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‘I don’t think I ever said the word “adopted”, even to myself,’ she later told me. ‘I was in denial about what would happen to my baby. I didn’t think about it.’ I can hardly imagine how scared and alone she must have felt as she made these elaborate plans. In the end, it was clearly too much: Mum couldn’t keep it a secret from Nan any more and confessed she was pregnant. Nan was upset at the news but even more concerned about the idea of Mum going into the home and having to give the baby away. She told her not to go and said they would face Grandad together.
Mum says she would not have gone through with it. She didn’t really want to, but she needed someone to say the words ‘Don’t go’, and when they did it was a terrific relief. Mum and Nan had a cry together, unpacked her bag and threw away the letters. Meanwhile, Nan was just as scared of Grandad’s reaction as Mum was, so they put off telling him, but at least Nan helped her daughter to face up to the reality of the situation. She insisted she saw a doctor and about six months into her pregnancy Mum attended antenatal classes at Guy’s Hospital.
In the end Grandad heard the news in the worst possible way. Word must have got round because one night in the pub great-Uncle Dick (Grandad’s brother) asked, ‘Has our Val had the baby yet?’
Grandad went ballistic, not just because she was pregnant but because he’d been kept in the dark. He stormed home from the pub. Mum was cowering under the sheets while he shouted and swore and banged on the bedroom door. He called her a slag and worse, then yelled: ‘Why didn’t nobody tell me? We could have done something. Now it’s too late!’ It was the worst rage any of them could remember hearing from him, and Mum was sobbing, clutching her pillow over her head to drown out the noise. I think the whole of Stephenson House knew about it that night.
Meanwhile, Nan was trying to soothe him. He’d never laid a finger on her or any of the children, but he was very strict and absolutely furious, so it could have been a whole lot worse. As it was, it was all shouting and swearing. The next day, when things had calmed down a bit, Nan said to Mum: ‘We’re going up to Johnny Murphy’s to sort this out. Can we have his address?’
By this point John had left his wife and was living back home in Streatham. Mum had already visited him there a couple of months earlier, after his wife (also pregnant at the same time) had confronted her. ‘Are you Val Maxwell?’ she asked. ‘I’m not here to cause trouble – Johnny has left me and gone back to his mother’s. Will you come there with me? I want to front up to him with this business that you and me are both pregnant.’ Mum had heard that John was a real player, but she was so desperate to be with him that she naively went along with it, hoping she might convince him to choose her.
Anyway, after they found out, Nan and Grandad went to see John at his mum’s house and he looked very uncomfortable, so they arranged for him to come round to their flat the next day, but when they saw him again all he said was: ‘I can’t do anything – I’m married. But I’ll help out financially.’ Mum felt she didn’t want his money, but at least it was finally clear to her.
Mum says Grandad was kind to her after that, but I’m not sure she’s telling the whole truth. I think he gave her a hard time, because years later, when she was very drunk one Christmas, she started to knock him: she said he may have been a good grandfather to me but he wasn’t a good father. I was very upset at the time because my memories of him were good and I felt she was taking that away from me, but I didn’t have any idea of what she went through. Grandad felt the shame bitterly and I’m sure he let Mum know on every occasion he could.
I was born three weeks early. Mum was washing and setting Nan’s hair (she always did this every Saturday, like clockwork) when the labour began. I was born three minutes after 8 p.m. on Sunday, 24 November 1963, two days after President Kennedy was shot. Mum has often told me she remembers hearing about the assassination just before she went into hospital.
I weighed 5lb 13oz, small but not worryingly so, and had jaundice. Mum stayed in hospital for 10 days, like they did in those days. She admits she had no idea what having a baby entailed – all the sleepless nights, endless washing and feeding – she thought she would just get on with her life. She also hoped that when John Murphy saw me he’d want to be with her, but once again she had her head in the clouds and he never saw his new baby daughter.
Looking back, Mum says she never doubted she did the right thing in keeping me – women who give their babies up for adoption are often tortured souls. But that’s not to say it was easy. In those days the damage was also profound for those who went through with keeping an illegitimate baby, and she would not be free of the shame of my birth for many years, if ever. In reality this was just the beginning: the beginning of my life and the beginning of a struggle that would exist between us for the next 40 years.
