Daring to Dream (10 page)

In my eyes I looked huge. I’d been a size 8–10 before I got pregnant and I really did balloon. I asked Craig to buy
me a gym membership for my birthday so I could get back into shape but I was too tired to go. I was still doing loads of night feeds, so during the day I’d be like a zombie and not really in the mood to get on a treadmill or lift weights. My weight eventually went down naturally but it took months and months. Even when I did lose the pounds (well, stones) I didn’t go back to a size eight. I kind of resigned myself to the fact that those days were over and I was fine with being a slim size ten.

Tony always said I was welcome back in the band but I didn’t rejoin them until a good six months after I’d had Brooke. I didn’t feel ready before then. Of course the outfits that I’d worn pre-pregnancy were no longer suitable for me. There was no way I was going to parade around in a red sequined bikini again! We had to go out and buy some new outfits, so I was wearing smart suits and dresses and I soon started to feel more like my old self. We changed the show a lot and it was like we entered a new phase, which reignited my interest.

I did need to be working and bringing money in but it was hard when the band had to go away for long periods of time. I did a week of Christmas parties up in Scotland that December and when I came home Brooke almost looked right through me. She wasn’t excited to see me at all. She was about eight months old but she barely batted an eyelid and instead crawled over to Craig. I vowed then that I would never go away for that long again. I loved singing but it was more important for me to stay at home. I cut right back on
the gigs and if I really needed to get a singing fix I’d go to one of my local pubs and do some karaoke so I could get it out of my system.

In 2007 my life changed forever when my dad became very ill. He was always petrified of the dentist, much like I am, so when he thought he had an abscess in his mouth he didn’t do anything about it for some time. When he eventually did go to the dentist he was told he needed to go to hospital and have it looked at as soon as possible. It turned out to be mouth cancer, which was a devastating diagnosis, and he was started on a course of radiotherapy. He had a big lump in his neck and his mouth and the next time I saw him he looked like a different man. It was so sad to see him like that and all I could do was pray that the treatment would work.

I’ll never forget getting the phone call from my nan in the spring of 2007 telling me that my dad’s cancer was terminal. I was devastated. They didn’t give us any idea of time but I couldn’t imagine him not being here. He’d always been such a huge part of my life and I think I almost went into shock and tried to stop myself thinking about the inevitable. My nan kept me up to date with how he was in between; she went round to his house every day to deliver him beer, which may not have been the most sensible thing for him to have, but it was like his medicine and it was how he got through each day.

I’d applied for
The X Factor
a few months before, and I
had my audition a few days after I found out about dad. I didn’t want to go along and use my dad’s illness as an excuse in case people thought it was some sob story, so I didn’t tell any of the researchers what was going on. I went along to Birmingham NEC wearing a ladies’ Leicester City tracksuit and after singing ‘His Eye Is On The Sparrow’ by Lauryn Hill for about a minute I was given a firm ‘no’. They told me to keep practising and come back the following year. I was so deflated when I walked out of there, I vowed there and then that I would never do it again. I was totally myself and I sang my little heart out and it wasn’t enough. I honestly wondered if I’d have fared better if I’d mentioned that my dad was unwell. I was so sceptical that in my head I believed you were only successful if you had a sob story, but I wasn’t about to try and use a horribly sad situation to try and get ahead. As far as I was concerned
The X Factor
and I were done.

In January 2008 my nan called me to tell me my dad had passed away. She’d gone round to see him and found him in bed, looking like he was fast asleep. When my nan told me about my dad I remember falling to the floor and shouting, ‘No, no, no, no.’ My neighbour Yvonne came running in and she called Craig at work to let him know. I was supposed to be doing a gig that night but I had to cancel – there was no way I could get up on stage.

I was in bits. Yvonne offered to look after Brooke for us, so Craig took some time off work and we drove straight to
my mum’s house. By the time we got there Dad’s body had been taken to a funeral parlour, which was a few doors up from Mum’s house. They had already closed by the time I got there but I walked up to the window and pressed my nose up against it. I could see a door at the back of the room and I knew his body was being stored behind it. I remember counting how many metres away from me he would have been in that moment and it broke my heart.

My nan went round to start sorting out his belongings, and she found more than 300 full cans of Special Brew hidden away in various places. He obviously hadn’t been drinking all the beer she’d been taking him, after all. She also found a note he’d written saying ‘I want a ’kin wake’, meaning he wanted ‘a fucking wake’. He also said he wanted his guitars shared out between his sister Jackie and I, and he also wanted a brass band playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ so it would be an uplifting day, not a sad one.

