known to wear thick pan-stick make-up. That I’d arrived to see my mum for what I thought would be the last time, only to be greeted with this, really makes me smile now. It was so typical of her. I stayed with her for a while and then reluctantly returned to filming in London.
A few days later I had another call. The nurses said they were sure this time that this was it. On the way, I got a flat tyre but I didn’t stop. I think that I knew this really was the last time I would be making the journey. Everything and nothing was going through my mind. I was very emotional – racked with anxiety and upset, tired yet wired.
When I arrived at the home my mother was lying in bed, looking tiny and frail. There was no caustic put down this time. She just looked helpless and fragile. She was awake and aware that I was there but quiet and restful, slipping in and out of consciousness. I took her hand and vowed to stay by her side. I would remain there for the next four days.
This time to be with my mother was a privilege that I know many people aren’t afforded. And as fraught, surreal and sad as it was, I was mindful that I had the opportunity to say things to her that I might not have normally said. Over the years I have had more than one occasion to want to tell my mother exactly what I thought of her, and not all of it complimentary or pleasant. She had always been a difficult person to deal with – someone who, I’m sad to say, found it very difficult to show affection or warmth towards me. It seems strange to admit this and yet at the same time she was my mother and I still loved her. As close relationships in life often are, ours was complicated.
My mother was obsessed with the notion of people getting ideas above their station. Having a daughter who was educated and followed her own path in life definitely fit into this category. There were many times when I just wanted her to be proud of me, but it seemed she never was.
But in these, her final days, as she lay in bed and I sat in the chair next to her, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that none of the things that made me angry about her didn’t matter, but they certainly didn’t need airing now. It seemed to me to be a time for peaceful acceptance. As she became more vulnerable I felt things soften between us. I suppose it was because she needed me and I was very happy to be needed and to help.
With all of this time to think, with nursing staff and relatives coming and going, but me as a constant in the room with my mother, I felt I needed to say something to her – for her to hear something from me that was from my heart. Something I could say with absolute honesty.
I took her hand and said, ‘Mum, I had the best childhood I could ever have had.’
Tears sprang to her eyes. I held her hand, which was gnarled with arthritis but she had enough strength for me to feel that she was holding on to me. Things changed as I got older, but it was true I really did have the best childhood and I needed her to know that.
Since her death, I have realised that whatever age we are, we all feel like children at times, even when there may be no one there to be a child for. Only last week I found myself hovering near the phone: I had found a recipe that I knew my mother would have liked and I wanted to tell her about it. Grief seemed to hit me all over again when I knew I couldn’t have that conversation. It was only a small thing but she would have been interested in my discovery and it made me very sad that I couldn’t share it with her.
My aim with this book is to look back over my life and explore what it was I couldn’t tell my mother, and why that was. But also – and more importantly perhaps – I want to set down a record of all the love and life, loss and laughs: all the big things, and the small things. Everything I wanted to tell my mother but felt I never could.
I WAS BORN in my aunty Millie’s house in Warrington during the Second World War. My mother Margaret was staying at Millie’s while my dad was away with his regiment. It is fitting that I was born in the thick of my extended family because although I was an only child I always felt part of a large clan.
My mother and her sisters would take turns to stay at each other’s houses. The reason they gave was ‘to keep the houses aired’. It seemed that everything needed ‘airing’ in those days. ‘No wonder you’ve got a cold,’ my mother would say, ‘that top’s not even aired!’ So the houses were occupied in rotation in order to keep them aired, but I’m sure the real reason was the reassurance of safety in numbers.
My father, Fred, was in the Royal Engineers and was stationed in Portsmouth. At around the same time that my mother found out she was pregnant with me, Dad came down with an illness. He was throwing up every morning and eventually they took him into the field hospital to have him checked over. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but then he happened to mention that my mother was pregnant. The doctor told him he knew exactly what he was suffering from: psychological morning sickness. Apparently it was quite common! While my dad was hospitalised his unit flew to Syria, where they were targeted and many of his regiment killed. Dad always used to say, ‘Our Sue saved me.’ When I was younger this was just a story but thinking about it now, it must have been quite harrowing for Dad, knowing how close he had come to death and to have lost so many of his comrades.