When we came back home from hospital, Nan was in charge. Mum liked dressing me up, but Nan did most of the other stuff – the bottles and the nappy changing. Apparently Grandad said to Mum at one stage: ‘It’s about time you did something for your baby – it’s yours, not hers.’ Mum says she regrets not doing more but at the time she was more than happy to hand me over. Whatever he felt about the way I was conceived, from the moment I arrived home Grandad adored me, though. I won him over straight away and any doubts he might have had before I was born were gone: I was the apple of his eye.
It has made my life very awkward having three parents: Mum, Nan and Grandad. I’ve always had to be careful – I could never say how much I loved Nan for fear of upsetting Mum. It was a strange upbringing in that way. And now, with hindsight, Mum thinks it was a mistake to stay at home with her parents all her life and she should have found a place for the two of us. But living at home meant she could go back to work after 10 months off on maternity benefit. ‘I don’t mind looking after her all week, but at the weekends you have to stay in,’ Nan told her. She and Grandad liked to go down the pub every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
For Mum, living at home with her parents meant that she never found out about running a home. She never had to cook because Nan did it all, but she did her share of the washing, putting my terry nappies in the old boiler in the washhouse next door to the flat. Because Nan was always there, Mum didn’t have the confidence to break out on her own. She tried to take responsibility for me – ‘She’s my daughter,’ I remember her saying to Nan. ‘Well, stop fucking having a go at her then!’ Nan would say.
Now I can see that Nan was undermining Mum, but as a child I thought she was just taking care of me. Nan was a strong personality and you’d need a hell of a backbone to go against her wishes. Mum never could, and I can see why not: she was formidable. Both had big mouths and big voices, and they’d go at it hammer and tongs – lots of door slamming, lots of swearing. But Nan always had the last word and it was always the women making the noise: Grandad never took part.
He also made it difficult for Mum to be a normal mother to me. She remembers he was always telling her off for nagging me because as far as he was concerned I could do no wrong. Mum couldn’t stand up to him because she felt obliged to her parents for letting us live there. Looking back, I can see it was very hard for her.
I do remember Mum was usually there to put me to bed. She’d do the rhyme about the little piggies – ‘This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home …’ playing with my toes. And she would hold my hand and recite, ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddybear …’ Both ended with me being tickled, which I loved.
Having a social life was difficult for Mum, and not just because I was hell bent on stopping her. As she says, in those days a woman with a baby was not a good proposition. She had a couple of chances: at one stage she got engaged to a guy called Johnny who she’d been seeing for about a year (somehow Nan must have persuaded me he was all right). Auntie Shirley even found a flat for Mum, him and me to move into. A mate of Grandad’s brought some rings to the pub and Mum chose one. They were discussing wedding dates and she was over the moon: at last she would have the respectability she craved. I was about five at the time and he got on well with me, lying on the floor with me doing puzzles. Finally, Mum’s life was taking shape.
When Johnny’s mother found out, she told him: ‘If you marry that girl, I want nothing more to do with you.’ It seemed he cared more for her than he did for Mum because he sent round a letter:
Dear Val, I won’t be there tonight. My mum and dad are going down to Cornwall and I’m going with them. I think it’s time we called it a day.
Mum left me with Grandad and rushed to where Johnny worked, but he’d already gone and she never saw him again. It was so cruel, and once again she was devastated. Every time she went out with a man she dreaded telling him she had a kid because she knew he wouldn’t want to see her again, she says. Although she didn’t tell me the story of my father until many years later when I had a family of my own, at the time she told me that no one wanted her because of me.
CHAPTER 2
Early Days at the Elephant
From the moment Nan and Grandad accepted me into their home, nothing was too good for me, no hand-me-downs. I had a big Silver Cross pram bought new for me from Morleys of Brixton. It was navy-blue and silver and Mum said she felt so proud of me when I was in it. She chose my name after Lisa Marie (the actress from Rock Around the Clock).
From day one, the way I looked was top of her list of priorities. She would do me up like a piece of installation art, all the best clothes, like a ‘Tiny Tears’ doll in my little white crochet bonnets and capes. She’d bump me down the stairs of Stephenson House and leave me on display for passers-by to admire. It was two floors down and she couldn’t see me from the balcony, but in those days no one worried about children being kidnapped. Perhaps there was a much greater sense of community – no one would do it today. Anyway, if anyone did want to snatch me they’d have to get past our old bulldog, Ricky, who was tied to the pram. Call it Elephant and Castle childcare.