I still feel guilty now that I didn’t see him more when he was ill. I didn’t realise how sick he was. My nan told me that the hospital had upped his morphine in his final few weeks, but no one told me about it. Had I known I would have suspected he didn’t have much longer left and would have taken time off work to go and be with him. I’ve still got dad’s journals up in my loft. He was writing down his thoughts and ideas but I can’t bring myself to read them. Maybe one day I will, but right now it still feels too raw.

Going back to dad’s house for the first time was so strange.
My nan was there, but it still felt empty somehow. I went up to Dad’s room and saw that my nan had picked out a suit for him to wear for the funeral. My dad
hated
wearing suits. It was hanging over the back of the chair and all of a sudden it fell to the floor. I just thought, ‘I’ve got to do something here’, so I went downstairs with dad’s favourite grey collarless silk shirt and said to my nan that I thought he should wear that instead. I was waiting for her to go mad at me because she was very fierce, but surprisingly she backed down. I took the shirt into the funeral parlour later that day, along with a smart pair of trousers. I also took along photos of my mum and dad, some of me, Danny and Charlie and some of the grandkids. I asked the funeral director to put them in his pocket on the day of the funeral. If my nan had found that picture of Mum and Dad together she would have gone crazy because Mum and her didn’t get on at all; they’d had a massive fallout years before. There was a lot of slapping involved and they hadn’t spoken since.

Dad’s funeral didn’t take place until three weeks after he died and those three weeks were some of the worst of my life. I hated the fact my dad, who I’d worshipped, was in a bloody fridge. The day before the funeral I went round to my nan’s to help sort everything out for the wake and she told me that she’d given Jenny, the woman my dad had
that
affair with, one of dad’s guitars. It was the only one I wanted and I was so angry. Dad had been given that guitar after his best friend, who I called Uncle Mickey, was killed in a car crash. I knew
how much it meant to him and I knew he would want it to stay in the family. My nan was like the don of our family. She was in charge of everyone and everything and you didn’t mess with her. I was so furious my blood was boiling, but I didn’t have the energy to say anything to her because I knew it would lead to a row. To be fair to Jenny, she was the one who really helped look after my dad when he was ill, but I was still really upset that the one thing I really wanted – and my dad wanted me to have – had been given to her.

Later that day, my nan said she was going to see my dad in the funeral parlour and asked if I wanted to go along. I was in two minds about whether or not I wanted to see him, so she told me what time she would be there and said, ‘If you’re there, you’re there. If you’re not, we understand.’ I went back to my mum’s house and to take my mind off things I started playing darts on her board. I said to myself, ‘If I get a 20, I’m going to see my dad. If I don’t, I won’t.’ I was aiming for 20 and I was so desperate to get it that I’d already answered my own question really. I knew I wanted to go. Something told me I needed to.

I got to the funeral parlour a bit early and when I saw Dad my first thought was ‘he looks like marble’. The lump was gone from his neck, his hair was washed, his face had been shaved and he looked really smart. I put my fingers through his hair and it felt so soft. I was stroking his head and I was so glad I’d gone to see him. I would have really regretted it if I hadn’t.

The funeral itself was incredibly emotional. I wore a
bright yellow T-shirt with the band Budgie on it. Dad would have loved it. They played Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’ and when the drum solo kicked in I burst into tears because it reminded me so much of Dad. In my head I could see him playing along. I was sat right at the front and when I turned around all of Dad’s musician friends were playing air drums as a mark of respect. There were flowers in the shape of drums and Gibson Les Paul guitars, and at the wake people were telling me all of these stories about what my dad had got up to in the good old days. I was pretty shocked about some of them! All of the rock’n’roll stuff came out and it seemed my dad had lived quite a life.

The night I arrived back in Leicester I was bathing Brooke and she kept looking up to the ceiling and waving. I asked her who she was waving at and she said, ‘Pop’, which is what she called my dad. I can only assume that one of my neighbours must have told her about my dad dying, but it was quite comforting in a way.