My mother would tell another story of a time my father was preparing to go back to Portsmouth. He turned to wave goodbye to her through the window, not looking where he was going, and as he did he walloped his head on a lamppost. He staggered back into the house, a great gash oozing blood from his head. My mum and her sisters had no time to be sympathetic, they were too busy doubled over laughing. Poor Dad needed stitches and ended up having to stay off for another couple of days. So my dad could say that he was hospitalised twice during the war – once for morning sickness and once for walking into a lamppost!
I often think about those years when I was first in the world and what it must have been like for ordinary people living through this extraordinary time. They were living on the edge in a very real sense. No one knew how events would unfold; all that they could do was pull together and hope for a positive outcome. My aunty Millie would always say about the war, ‘Well, we just had to get on with it,’ and she was right, what choice did people have? It seems to me that the only stories that were ever told about the war were as jokes or broad brushstrokes, never detail. The horror of war simply wasn’t mentioned, except with gallows humour. It was as if that entire generation had accepted their lot – whatever happened during the six years between 1939 to 1945 stayed in those years.
They were an extraordinary generation, they were never indulgent or self-pitying about what they’d had to face. It does make me think that we’re so very nannied now. I don’t know how people would survive if they had to face the same thing. When the war ended, everyone was, of course, thrilled, but I can’t help thinking that after all that time living on their wits, the return to everyday life must have been a difficult adjustment, even if it meant they might get the chance to actually clap eyes on a banana!
During the war, Liverpool and Warrington were a target for the German bombers. Liverpool, because it was a port and hub for industry and Warrington because after Pearl Harbor, when the Americans entered the war, it became an American air base. The place was swarming with GIs and my mum and her sisters would talk later about getting stockings and chocolates from the American soldiers. They spoke very highly of them, saying they were extremely courteous and generous. They used to go to the dances, but as far as they were concerned it was all very innocent. Other women did have relationships with the GIs that landed in Warrington and there was the common saying that they were Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here. But I think as far as my mother and her sisters were concerned they were just Over Here, and they were glad of the stockings.
I arrived in the world on 7 December 1943. At that time women were expected to stay ‘in confinement’, they had to rest up in bed for several days and get their strength back after giving birth. While Mum was lying there a few hours after having me, looking at her new baby and minding her own business, the air-raid sirens began to wail. My aunties Millie and Ena came charging in and took me out of my cot, wrapped in my blanket.
‘Where are you going?’ my mother asked.
‘To the shelter, of course,’ Millie said, swaddling me and holding me tight. Millie had an Anderson air-raid shelter in her back garden that she and her sisters were well acquainted with.
‘She’s a tiny baby, we can’t leave her in the house,’ Ena added, matter-of-factly.
‘What about me?’ my poor mother implored.
‘You need to stay there. You’re in confinement.’
And with that the sisters were out of the door with me bundled in their arms, while my mother had to lie there and hope that the bombs that were dropping all around paid due respect to the notion of confinement and left her alone.
So this was my rather unceremonious introduction to the world and I was named Susan. It wasn’t the one my mother had intended for me. My mother wanted me to have her name. I was to be Margaret Jane after both her and her mother and my father was duly sent to register the birth. I’m not sure what happened between him leaving the house and getting to the registry office but with uncharacteristic bravery he decided that I should be called Susan. The name didn’t have any family connection for either my mother or father, I think he just liked it.
So here I was, Susan Wright. Hearing my first name and my maiden name together always makes me smile. You were only ever addressed by your full name at registration time at school, or if you were in trouble. If someone shouted ‘Susan Wright!’ at me now I’d still drop everything and wonder what I’d done. My mother always referred to me as Susan, never Sue. She would shout me in for my tea when I was a little girl. ‘Susan!’ the cry would come down the street. I would, of course, always try to wring out another few twists of the skipping rope.