Mum loved buying me clothes. When I was older she’d dress me up and take me over to the park, where she’d take pictures of me smelling flowers. She used to clean my patent shoes with milk to make them shine and spend ages on my hair, giving me doorknocker plaits with loops and always with ribbons. I remember when I was old enough for school she’d stand me on the side in the kitchen and make sure I looked immaculate while Noel Edmonds prattled away on Radio One.
As I grew older I identified with her need to create a good impression on the outside. I loved shopping for clothes, picking out my outfits for family dos. Whenever I got new clothes, I would ask Mum to hang them on the back of the bedroom door so I could fall asleep gazing at them. For Mum, dressing me up was a way to validate us both. ‘’Course we love ’er – look how nice she looks’ was the message she was sending out. It rubbed off on me and I’ve always worried about creating the right visual image, wanting people to like how I look; what started as a love of fashion became a way of controlling people’s perceptions of me. If I looked great on the outside, no one would search for the real stuff underneath. The last thing I ever wanted was for people to feel sorry for me – ‘Poor little Lise’ were not words I ever wanted to hear.
We were a lively family and there were lots of dos to dress up for. Nan and Grandad liked a good time and there were a few parties at number 15, spilling over from big family get-togethers in the pub. They used to put a board over the bath and put all the drinks in the bath. When I was a baby there was a scare because they thought someone had sat on me: it was one of my family’s favourite stories – even as a baby I was the butt of Nan’s humour. Apparently Alan’s friend Mickey lurched about drunkenly and had flopped down almost on top of me. When someone realised they couldn’t see me they thought I was squashed underneath him. They all thought it was hilarious.
Nan only ever expected one thing from me: if she was having a good time, I had to join in. ‘You’ve gorra have a laugh, int’yer?’ was her motto. She didn’t do misery. If anyone tried to burst her bubble, she’d say: ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!’ And she’d encourage me to get up and dance in the middle of the boozed-up adults. ‘Gorn, babe,’ she’d say, and as the spirit of Chubby Checker entered my body I’d dance and shout.
‘Is it a bird?’
Boozed-up adults: ‘No!’
‘Is it a plane?’
‘No!’
‘Is it a twister?’
‘Yeah!’ and the whole of number 15 would be up on their feet, twisting the night away, with Little Lise right at the heart of it.
‘Aw, in’t she lovely?’ people would say. I knew I was everyone’s favourite.
As Nan’s granddaughter it was no surprise that I was a born entertainer, and she and Mum encouraged me. She enrolled me for dancing classes when I was about three and a half at the Renee Hayes Dancing School in a church hall just off the Walworth Road. I had a little red leotard and white tap shoes, through which my mum threaded red ribbons.
I was walking there one day with Mum when I was attacked by a dog off the lead: it was only little, like a Yorkshire terrier or something, but it bit my leg and locked its jaws onto me. Mum tried to kick it off, then picked me up and tried to swing it off. Eventually, when it was off me, I was taken to hospital for a tetanus jab which made me scream and put me off injections, so that put paid to my dancing for a while. I refused to go again but I still danced around at home. I remember once climbing on top of the sideboard, which had a drinks cabinet in it. This cabinet was made of shiny, fake walnut wood – I know it was plastic because we didn’t have any real wood in the house. Suddenly it fell over on top of me and there was smashed glass all around. I was badly cut and Mum had to rush me to hospital again; luckily this time I didn’t need an injection.
I wasn’t just spoilt with clothes, I was given every toy I ever wanted: if I wanted a walking, talking doll the same size as me, I got one. When I asked for a Swingy Doll, with beautiful white nylon hair she could swing to and fro, it was the same. And when I wanted a whole suite of Sindy bedroom furniture, it was there. I don’t remember being denied anything.
I must have been a cute kid when I was at nursery school because the teacher chose me as her bridesmaid when she got married. Mum was so proud: she and Nan took me down to Brighton for the wedding, and she was thrilled when people kept telling her what a pretty child I was. I was the centre of attention, just as I was throughout my childhood.
In some ways, I think Mum loved me too much. I was nearly suffocated by her love and fascination for me. I was top priority. I know that often happens to only children, but even as a child I found the responsibility of being put on a pedestal almost too great: it didn’t allow me to fail.