The only things I kept of my dad’s are some pyjamas, a Supertramp T-shirt from when I took him to their concert, a clock and a cup and saucer. I didn’t want or need much stuff, but his guitar kept playing on my mind. A few months after the funeral I called Jenny and told her that Dad had wanted me to have it. She was really apologetic and said, ‘Come and get it whenever you want. It’s yours.’ She was so understanding about it. We’ve become good friends over the years. Who could have predicted that?

The only other thing I wanted were some of Dad’s ashes, but when I asked my nan for them she told me she’d already sprinkled them all in his garden. I was really hurt, so I took it upon myself to go to his house and ask the new owners if I could have some soil from their garden. I knew it sounded a bit crazy and the new owners were understandably very taken aback. But bless them, they let me do it.

I called my nan afterwards to tell her what I’d done and she must have felt bad because she said, ‘Sam, come round. I’ve got some of the ashes here.’ When I arrived she had a carnelian, which is my dad’s favourite plant, and she’d mixed the ashes in with the soil, so she gave me some to take home.

I planted a carnelian in my back garden and sprinkled the ashes around it. Every night when I used to go outside for my last cigarette I would look up at the sky. My dad loved astrology and he always used to show us things like Orion’s Belt and Pegasus. I was always looking for a sign from him, like a shooting star, so I’d spend ages looking up and hoping. I also used to look in my wing mirror when I was driving in the hope of seeing him sitting on the back seat smiling at me. I wanted to know he was still around. I was desperate for something.
Anything
. I missed him so much.

I
decided I wanted to go out singing on my own so I went to a ‘shop window’, which is a showcase in a social club where singers who want to get booked on the circuit can go along and sing for venue owners. I met up with a girl called Erin, an agent, who I’d spoken to briefly on the phone a few times. We were outside having a cigarette and she turned to me and said, ‘I only know two Sams. You’re one and the other one is a relative of mine. I went to see a psychic a while ago and she said to me, “You’ll work with someone called Sam”, and she said that I had to say three things to you. It may sound crazy but I have to say them because it’s driving me insane.’

I thought it was a bit odd because we didn’t even know each other, and I wasn’t sure I believed in all of that anyway. Then she paused and said to me, ‘Walt Disney World Florida,
the Twin Towers and Sex With Strangers.’ As I’ve mentioned I was in Disney World when the planes hit the Twin Towers, and of course Sex With Strangers was the band my dad was in when I was young.

I felt physically sick. There’s no way she could have known any of those things about me. It played on my mind so much, but I took it as being the sign I needed.

A while later I was talking to my cousin Clare on Facebook about a psychic she’d been to see and the woman had described me and said, ‘Tell that lady that’s out in the garden looking up at the sky hoping to see a shooting star that he’s right beside her.’ I’d never told anyone that I did that. It was my little secret and it totally freaked me out.

I had a similar experience about two years ago when we went to my husband’s auntie’s house to see a medium. There were about ten of us and one woman came through who was stern, and I thought it was my dad’s mum because she was very authoritarian. The message she channelled was for me to stop looking in the wing mirror. She also said she saw a piece of paper with ‘Chasing Cars’ written on it in red pen. The second part didn’t resonate with me at all, but I was doing a gig a short time later and I opened up my tracks case. Inside was a piece of paper with ‘Chasing Cars’ written on it in red pen. Someone had put in a request for me to sing it at a previous gig but I’d completely forgotten about it. I’ve still got that piece of paper to this day.

Shortly after my dad died his sister, Jackie, also passed
away. She was so like my dad. They both had guitars, they both liked a drink and they were so close. I went to London for her funeral and the night before I was sleeping on my mum’s sofa. I was drifting off to sleep and the entire room went cold and I had this feeling that someone was standing behind me. The thought came into my head that it was my dad and Auntie Jackie standing there hand in hand, and then the room went warm again. I like to think it was my dad letting me know that he’s okay. It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever experienced in my life and I get emotional just thinking about it. I know a lot of people are sceptical but I genuinely can’t explain away any of those things.

My dad was always in my thoughts and I’m so gutted that Tommy, my son, will never meet him and Brooke probably won’t remember him. I’ve got an old phone that I can never get rid of because it’s got photos and videos of my dad reading to Brooke on it that are so precious to me. I’ll never stop missing him.

I lost both of my granddads and my nan shortly after my Auntie Jackie passed away. Pop, my dad’s dad, passed away from emphysema. I remember someone saying to me, ‘When you hit a certain age you’ll need a black tie because you go to so many funerals.’ And sadly they weren’t wrong.