One of my first really vivid memories of my mother is of me playing in the street waiting for her to return from an afternoon in Warrington. She rounded the corner and I saw her and waved excitedly. She had had her hair cropped. In those days most women we knew seemed to have a regulation perm, or their hair was rolled back and pinned around their head, a severe look that made them look older than they were.
So to see my mum with her short hair made her seem so glamorous and I was really proud of her. She was wearing a suit, a skirt suit as Mum never wore trousers. In fact, the first pair of trousers I managed to convince her to buy was when she was in her eighties. She always said she’d feel underdressed wearing trousers.
Mum had dark well-shaped eyebrows, which I inherited from her. She had blue eyes and a lovely nose but I inherited my dad’s! The cropped hair didn’t last long and the perm soon crept back in but Mum always looked very smart.
My parents made a handsome couple. Dad was five foot ten and very trim; he had a bit of a swagger when he was younger. He was a great swimmer and his physique showed it. When I was a girl I found a certificate and asked my dad what it was. He bashfully told me that it was awarded to him because years before I was born he had saved a man who was drowning off Blackpool pier. The man had got into trouble and Mum piped up to tell me that Dad had jumped in with no thought for his own safety. I was proud to think that if it hadn’t been for my dad, that man would probably have died.
Dad had huge blue eyes and fair hair. He began to lose it as he got older and although he never had a comb-over he did have a few persistent wisps of hair that he carefully maintained. My dad, like my mother, was always very well turned out. He wore a trilby hat and a shirt and tie. I once bought him a Liverpool club tie and he was as proud as punch to wear it. Dad worked as a plumber both before and after the war. Mum had worked before she married Dad, in the box works, a box-making factory. She started as a machinist but had a shocking accident, running an industrial-sized needle through her fingers. She carried the scar until the day she died. After the accident she was moved to the assembly line, where she worked alongside her sisters Millie and Ena.
The house where I grew up was ten miles away from my aunty Millie’s in Warrington. It was on the outskirts of Liverpool in a place called Whiston in a newly built estate, owned not by the council but by a landlord. I remember that the rent collector would come every week; we never saw the actual landlord but he was talked about in reverential tones. He had money when everyone else was on their uppers.
The houses were all semi-detached except for the four in our row. It was as if they’d got to the last plot and thought, ‘Come on, lads, we can squeeze four in here.’ The house itself was plain-fronted, a cheap-as-chips build with a small front garden, but as my family lived on the corner plot we had a larger backyard, which gave me and my cousins room enough to play and for my father to tend to his beloved plants.
It wasn’t just the rent collector who knocked on our door every week. The pop man would come on his horse and cart and we would hand back our bottles and get a discount on that week’s cream soda or dandelion and burdock. The rag-and-bone man would pass by on his horse and cart shouting ‘Any Old Iron’ but we could never really make out what he was saying, to us he just sounded like a strangled donkey shouting ‘Eeyore!’ The coal man would come around, heaving his sacks of coal on his shoulder. It was so cold in those days, we would wake up with icicles on the inside of the windows. When I was ill my dad would come up and put some coal in the grate of the fire in my room. I still hanker after a fire in my room like the one I had as a child. The milkman was also on a horse and cart and again we would give him back our bottles in return for that day’s milk. I’d like to say to my mum, ‘See we were green back then, weren’t we? Recycling and we didn’t even know it!’
I never felt that we were going without because everyone was in the same situation. We did not expect to have anything more. It was before we had TV so there were no advertisements telling us what we should want next and even if there had been we didn’t have any money to buy them. Sweets were rationed until I was at junior school and I remember clearly the first day the ration was lifted and we were all given pennies to go and buy some sherbet.