Nan and Grandad adored me in a more straightforward way, but even that caused problems. Their other kids had children, too, and Mum remembers a bit of resentment. Nothing was ever said openly to me about my father, but I heard things. At family gatherings people would say: ‘She’s a chip off the old block. She looks just like her dad.’ And ‘She favours her father, not her mother.’
From an early age there was clearly a short gene in my mix but Mum always tried to pass it off by saying it was to do with an infection after I was born. I’m the only one with a little button nose, too. When Mum introduced me for the first time people would often say, probably just out of politeness, I looked like her. She’d reply, ‘No, she’s not like me, but she’s the spitting image of her father.’ This was in my hearing, but not to me.
All I knew about him was his name – John Murphy – and I didn’t like it. It made me think I was half-Irish and I didn’t want to be a different nationality from everyone else in my family. The kids on the Rockingham Estate made fun of Irish people. Sometimes Mum would say, ‘You could have been a Murphy,’ and I hated it because I liked being a Maxwell.
I never asked direct questions about my father; somehow I knew not to; but she’d sometimes say things, like he looked like Paul Newman and that he looked fantastic and wore a Frank Sinatra hat. From these snippets I built up my own image: for me, Paul Newman was the definition of a good-looking man and I’ve always loved the music of Frank Sinatra. Maybe that’s just coincidence or perhaps some deep-rooted influence from those days but don’t imagine I spent hours thinking about my ‘Father Unknown’ – I didn’t. I did a really good job of putting him out of my mind. Somehow it seemed an insult to Mum to harp after a father figure when I could see she was doing everything she could to make sure I didn’t feel abandoned.
Grandad was like a real dad to me although he wasn’t cuddly and warm and he didn’t seem to be part of my world as much as Nan. But he did the fatherly things: he took the stabilisers off my bike, taught me to ride it, and he made a game for me – a bit like jacks only with wooden cubes. Like lots of men of his generation, he always wore suits (usually brown) and stripy shirts. He got them on Club Row market, next to Petticoat Lane, and whenever he needed a new one he’d take me with him on a Sunday morning. To a child this was a magical place, full of colourful stalls and great characters. My favourite stall was the one where they sold puppies, and Grandad would take me there and let me play with them – we loved our trips together. Afterwards we’d go and see his brother (Uncle Dick) and his son Richard (Little Dick) and I’d get a cup of tea and biscuits, then he’d drop me home before going down the pub.
It was Grandad who reluctantly put up the money when Mum saw an advert for child models (I was seven or eight at the time). She took me along and the people running the ‘agency’ said we would need to buy a portfolio. This was a scam because they never found me any work, but the photos were great and Mum used them later on when she got me into the Italia Conti.
It was Grandad who brought home one of my closest childhood friends: Pierre the poodle. He was a French poodle, hence the name, who had belonged to Grandad’s sister Sarah (famous in the family because she once lived next door to Cliff Richard) but she could no longer keep him. I was thrilled to adopt him and apparently when I was very young I said that when I grew up I was going to marry him. I have to say, the name was a bit of an embarrassment – shouting ‘Pierre’ off the balcony really wasn’t acceptable on the Rockingham Estate – so Uncle Alan quickly renamed him Pete the Poodle.
Grandad was the boss in the house: if the news was on the telly and we were talking, he only had to say ‘Shush’ and we’d all go quiet. After two or three drinks he was more sociable and he’d have a soppy grin on his face. That’s when he would say ‘yes’ to buying any toys or clothes I wanted and, boy, did I know it.
Mum and me shared our room until I was about 10: I think this contributed to the impression I had from early on that Nan and Grandad were in the role of parents. Mum never grew out of being their child because she always lived with them and it’s only recently she’s had a double bed, not till after Nan died in 2009.
Running through those years was my ongoing fear of Mum having a life outside our family: I dreaded her going on dates, I felt she was going to do all the things that had given her a ‘reputation’ in the first place – shocking, horrible things associated with my birth. I remember with horror once walking in when I was about eight and finding Mum in Nan and Grandad’s bed with a man: it was terrible. I called her a ‘slut’ and other things, words I must have picked up from what other people said about her. As far as I was concerned, she wasn’t supposed to have a boyfriend or male company. The man had a beard and no one in our family had a beard. To me, he looked debauched, but then any man in a compromising position with Mum would seem that way. Much later, when I was about 14, she had another boyfriend (Bernie). I wasn’t going to cut her any slack and used to sit between them on the sofa. As Mum says, she had dates, not relationships.