I carried on performing with The Tony Carnagie band for the next couple of years on and off, while also branching out on my own. I was still enjoying being in the show but the cracks were starting to show. I’d been in the band for years
and I’d really worked my way up. Then a new girl called Gina joined the group and I found out that she was being paid more money than me and Tony was also reimbursing her for her petrol. I felt so disappointed that I’d worked so hard for so long and yet she was getting better treatment than I was. If I had a gig on a Friday evening I’d have to put Brooke into a nursery for the afternoon until Craig could collect her and I never once asked for that to be paid for. That incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I knew I had to leave the band once and for all. I didn’t want to stay and feel resentful towards someone I cared about so much, but first I needed to have a back-up plan.

Sadly, because of the recession and the smoking ban the gigs had started to dry up even more anyway. I’d get a call from Tony the night before a booking saying, ‘Sorry, the gig tomorrow night’s been cancelled because the club closed down last week.’ I’d have been counting on that money, so I’d be left praying that someone else would book us for that slot so I could pay my phone bill.

The problem was other bands were willing to work for much less money than us, so we would often get undercut and miss out on performances. A lot of clubs seemed to stop caring whether or not the acts were actually any
good
; it was just about getting punters though the door and hoping they were too drunk to care if the band were crap. Sheffield and Rotherham used to be two of our biggest markets because there was a social club on every corner, but the majority of
places now have solo performers because that’s all they can afford. As a result, the solo market is really competitive, and that started to affect our bookings. People were willing to work for next to nothing and sometimes what we was offered for a performance would barely even cover our petrol.

I was worried about how long I could last doing singing off my own bat if I did leave the band, so I started to think long and hard about what else I could do with my life. Weirdly it was doing my weekly shop that kick-started my new career! A neighbour of mine was a prison officer and he’d told me lots of stories about his job which I found fascinating. One day when I walked into Asda, the prison service had set up a recruitment table near the entrance. I took an application form home, filled it in and sent it off. I had to do an online grammar and maths test, which I passed, and I received a letter inviting me to a Recruitment Assessment Day at Birmingham Prison. I had to take two more tests and then I was put into a room with actors and I had to explain how I would deal with certain situations and what the appropriate action would be. It was all filmed and my body language analysed to see how empathetic I was. I also had to have an interview. Thankfully I passed everything with flying colours.

The next step was a fitness test at Prison Service training college. I was incredibly nervous because the further along the process I got, the more I wanted the job. It was August 2008 and as I was getting ready to leave the house and head to the college I started to feel a bit unwell. My boobs were
sore and I was feeling really tired, but I put it out of my mind and took the test. I passed no problem, which meant I’d completed all stages and I was in line to become a prison officer. It was brilliant news.

I drove home on a real high, but you don’t automatically get a job when you pass all of the tests: you’re put on a waiting list for three different prisons and when jobs come up the service contacts you to let you know. All I could do was hope a vacancy came up near me. Even once it did I’d have to spend six weeks at training college before I could actually start a job, so I kept my fingers crossed that something would come up sooner rather than later.

I was on cloud nine thinking I could be about to start a whole new career within weeks or months, but when I got home I still didn’t feel right. And I was pretty sure I knew what it was. I went and bought a pregnancy test and – you guessed it – it turned out to be positive. There’s that great Sam timing again! I phoned Craig and told him I’d passed the prison service fitness test and he was so pleased for me. Then I added, ‘The only thing is, I’ve passed another test too. A pregnancy one!’ I think it’s fair to say he was
very
shocked but
very
happy.

I had no choice but to phone the prison service and tell them there was a
slight
problem with me carrying on with my application at that point. Training at Prison Service College would have involved me learning control and restraint and rolling about on the floor, and there’s no way I could have
done all of that pregnant. The lady I spoke to told me I had 18 months from the day I did my Recruitment Assessment Day to get back in touch and restart the process, so I marked it in my diary and carried on performing with Tony and the band.

It was getting harder and harder for us to keep going, and in 2009 we decided once and for all to go our separate ways. I think the spark had also gone from the show and Tony was getting sick of wearing leotards and prancing around a stage. He was constantly worrying about putting on weight and fitting into his outfits, and you can’t really have a curvy Cher. I was also a mum and that kind of transient lifestyle really doesn’t fit in very well with having children.