We didn’t have many toys or things to play with, every family had the same board games – Ludo, Monopoly, Snakes & Ladders, and a pack of cards for the adults. My mother would dye her legs with gravy browning and draw a line up the back of her legs to make it look as if she was wearing stockings. I suppose it was a primitive version of fake tanning.
We had a bath once a week. Heating the water for a bath involved lighting the fire, so if the fire wasn’t lit my mother would boil a pan of water and give me a wash with that.
One of these bath days was the day before Warrington Walking Day. The Walking Day is a yearly event that is still being held today, originally it had been organised by churches in the area. It was essentially a parade and there was a fair afterwards and we would receive a few pennies to go on the rides. Everyone in the area took part.
I was very much looking forward to the parade the next day. Mum took some boiling water in a pan, brought it into the bathroom and set it down at the side of the bath. I was faffing around with the plug. As she went to pick up the boiling water, I got in her way and she spilled it all over my foot. I immediately began screaming in pain, my mother panicked and whipped off my shoe and sock, taking the skin with it. I was in agony and absolutely hysterical. Uncle Joe, my friend Valerie’s dad and our neighbour, was passing our house and heard the commotion. He came inside to see what was going on. Seeing me sitting on the mangle, where my mum had plonked me so she could get a better look at my foot, he looked terribly shocked.
‘Ring an ambulance, Joe, please!’ Mum pleaded.
Poor Joe only had one leg but he turned and hopped to the phone box as quick as that leg could carry him.
An ambulance arrived to take me to hospital. I was bandaged up and sent home, and a nurse came round to our house every day to give me an injection. For a couple of months I had to use a wheelchair to get about. It was very painful and quite traumatic. I missed the walk, of course, and was very sad to have to sit at home ailing while everyone else was enjoying themselves.
I was only little at the time but I could tell that my mother was horrified and blamed herself, even though she would say, ‘Why were you messing about like that?’ She was right, it was me messing about that had caused it, but she felt guilty because she was a mother and that’s what mothers do! Poor Mum. I still have that scar on my foot. I have the ugliest feet in the world and getting a scar on one seems to me to be adding injury to insult.
We weren’t Scousers, we were Woollybacks, as the real Liverpudlians used to call us. The term is derived from the time of the industrial revolution apparently, when people from Lancashire and Cheshire used to wear a form of sheepskin. But ask around at a Liverpool football match why they use the term ‘Woollyback’ and they’ll give you a very different reason involving relations with sheep – charming! Even though I have always embraced everything Liverpool has to offer, I have always known I’m not, I’m sad to say, a dyed-in-the-wool Scouser.
I have so many memories of my childhood that trying to pinpoint the earliest isn’t easy and it seems like such a long time ago! But certainly my fondest early memory is of sitting on my mother’s knee. We were in the living room as Listen with Mother came on the radio. I remember it was on at five to two in the afternoon and I can hear the tinkling intro clearly and the feeling that accompanied it. Here comes our story… I would think.
I felt very encircled by my parents when I was younger, very loved. Mum would nip to the corner shop and say to me, ‘Stand on the chair and watch out for me, I’ll only be a minute.’ So I would stand in the window, watching her as she walked to the end of the road, disappear momentarily and then reappear round the corner again. She wanted me to know she wasn’t going far and that I was safe.
Although I was an only child I never felt that I was on my own. My dad’s family lived nearby in Whiston and my mother’s family were not far off in Warrington and we saw them all the time. My dad was one of six, but that seemed like a small family compared to my mother being part of a massive brood of twelve!