I’ve got a picture from a holiday we went on to Portugal when I was a kid and Mum’s sitting on the back of a fisherman’s motorbike. I hated seeing that picture: he’s swarthy, and to me he looks like a highly sexual person. It was terrible for me because I think Mum was having a holiday romance with him and I hated that, I hated anything to suggest she was a normal, sexual being.
Uncle Alan played his part in my upbringing, too. He is only 12 years older than me (Nan’s youngest child) and in many ways I grew up thinking of him as a big brother: he used to look after me after school while Mum was working. He’d take me to Nan, who would be at the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre playing bingo, trying to win food vouchers for our tea. She was no good with money and so she had to come up with creative ways to feed us all, usually involving bingo, the pawn shop or the tally man (the man who collected instalments on money she’d borrowed). Looking back, I can see she probably had a real gambling problem: money always went down the betting shop or the bingo hall and a lot of the time I was with her when she visited there. Grandad never gave her money because he knew what she did with it. She always loved horse racing and followed certain jockeys, working out the odds. At one time she worked in a betting shop and if a punter came in with a bet she knew was hopeless she’d pocket the cash and not put the bet on. Thank God it never came down on her. Later in life she’d watch the racing on telly, screaming and shouting at her horse.
I remember hiding with Nan when the tally man came round (I don’t know how she knew it was him). Suddenly there’d be a knock at the door and she knew not to answer as if she could smell him. So we’d hide and I’d have to be really quiet, like a game. If we were in the passage when he came, we’d have to get down really low because he could peer through the letterbox. When he’d gone, she’d laugh about it and get on with the rest of her day. If he caught her out and she had to open the door, it would only be a crack, a few inches. I’d be hanging round her legs, trying to see him, but she’d always push me back. I could never put a face to the tally man but the thought of him scared me: he was like a bogeyman.
I don’t think Mum or Grandad knew about the tally man or the clothing club Nan paid into; maybe it was only Uncle Alan and me who were in on it. Alan got a leather jacket from the tally man money, which he has never forgotten. Nan told us to keep it a secret.
She was always trying to get money out of Grandad, but he knew better. Whatever excuse she used, he knew it would go down the betting shop or the bingo; they rowed about it a lot. When they were cleaning offices together in the City they would take me with them. I’d sit there making false nails for myself out of Sellotape (a skill used later in life) while they cleaned. She’d be having a go at him about money. Sometimes she’d forge notes from one of the other cleaners (a man), asking to borrow a tenner until next week, and Grandad would hand it over, not realising it was going into her purse. If she had money, I’d be taken to the betting shop and had to hang around outside waiting for her, even after the age of 11 when I was in my posh Italia Conti uniform.
Feeding us all was very hand to mouth: she’d count out the money, sometimes coppers, and go shopping every day. We all ate at different times: the only time we tried to have a meal together was Sunday lunchtime but because Nan and Grandad had been in the pub for hours it was often burnt. We had a drop-leaf table under the window that would only be pulled out on Sundays or at Christmas. Normal meals after I came in from school were egg and chips or ham, egg and chips if there was more money, a bit of brawn some days. I loved fish paste and used to eat it with a spoon from the jar. Nan would sometimes make shepherd’s pie and I loved her rice pudding with a skin on top, made in a bowl that looked about 100 years old. We all loved it when Nan brought pie and mash home: there was a real ritual to ripping the paper off, carving a cross and pouring in the bright green liquor from a polystyrene cup, then smothering it in vinegar and pepper. It was a real treat, bought from Arments in Westmoreland Road, off the Walworth Road. I think we only had pie and mash if Nan won a bit on the horses.
I loved the Joseph Lancaster School. When I started there at five, the head teacher remembered Alan and said he hoped I would do better: ‘Alan came in through the front door and out through the back and was home before your nan.’ But I was a good girl: my school reports are all great except every teacher said I was very chatty (nothing much has changed). We didn’t have to wear a uniform and, as you’ve gathered, I was always fashionably dressed. Mum used to buy me clothes in Carnaby Street, the trendy place in those days, from a shop called Kids in Gear. I loved my patent leather hot pants with yellow leather braces on them. In another shop (Buttons & Bows) she bought silk ribbons, buttons and bits and pieces to sew onto my clothes to jazz them up. The shopkeeper made a dress for me, crocheted in white with red satin ribbon woven through and a matching beret. It was for the wedding of one of Mum’s friends (they weren’t having bridesmaids but they wanted me in the pictures) so I was star of the show, my favourite place.
