That's Another Story: The Autobiography (19 page)

When I was away from home I started to dread going to sleep, much the same as I had as a child and feared wetting the bed. This wasn’t helped by my propensity to sleepwalk. Once whilst staying in a hotel on location, I walked out of the hotel room stark naked and was only awoken by the sharp click of the heavy door as it closed irreversibly behind me. I stood in the corridor, shaking and soaked in sweat, desperately trying to work out where the hell I was. Luckily a female hotel guest was returning to her room and she got me a towel to wrap around myself, allowing me to sit in her room while she called the receptionist to come and let me into my own. One night when my daughter was critically ill as a child, and I was sleeping at the hospital on a put-me-up next to her bed, I woke to find myself running down the corridor towards the nurses’ station, shouting at the top of my voice, ‘Please, somebody, please! My daughter! Please, come and help me!’ I ran with the nurses back to the bed but before we even got there I began to realise that I had somehow forgotten why I had called them in the first place and that this was probably a dream. She, of course, was sleeping peacefully. At that point I just broke down.

This particular incident was unusual as my terrors went, in that it actually related to something that was obviously stressful in my everyday existence. Normally I could see little correlation between my nightly insanity and what was occurring in my life on a day-today basis. I would have the terrors irrespective of whether I was worried about something or whether I was totally relaxed on holiday, although there was the odd sequence of work-related terrors.

A common one for me was dreaming that the camera crew were in the bedroom. I would actually open my eyes and see them, and then I would start getting panicked because I would realise that I had no clothes on and that I didn’t understand what the scene was that I was meant to do, and why wasn’t anyone speaking or at least telling me what we were supposed to be doing? In another instance, whilst living in my friend’s Camden flat, I tried to get out of the bedroom window, waking up as my foot touched cold, damp concrete. It was a basement flat so I was in no real physical danger. I fact I never seemed to sleepwalk dangerously.

Frequently, I would wake up thinking that there was someone in the bed next to me whom either I couldn’t identify or whom I knew only vaguely, and so I would end up nudging my poor, long-suffering husband awake, asking, ‘Who are you?’ How my marriage has survived the nightly turmoil that these disturbances caused is nothing short of a miracle. When we first got together, Grant would cuddle and soothe me back to sleep.

‘Shhh, shhhh, it’s all right, you’re just dreaming, it’s all right, you’re safe, go back to sleep.’

After about ten years it became, ‘You’re bloody dreaming!’ accompanied by a swift turning over, taking most of the duvet with him. Sometimes we would have lengthy conversations that often turned into arguments, all whilst I was still asleep.

‘You’re dreaming!’

‘I am not dreaming!’

‘You
are
dreaming!’

‘Don’t tell me I’m dreaming. I know when I’m asleep!’

And so on. However, I was eventually to find salvation in the form of acupuncture. After reporting my condition to several doctors, I had tried sleeping potions of every kind and although they made me sleep soundly, I would still sleepwalk, scream and do all the night-terror stuff, but without waking or remembering any of it, which was terrifying in itself. So it was at the ripe old age of forty-eight, after thirty years of badly disrupted sleep, where I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times I had slept through the night, I had an acupuncture treatment. On that very night I slept through without waking and the next morning I cried and I cried. It was so wonderfully restorative and I grieved for what I had so missed. This only lasted the one night but I went back every week so that gradually it became the norm and the screaming habdabs became the odd exception. Then just as I started to get a good night’s sleep, the menopause started, but that’s another story.

In the year prior to college, I did a series of temporary jobs, working for Carrera’s, the cigarette company, counting cigarettes; as a sales assistant in a shoe shop; plus a myriad of others, under the auspices of Manpower Services, the worst of which was quite possibly a factory on the outskirts of Manchester. Here, I spent my days screwing tops on to large cans of oil and trying to take my mind off the all-pervading stench of the place, which I can still smell today and which, I’m afraid, is indescribable. Everywhere was covered in a thick layer of filthy grease, making the floor lethal, and after working there for only about a month, my shoes were coated in it and had to be thrown away. However, the worst aspect of this job was not the mind-numbing tedium, or the ever-present, sick-making smell, or the ubiquitous grease; it concerned certain of the employees.

Amongst the workforce were a number of mentally handicapped people and one such girl worked on the same floor as me. She was blonde, sweet, innocent and slow, obviously much younger than her actual years, always happy, smiling and willing, and rather pretty. Every day of her life while I was there, she was subjected to humiliating teasing at the hands of a group of four or five men. This usually took the form of lewd sexual jibes, which for the most part seemed to go over her head, but sometimes I saw her emerge from behind a partition adjusting her clothing, with raucous laughter coming from the men on the other side. At first I felt impotent, because of my status as a temp, but I became very upset on behalf of this vulnerable girl, obsessing about the awful, bullying behaviour to the point where I couldn’t concentrate on my ‘screwing’ and I began to lose sleep at night. In the end I took it upon myself to approach the foreman and told him what I had witnessed.

‘No, it’s only a bit of fun. She loves it. She’s been working here years. No, no, don’t worry your pretty little head!’

I don’t know how I stopped my hand from forming a fist and punching his big pockmarked nose right into his ugly, pockmarked face.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I want
you
to worry
yours
.’

When I checked in with Manpower on the Friday of that week, they said that I would be going somewhere else to work on the Monday. It seems the factory no longer needed my services.

Whilst in a practical sense I missed the comforts of home and the institutional nature of life in the nurses’ home - where the domestic side of everyday living, like laundry, cleaning and cooking, were completely taken care of - I found my new life of cohabitation both challenging and exciting. There in the tiny kitchen at Maple Avenue, from a fairly narrow culinary repertoire, DT gave me my first real cookery lessons. How to boil potatoes and how to make spaghetti bolognese, two ‘skills’ that have formed the basis of the cook I am today!