My cousins Pauline and Marjorie, Ena and Millie’s daughters, were like sisters to me when I was younger. Although, I have to say, we didn’t all scrub up in quite the same way. Pauline and Marjorie were always well turned out. Everything was clean and pressed and remained so throughout the day. I started out in the same orderly fashion – my mother would always make sure of it – but as the day progressed I would attract muck of all description, always the first to get grubby and the last in the bath if I could help it. I was a total tomboy and this distressed my mother who, as someone who never stepped foot out of the house without looking immaculate, had obviously hoped for a more kempt daughter. I remember very clearly once being made to walk behind my mother because I had been playing in the mud and she evidently felt I was bringing shame on the family. I couldn’t have been any more than three at the time. The fact of the matter was I was a grubby child. Any bit of dirt, I’d find it. My mother would find me rummaging under seats on the train, surfacing with old cigarette butts hanging out of my mouth. If a bird pooed you could guarantee that it would land on me, and no amount of saying it was lucky would convince my mother that it was fine to parade around with bird muck on your coat. It didn’t bother me that I was thought of as the scruffy one, and I know that my cousins quite enjoyed being the neat ones too.
I think that my tomboy ways may have been a direct reaction to my mother’s assertion that she had always wanted a boy. It was something that she would tell me quite often – ‘You were meant to be a boy’ – as if the fact that I’d popped out a girl was in some way my fault. She even had a name: Michael. There was also the odd comment that led me to believe I was a ‘mistake’ and that she had never intended to be a mother. I think the fact that she came from such a large family put her off having children. Also, this was during the war and it was such a time of uncertainty that I’m not sure the idea of bringing a child into the world was something she and my father even considered. But once she had me she must have realised that this was what she was ‘meant’ to do as she certainly took on the role of matriarch of the house with great gusto.
I don’t mean to sound melodramatic when I say that comments like this made me feel that I was never quite wanted by my mother. It was just the way it was in our house. Of course, it was never addressed by us because in our family we just didn’t talk about how we felt. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to take it to heart; it was something Mum said to try to get me to be better behaved. ‘I’m just telling you for your own good,’ was one of her mottos and she stuck by it. I could never have sat my mother down and said, ‘So, Mum, you say that you wanted a boy instead of me – do you know how that makes me feel?’ She would have shot me down with one of her vinegar looks and told me in no uncertain terms that if she had had a boy he wouldn’t be trying to have conversations like this with her!
As a child I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ in Warrington. It was a large three-bedroom semi-detached that they rented. It had a big bay-fronted window and the house formed an L-shape around the backyard with the dining room, kitchen and back kitchen overlooking it. We always used the back door, never the front. In fact I’m not sure who would have been allowed through the front door as my grandmother wasn’t much for visiting dignitaries. Everyone was treated the same, so I can’t think who might have got their foot through it.
But as large as it was for a semi I could never quite work out how they had managed to fit twelve children and two adults in there when my mother had been growing up. I would go upstairs to the bedrooms and stand for hours trying to work out where they had all slept. Eventually I asked my mother how the logistics had worked and she replied as though it was obvious, ‘The girls were in one bedroom, the boys in another, of course.’
My grandmother – my mother’s mother – was a large lady and round, with ruddy cheeks and a face that reminded me of a toasted bun. Her hair was grey and pulled back into an untidy French pleat that had strands of grey hair straggling out from all sides as if fighting to escape her hair band. She was a real character who had a healthy disdain for cleaning and didn’t care who frowned upon her for it, something I have to say I think I may have inherited.
She was very capable in other domestic areas though. A self-taught seamstress, she made everything from coats to wedding dresses for an array of customers who would come to the house. Her children acted as a team, the older ones looked after the babies when they came along, wiping, feeding and cleaning. They would pick up the odds and ends of material that lay discarded around the house and would try to keep on top of this industry that my grandmother had created.
My grandmother dressed her own daughters; all six of them immaculately tailored. She used to buy Vogue and copy the designs from there. And when us grandchildren came along she dressed us too. Pauline, Marjorie and I would all be dressed the same, I think we quite liked it – identical, until of course I got myself covered in dirt. All my grandma’s daughters had an impeccable sense of style that they got from her. I also have a huge love of clothes that I attribute to the time I spent with my grandmother. Having handmade tailored clothes from an early age obviously made me sartorially savvy.