I wore the dress to school as well: there was never any of that saving your best for weekends in our family, I was always done up like the dog’s dinner. It was part of our thing. Look at us Maxwells: we’re not failures, we’ve got all the latest gear and everything we’ve got is on our backs. A lot of working-class people are like that. Nan had a ring on every finger, she’d bung it all on: it was about telling the world we didn’t need charity. There’s a pattern emerging when I look back at my life.
I was Miss Popular at school: bright, funny and loved by everybody except those I took the mickey out of. Putting the focus on someone else’s shortcomings meant no one got round to asking me the dreaded question: ‘Why haven’t you got a dad?’ Without thinking about it, I was always trying to recruit friends: believers in Lisa Maxwell, people who would think, isn’t she great? I’m glad Lisa is on the planet! One of the reasons why I liked being well dressed was that I thought it would make people like me more if I looked as if I came from a well-off family who could afford to buy nice things. Even as a kid I was acting out the philosophy that took me through a lot of my life and stopped me ever having to face up to myself: keep busy, stay at the centre of things, have a laugh. Whatever you do, don’t stand still long enough to be alone with yourself or to let other people ask too many questions. If I was funny and popular, who would care if I didn’t have a father?
Maybe the other kids did notice but they didn’t say anything to my face. Maybe the others clocked my background, but I was protected from name-calling and nasty comments because all the scary kids liked me, which meant no one else gave me any trouble. I was tiny, but I had this really tall friend called Delphine. Her sister Jackie could beat anyone up, including the boys. My loose tongue and ability to mimic people meant I was always taking the mickey, but I managed to duck out of trouble: if anyone threatened to meet me after school, I’d walk out with Delphine and the troublemakers would melt away.
Mum never admitted she was a single parent, deserted before her baby was born. At the offices where she worked she always said she was divorced or separated, and for years she told me my father had ‘died in the war’. I was too young to ask ‘What war?’ because it didn’t make any sense (there was no war when I was born, unless you count Vietnam) and what was an American GI doing hanging around South London with Mum? But it was something women always said, an excuse the previous generation had been able to use, so that’s what I told the kids at school. When I look back, I’m amazed, but they accepted it just as I did.
I found out my dad wasn’t dead from Nan, but not in a proper sit-down-and-we’ll-have-a-talk kind of way. We were in the pub when I was seven or eight and I said something about him being dead (I think a kid at school had asked me). ‘Oh, your dad ain’t dead, don’t be silly,’ said Nan casually, then turned to the barman: ‘Scotch and American and a martini, please, Jim. Oh, and can you tell the pianist to play “When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New” …’
It was just slipped in: it wasn’t explained, just a quick reference before ordering the next drink. I don’t remember being shocked or the news having a massive impact, so I think deep down I probably already knew but didn’t understand. Although I carried on pretending, the story changed: instead of saying Dad was dead, now I said he left when I was very young. It was a world away from being illegitimate because at least I had a father when I was born. If I had a dad, even for a day or two after my birth, it legitimised me being on the planet.
Secrets and lies and shame have had a profound effect on me. There was a big chunk of my life that I didn’t know about – ‘Father Unknown’ – but I also knew from early on that I mustn’t ask questions. Again, I don’t know how I knew this, but subliminally someone must have made me feel it was not a good idea: we don’t talk about things that hurt. It was a defence mechanism, I guess, filtered down to Mum from Nan and Grandad’s generation, who believed you put up and shut up.
As I grew up, I became adept at not dealing with things: I simply put my head in the sand. From a young age children pick up when something causes pain, and I didn’t want to put my mum through that agony. The bits of information I was given about myself were just snippets or downright lies; you become numb to the good stuff, the bad stuff, everything … Somehow you know some of it’s not true but you also understand the reason why they’re not telling you the truth is because it’s too hard for them so you never try to unravel things. Not that I went through childhood having deep thoughts about all of this; I was enjoying myself too much.
I was a bit of a star at school: the singing teacher (Miss Stokes) really encouraged me, telling me I was a natural. She gave me the role of Mrs B in our little production about Peter Rabbit when I was about six and I remember hearing my voice singing through a microphone, a song about Mrs Rabbit going through the wood with her shopping basket – I loved it. It was a massive moment in my life, hearing my voice amplified and performing to an audience.