I’m still friends with Tony now, but we drifted apart a bit when the band broke up. He’s living in Chesterfield and we’ll always be mates, but what happened with Gina did make things difficult for a while, sadly. I have a lot of amazing memories from the years I spent performing with them though, and I also met one of my best mates, Jo, through the group, so I’ll always be grateful. She’s Brooke’s godmother and she’s absolutely blinding. The band was a massive part of my life and I was sad when it came to an end, but it had to at some point. I’ll always feel proud of being a part of it because we made a lot of people happy over the years.

I knew I wanted to carry on singing in some way, so I decided to carry on doing some solo gigs as and when they came up. Craig bought me a little PA system, which meant
I could perform pretty much anywhere, and either Craig would come with me or I’d get someone at the venue to help me lift it onto the stage and get it up and running. It felt strange being on my own full-time after being surrounded by other performers for so long, but I had done enough solo gigs to feel confident about it and I soon got used to it. After my dad passed away my performances became more emotional and sometimes I would imagine he was sat at the back of the room nodding at me while I sang. That always kept me focused.

I went to sing at New Lodge Working Men’s Club in Barnsley when I was about six or seven weeks pregnant, the same venue where my waters had broken with Brooke. When I was on stage I could feel that something wasn’t right. I was near the end of my set and when I went to the toilet afterwards noticed I was bleeding really heavily; I was terrified I was losing the baby. Thankfully Craig was with me at that gig, so I went to find him and he took me straight to hospital. By the time we got there it was late and there was no one available to do my scan, so I went back the following morning to get properly checked over. I cannot even begin to tell you how relieved I was when they said that the baby was okay. Sadly they did say that the loss of blood I’d experienced may have potentially been a twin. It was very sad to think about what might have been but I’ll probably never know what actually happened and I was so grateful that there was still a healthy baby inside of me.

After that scare I scaled everything back. I knew that I needed to take things easy and it would have been really hard for me to carry on gigging like I had in the past. Because Brooke had been so premature I had to go to the Prem Prevention Clinic at the Leicester General for scans and to be monitored regularly. Craig wanted me to rest as much as possible, so I became very familiar with daytime TV.

When it was time for the 20-week scan Craig and I were both desperate to find out the sex of the baby as we had done with Brooke. Craig was insisting he didn’t mind whether it was a boy or girl, but as soon as the nurse told us we were having a boy his face broke into a massive grin. We went straight to Toys R Us and bought Brooke a present and the first few bits for our son. When my dad was ill he’d said to me, ‘Sam, if you ever have a boy, will you name him Tommy?’ I was going to be called Tommy if I was a boy and my dad had an Uncle Tommy he thought the world of, so it was a name that meant a lot to him. My due date was 7th June – my dad’s birthday, so it felt only right that we should honour his wishes. From then on whenever we talked about my bump we called him Tommy and it felt right.

Poor Brooke wasn’t all that happy about the fact she was going to have a little brother. She’d always said she wanted a sister to play with, so when we told her it was a boy she burst into tears. We had to try and placate her with a Peppa Pig toy but she kept crying and saying, ‘I don’t want a brother, I want a sister. I don’t like boys.’ We kept telling her what an
amazing big sister she was going to be to little Tommy but she still wasn’t keen!

Two weeks before my due date I was booked in for a blood test at my local doctors. I was talking to one of nurses and I started getting this pulling sensation in my tummy. The nurse said it was probably Braxton Hicks – practice contractions, or Toni Braxton’s as I used to call them – but by the time I’d got back home it was much worse. It kept tightening and then stopping and my neighbour Yvonne said to me, ‘Sam, I think you’re in labour.’ I called the Leicester Royal Infirmary hospital and because Brooke was early they asked me to go straight down there. Craig’s mum came over to look after Brooke and Craig and I headed off. I took my birthing bag just in case, but I thought they’d probably be sending me back home within the hour. How wrong was I!

I was hooked up to a machine which monitors your contractions and the nurse told me they were less than five minutes apart. The doctor came in and did some other tests and told me I had to stay in hospital. That’s when it hit me that I could be having my baby that day. I was about to send Craig off with a list of things I wanted, like magazines and munchies, but as I rolled out of the bed to say goodbye it felt like a water balloon popped in my stomach and my waters broke all over the floor. The nurse told me it would be a little while before I was ready to go into the delivery room and told Craig he could go back home for a while and pick up the stuff I wanted.