As well as sewing my grandma loved to cook and bake. Cooking is also a passion of mine; I love to cook for others but cannot lay claim to my grandmother’s prolific abilities. Her house always smelled of apple pie or custard tarts, or mince on cottage pie days. We would arrive at the house to be greeted with piles of baking – lemon meringue pies stacked next to huge chocolate éclairs that oozed cream. My grandma was a powerhouse of a woman, and looking back I don’t know how she managed to do everything she did. She just seemed to be able to do ten things at once, a skill learned, no doubt, from having to deal with all those kids! My mother and my aunty Millie used to say with great admiration, ‘She was a marvellous woman, our mother.’
My mum’s dad was the strong, silent type. As a small child I found him quite distant towards me, but I wanted to know him and when he did say something I used to sit up and listen, as it was always something well thought out and considered. When he did speak to me he had a knack of making me feel very special. A few years ago I was asked to go on the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are? where you delve into your family history. I knew that my grandfather had been from a well-to-do family and had turned his back on his privately educated upbringing to pursue a life on the railways. But here I learned how his own father, my great-grandfather, had dragged himself up by the bootstraps from a life of poverty in Carlisle to being a hotel owner and a man of considerable means. When my grandfather got married, on the wedding certificate under ‘Father of the Groom’, my great-grandfather had written, ‘A Gentleman’ as his occupation. It’s funny to think that this was my mother’s grandfather. I’m sure, hotelier or not, thinking himself a gentleman yet having come from the Dickensian slums of Carlisle would certainly have provoked a few choice words from my mother – it must surely rank as ‘getting ideas above his station’.
The fact that my grandfather then turned his back on this privileged life no doubt caused ructions within his family, but he went off to do a job that he loved. He always had the nickname ‘The Duke’. Whether it was given to him affectionately because of his background or whether it was something that stuck because he was an engine driver and therefore top dog, I have no idea. Anyway, he wasn’t just any train driver I was told as a child: he drove one of the most iconic steam engines in the world, the Flying Scotsman. Not so, the Who Do You Think You Are? programme informed me. He was indeed a steam engine driver but he only ever worked on the west coast and the Flying Scotsman went down the east coast. A childhood belief was shattered by this revelation. However, I did receive a kind letter from someone after the programme aired, telling me that I shouldn’t lose heart. The Flying Scotsman had travelled down the west coast from time to time and may well have been driven by my grandfather. I do hope so – I built any popularity I had at primary school on this connection!
It doesn’t matter, though, as one of my most magical moments in childhood was to do with my grandfather and his steam train – Flying Scotsman or no Flying Scotsman. My mother and I were standing on the platform at Eccleston Park station waiting to catch the train to Liverpool. A steam train soon approached and the train driver was hanging from his cab, whistling to my mother. ‘Margaret!’ he shouted. My mother gave him a disdainful look. Who was this uncouth man hollering at her at the train station?
‘Take no notice, Susan,’ she said, taking my shoulders and positioning me away from the train. As the engine came to a stop we both realised it was my grandfather. My mother quickly changed her tune.
‘Hello!’ she said, suddenly all smiles to her dad. ‘I was wondering who was shouting at us. Come along, Susan.’
We boarded the train and took our seat. It was a compartment, enough to seat six people at the most, with two sets of bench seats facing one another. I sat down on one of the seats. I was only about five at the time so my legs dangled over the edge, half a foot from the floor. I ran my fingers over the heavy weave of the upholstery. There were three pictures of places that the train no doubt stopped at on the wall. The doors and trim were a dark walnut colour and over my head there was a mesh luggage holder. The carriage smelt musty but not old, just grand. I was so excited this was my grandad’s train. No one else’s grandad had a train that I knew. My mother and I sat in the compartment and admired our surroundings. I could have stayed there all week.