I was clever at school but that didn’t matter in my family, they weren’t interested in academic things. For some reason, I had a reading age of 16 at 11 years old. We all took a test to see who should be on the school team for the Panda Club Quiz, an event started by the Met Police, and I was chosen. The four smartest kids took part in this quiz with all the other schools in London and we won, which made us celebrities at school for a while – it was a really big deal, everyone was very pleased. We had to answer questions about the history of the police, which is funny because many years later I would join the Force myself in The Bill – I guess my research started early.
Breaks and lunchtimes were spent playing and our favourite games were French Skipping, with girls jumping through a large loop of knicker elastic, and Two Ball Up the Wall – I always had two tennis balls with me and was a whizz at throwing them against the wall and reciting rhymes like ‘Holy Mary, mother of God/Send me down a couple of bob’. Blasphemous, but we never thought about the meaning. We weren’t a religious family, the Maxwells, although I was sent to Sunday school at the Abdullam Mission from about seven years old. I took a shine to a dog living next door to the room where Sunday school was held. I’d knock at the door and ask if I could take Teddy for a walk. A lady in an overall, just like Nan wore, would hand him over on an old chain lead with a worn leather handle.
‘Here you are, love,’ she’d say.
‘When do I have to bring him back?’
‘When you’ve had enough.’
Off I’d skip with Teddy, who wasn’t exactly pretty. He was part-Doberman and part-Whippet, and probably lots of other things in there as well: skinny, brown and black with a strange little stump where his tail should have been. I loved walking round the estate with him, pretending he was mine.
One day Teddy made a run for it, with me desperately trying to keep hold of him, which was difficult because the leather handle had snapped and I was grasping the end of the metal chain. Then the metal hook, which held the chain to the leather, pierced the skin between thumb and forefinger: the more Teddy ran, the more it bit into my hand. The pain was excruciating and I was screaming in agony. Somehow I managed to yank the hook out and ran home, yelling my head off.
‘All right, babes, calm down,’ said Mum. ‘Let’s have a look.’
I got on top of my breath slightly and became calmer, desperately hoping Mum wouldn’t take me to hospital – I dreaded having an injection.
‘We’ve got to go, babes. You might have lockjaw.’
‘What the hell is that?’ I wailed. ‘Am I going to get a stiff head and never speak again?’
‘No, you just need a little tetanus. Let’s just get you up the ’ospidal.’
By this time I was hysterical. ‘Do I have to have a needle?’
‘No, darling, they don’t give you needles now – they give you sweets nowadays.’
So we went to Guy’s Hospital, but I soon realised I’d been tricked when two nurses held me down and a giant in a white coat came towards me with a needle like a pneumatic drill. I screamed, kicked and wriggled and tried to punch, but in the midst of this maelstrom the needle went in without me noticing it.
‘There, there, it’s all over – calm down,’ I was surprised to hear the doctor in the white coat say. And then, ‘Now, I hear you wanted sweets?’ and he waggled a bag of Jelly Tots at me. So I got the sweets but it was not the way Mum said it would be. Lying was her first line of defence under pressure and I don’t blame her because all she was worried about was getting me to hospital. I would have preferred to know what was coming, though!
In my later years at primary school I used to bunk off a bit. We’d go round to the flat of a black lad called Jimmy Paul, who had the ‘Telegram Sam’ record by T-Rex, which we would play endlessly. Jimmy scared a lot of kids – he was a good fighter with a bit of attitude, but I was his mate and so was Wendy Donovan. I really liked her clothes and she lent me her Starsky and Hutch chunky-knit cardie. When we went on our one and only school trip, a week in Norfolk, she lent me her edge-to-edge cardigan for the whole time. A really thin knit that joined in the middle, no buttons or fasteners, worn with a thin knitted belt, it was beige and came down to just cover my bum: I wore it with platform shoes.
I don’t think I knew the word ‘chic’ then, but that’s exactly what I would have used. To me, that cardigan looked like it cost a fortune. I remember that I extended the loan period, keeping it for the whole trip, and it was out of shape by the end. That trip was the first time I ever fancied a boy – Gary Weston. I showed off by dancing in front of him, wiggling my derrière. It was the start of another pattern in life: I’ve always used dancing to attract blokes I fancy.
In those days there was a great deal of freedom for children. As soon as I was big enough, Nan and Mum would let me loose to play with the other kids on the estate. They’d call from the balcony when they wanted me and often it would be after dark and I’d still be running around. We used to run everywhere, hiding from each other; we’d even play on a rubbish dump. Although we never got in big trouble, we could be naughty. I remember we played Knock Down Ginger (knocking on the door and running away) on the door of a little round Irish man, who looked like a leprechaun (‘Thick Mick’) – the political correctness police would be after us today. But we never did any harm and he was lovely to us.
There was a sandpit in Jail Park, where we played endlessly. I once got a mouthful of bird pooh, which gave the other kids a good laugh. Even then, I was talking the whole time and I must have looked up with my mouth still motoring. Another time I was wearing a gold ring with a tiny diamond in it. (What was Mum thinking of, sending a six-year-old out to play like that? Typical of us Maxwells, all part of making me look high-end.) Anyway, I swapped it for a bag of Maltesers. Mum had to go round to the girl’s house to retrieve it.
My babysitter Sandra lived on the ground floor of Stephenson House: I used to play with her brother Raymond, who was a couple of years older than me, and his cousin Rachel. Raymond was mad about Elvis and we’d all be doing Hound Dog impressions on the bit of lawn at the back of his flat. I was keen on David Cassidy and Sandra took me to see him when I was about seven or eight at the Wembley Empire. Because I was only little and sitting on her shoulders we were allowed right through to the front, and he sang ‘The Puppy Song’ for me and gave me a rose. I was so in love – I remember crying and kissing the television whenever he was on. When he came back to London the next time I was so upset he was kept on a launch on the Thames to stop the fans stampeding him. He was the first person I ever saw wearing Yeti boots, and he was the coolest thing on the planet.
I rode around the estate on my bike, a red second-hand Raleigh that my mum bought from her friend Shirley Delannoy, whose name I loved because it sounded exotic and foreign. Shirley was a travel agent with bleached blonde hair. She was married to a man from Belgium so by the standards of my childhood she was exotic. It was sometimes a volatile union – they lived on the sixteenth floor of a Bermondsey tower block and she would joke that one day she would deliberately leave open the balcony door when he was out drinking in the hope that he might fall over in his drunken state.
I got another kind of education from Uncle Jim and Auntie Wendy. Jim had done well for himself, running a successful haulage company, and they had a big house with a swimming pool. He was always supportive of Mum and me and I used to spend part of my summer holidays with his family. I’d be put on a Green Line bus in London and they’d pick me up at the other end. It was there that I learnt to eat posh.
I remember four-course dinners at their house, everyone round the table. And I learnt how to eat in a restaurant – they took me for my first-ever trip to a Chinese. When I used to pretend I had a father to kids who thought my parents were divorced, all the information I gave about my imaginary dad was based on Jim.
When I was 10, Jim and Wendy took me to Devon for a holiday. I was with my cousin Samantha and there was this lovely-looking French boy playing near us. He looked like a mini Sacha Distel, with a navy blue jumper. Young as I was, my taste in boys was already refined – I’ve always liked the preppy French look (for a girl from a council flat, I have a taste for ‘a bit of posh’ in terms of looks). So Samantha and I kept smiling at this boy and eventually we got talking to him. I was a bit surprised by his high voice.
‘Lauren,’ he said, when I asked his name.
‘Laurence?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘No, Lauren – I am a girl …’
I was gutted but we still became pen pals and I think when I was writing to her I secretly imagined she was a boy.
When I was about 12, I was at Uncle Jim’s house, sitting in the front of the Jag that Auntie Wendy had parked in the drive. Their Alsatian was in the car with me and I was trying to get the Stylistics’ eight-track cassette out of their cassette player. Somehow I knocked the car, an automatic, into reverse and we started to roll backwards down the hill. I was a tiny kid so if anyone had seen this it would have looked really odd. The dog started howling – he knew this wasn’t right. We were heading towards the swimming pool but luckily I managed to grab the brake and pull it on. We stopped within a couple of feet of the pool. Thank God we haven’t hit anything, I thought, as I climbed out.
‘I’m sure I left the car under the kitchen window,’ said Auntie Wendy.
‘No, it’s always been by the pool, Auntie Wendy,’ I told her, all innocent.
The dog didn’t snitch but he looked a bit worried around me for a while.