When we pulled into Liverpool my grandfather came and got us and brought me to the front of the train where he lifted me up into his cab. He then introduced me to his fireman, the man responsible for shovelling coal into the fire to keep the steam pumping. Grandad showed me all the dials and the wheel and explained what being an engine driver entailed. Of course it all went over my little head as I stood there agog. But I was utterly thrilled that my grandad was the driver of such a big steam train. That bought me a lot of brownie points at school!
One thing that I clearly remember about my grandmother and grandfather’s house was the huge amount of crockery and silver they had, obviously a legacy from the hotel days when my grandfather was a boy. The amount of silver was mesmerising and I would always be returning to the cupboard for a peek, just to see that it was still there. It seemed so precious to my young eyes. There were large coffee pots and teapots, sugar bowls, cruets, cutlery and trays all with Globe Hotel – the hotel that my great-grandfather had owned – stamped on them. This seemed like such treasured possessions to me as a little girl. The idea that we had family silver!
My father’s mother died just before I was born. She never knew my mother was pregnant with me. Everyone always said what a lovely woman she was and I often felt that I had missed out on meeting someone very special. My father’s father lived around the corner from us in Eccleston Park with two of his children, my uncle Harry and aunty May. Just along the road from them lived Aunty Reenie, Uncle Alec and my cousin Alec. About a mile away was Uncle John, Aunty Ada and my cousin Lavinia, and around the corner from them was Uncle Bert and his wife Lynne, and their daughters Catherine and Elizabeth. It sounds like we were all living on top of one another but it just felt normal. Everyone I knew had his or her families close by.
Aunty May was very much part of my life in Whiston. She was a midwife at Whiston Hospital and during the war had nursed injured soldiers. She would come to our house most weekends and she would always have two bags of sweets for me, never one. And as I’m writing this it’s just occurred to me that I do exactly the same thing. I always buy two of everything, just in case. Just in case of what I’m not sure! But I would seek refuge at her house whenever I was in need of advice or felt that I was in trouble. She was a great listener and I felt that I could sit with her and air my problems.
Aunty May had never married but always wore a little diamond engagement ring. One day I was sitting with her watching TV. Aunty May was the first person in our family to get a television and it was big news when it arrived. Every Saturday I would go to her house and we would watch Six-Five Special, a forerunner of Top of the Pops. As we were sitting there I plucked up the courage to ask her where the ring had come from. She said that it was from a Belgian man that she had met in the war, he was an injured soldier convalescing over here and she was his nurse. When he recovered, he went back overseas with the intention that he would return and they would marry. But he was killed on his return to active service. Aunty May was heartbroken and never married after that. I went to see Aunty May three days before she died, shortly after her ninetieth birthday, and she was still wearing that ring. It makes me sad to think that she lost the love of her life at such an early age and then carried a candle for him until her death. There was never any other man in her life.
I went to Whiston Infants. My infant school teacher’s name was Miss Cross and we would say ‘cross by name, cross by nature’, making sure that she never overheard us as we didn’t want to incur any further wrath than she was already more than happy to dish out. She even looked cross, with her jet-black hair and features that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a crow.
I went happily to school on the first day but the next day I woke up and said to my mother, matter-of-factly, ‘I don’t think I’ll go to school today, thank you.’
My mother, with a look that could curdle milk, said, ‘There’s no “think” about it. You’re going to school, young lady!’
With that I was dressed and whisked out of the door, my feet barely touching the floor.
I wasn’t having this, I decided. They might have got me there under false pretences for one day, but I wasn’t going again. As all of the other children filed obligingly through the school gates, I clamped my hands around the railings and clung on for dear life. My mother tried to pull me off but I was having none of it. ‘I’m not going in!’ I protested. My poor mother. In the end she gave up trying to extricate me from the railing herself and marched into the school, asking the head teacher if she would be kind enough to come outside and prise me away from the school gates and into the school itself.
The head came out and looked at me. I glared back, my face puce with defiance. ‘Come on now, Susan, let’s have you inside,’ she said. She peeled one finger off and immediately I flipped it back on to the gate. It must have been like wrestling an octopus. Finally the head and my mother managed to prise me away from the gate and the head carried me, under her arm, kicking into the school.
After this altercation I was fine, but I like to think that this was a precursor to my future political life – the first of many protests!
I remember very clearly being in the nursery class aged four; it was an old Victorian schoolroom, and it had a big open fire with a guard to protect us infants from falling in. If we were naughty Miss Cross would make us stand facing the fire so that our faces burned. I think about this now and wonder how that would go down with parents if primary schools were to introduce a policy of Stand by the Fire!
I was, I am informed, very bright at infant school. We had little cards that we would write our class exercises on and I’d always be the first up with my card, arm outstretched, ‘Finished, Miss!’
One day as I was standing impatiently waiting to be seen by the teacher, I slid my exercise card down the back of a poster on the wall. I’m not sure why I did it: boredom, curiosity, whatever was the reason, it resulted in me receiving a good hiding. I was given the ruler – for that! Mind you, at that time if you had the audacity to go home and say that you’d been smacked you would get smacked again, so I never told my parents that I had had the ruler. They wouldn’t go down to the school and defend your corner to the teachers as parents do now. Years later I bravely told my mother I had had the ruler at school and she just said, without looking up from the magazine she was reading, ‘Well, you must have deserved it.’
I may have been a bright girl at infant school, but one thing I couldn’t do, which Miss Cross seemed to think was essential to the holistic education of her charges, was knit. For Miss Cross, humiliation was the art of education. I remember trying to concoct something with my knitting needles that was probably meant to be a scarf, but that just looked like a tangled mess – quite arty though, I thought. She held it up to the class with a look of disdain – all of my classmates looked on, marvelling at how bad my creation was – and then I got the ruler again! I was only five at the time. Five years old and being burned by the fire and beaten by a ruler for bad knitting was an everyday occurrence at Whiston Infants.
I had my first acting experience at that school. I’d like to say there was the early evidence that it would eventually become my career. That wasn’t the case. I remember seeing my parents come into the room and look around, maybe they were looking for me playing Mary, or even a shepherd or king. But no, there I was, standing on a stool pointing at the words with a stick, under strict instruction that I wasn’t allowed to sing. At least I’d been given a job, I suppose! I’m still no use at singing. I might on occasion fancy that I can sing but I’m reminded that I can’t as soon as the notes leave my mouth. So, Miss Cross, you may have burned me and beaten me but you got one thing right – recognising I was tone deaf from an early age!
We moved from infants to junior school when we were seven. My junior school, Eccleston Park Church of England school, was a mile and a half away and I would walk there and back twice a day, coming home for my dinner. Six miles a day, no wonder we were all beanpoles! One of the tricks of our teachers at junior school was to throw our work out of the window if we were misbehaving. Mr Dean was the worst for it. So we would be standing there, agog as our work frittered through the air. While we were unawares we’d get a great thwack on the back of the legs but not from a ruler this time but a cane; we were seven now, we’d moved on! Then we’d have to hobble into the garden to pick up our ruined work. Thinking back, school really was like running the gauntlet, it’s a wonder we learned anything.
When I was in juniors I had terrible bladder problems, something that affected my entire family. Weak bladders were known to run on my mother’s side and my poor aunties and mother were martyrs to it. If they laughed they wet their knickers. My dad always said it was a sign of a good holiday if there was a line of knickers pegged out. One time, someone in the family was getting married and my mother and aunties took my grandma to get her outfit from Lewis’s, a grand old department store in the middle of Liverpool. Grandma was trying on a particularly smart outfit when she had a fit of laughing at something someone said and laughed so much she wet herself and had to buy the dress.
I was to be cursed with this affliction as a child. In junior school I sat next to a boy called Roger Kelly. He would go on to be an actor himself and changed his name to Sam Kelly. He was in Porridge and ’Allo, ’Alloso