It was here that the exploding haggis incident occurred. I had just left the kitchen for a second when a bang like a football rupturing brought me running back in to find the innards of a haggis, which had been boiling on the stove, dripping from the ceiling, the thing having burst in the pan. The downstairs neighbour stood on the landing looking a touch scared. This was after the pubic hair business and, unsure whether this neighbour was the anonymous author of the note, I was struck dumb, so the two of us just stood there, him wondering what on earth had happened and me picturing him gingerly picking my pubes out of the bath.

Another disaster took place when I decided to surprise DT with something a little different and purchased for the hefty sum of six-pence a pig’s head. I popped it in the Baby Belling oven with a few rashers of streaky bacon artistically placed on top of the head, two between the ears and a couple down each side, which had the effect of making it look like hair and, without realising it, a prototype for Miss Piggy. I couldn’t wait for DT to arrive home from college; the smell from the kitchen was mouth-watering. However, when he finally did get home and the time came to reveal my culinary surprise, I opened the oven door only to find a sight worthy of a Hammer horror film. The head had indeed roasted to a gorgeous golden brown and the rashers had crisped into a set of curls, but out through the eyes, nose and mouth was oozing the creature’s brain, which I didn’t even know was in there, and it was a sludgy, burnt, greyish colour. We had fish and chips that night.

One Saturday, having gained a little confidence, I invited a couple of friends around for lunch. The lunch was to consist of a quiche, a fairly unusual dish in those days and very trendy, plus some salad, followed by apple crumble and custard. I was totally thrilled with the result as I got the two dishes out of the oven. They looked cookery-book perfect, golden and delicious, but when we came to eat the quiche, no one could get their knife through the pastry. What made it worse is that no one said a word; they just soldiered silently on, trying to force their knives to cut into it, one friend placing his knifetip down vertically and banging on the end of the handle with the palm of his hand, hammer-and-chisel style.

‘Look, look, since we haven’t got a pneumatic drill, it might be best to just scrape the filling out and eat that, and if anyone’s got a roof that needs mending please feel free to take the - what I laughingly call - pastry case home with you.’

I have never made pastry since. I’ve always seen cooking as some sort of measure of my womanhood, a kind of performance that I must rise to, and so apart from preparing meals for my own family, it has been an unspeakable trial. The thought of giving a dinner party to people I don’t really know is anathema to me. Only in the last few years have I been able to enjoy cooking to a degree and see it for what it actually is, and for that I thank Queen Delia.

In January 1970, I had my audition for a place at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre. I had bought a couple of books of audition speeches as I had been asked to prepare three pieces, one of which had to be Shakespeare. I chose Lady Macbeth,
Macbeth
being the only Shakespeare I knew, having studied it at O level. The other two I barely remember, except that one was from a play I had never heard of, with a speech by a character contemplating suicide, and the other was a play by Clemence Dane, whom I had also never heard of. I was interviewed on the day by Edward Argent, the principal of the school, who was wearing a black velvet jacket. I recall thinking that this was a good sign as I was wearing my new black velvet trouser suit with the bell bottoms, the tunic-style top being cinched in at the waist by a thin, black-leather belt belonging to DT, and my new knee-length, black leather boots.

‘So you want to be an actress?’ He was a round, teddy-bearish man, with dark, twinkling eyes, thick dark hair and a full beard, threaded through with grey.

‘No. I am an actress,’ I said. ‘Whether I am employed as such is another matter, but that’s what I am; I am an actress.’ I believed that absolutely and felt that if he were to turn me down, it would be his loss.

‘So, do you think you’ll be able to learn anything here then?’

‘Oh yes, I’ll be learning about the actress that I am and how to use what I have.’

He then asked me to stand up and perform my pieces. Never since have I performed anything, first time, with such confidence. First of all I did my Lady M, the ‘screw your courage to the sticking place’ speech, feeling totally in tune with every single line. I was pleased with it, sensing that I had made the right impression, and then, buoyed up by this, I went on to my second piece, the suicide speech. Again I soared through it, convinced that I was completely at one with the character, that I was inside her skin.

Edward Argent didn’t say anything straight away, just creaked slightly in his chair. ‘Mmm, that was interesting and very, very good.’ I felt as if I might just float up into the air buoyed up by my very own ego, but then, ‘Tell me, why did you choose to play a man’s part?’

‘Oh . . .’ I laughed; what the hell was he talking about? A man’s part? My brain instantly melted into a fuzz of anxiety. And then I realised that because I’d bought a book of audition speeches, I didn’t really know the plays that the speeches were taken from and therefore, of course, I didn’t really know the characters either. Clearly there was more to this than my just acting words off the page, regardless of context.

I laughed again. ‘Oh, I just thought it would be . . . you know . . . I thought . . . Oh . . . Oh . . . Oh, what the hell, I had no idea it was a man, I just liked it and I wanted to play that speech and express those feelings.’

Now he laughed.

‘I like your honesty, good for you. Now what else have you got for me?’

‘I bet you can’t wait!’ I laughed nervously. ‘It’s by Clemence Dane and before you ask, no, I don’t know anything about him and I haven’t read the play either, but I think he must be pretty good, judging from this speech anyway.’

‘Oh yes . . . Incidentally, Clemence Dane is a woman. Fire away!’

About three weeks later, I received a letter accepting me on the course, to start the following September, but this depended on my gaining one more GCE, as five were required in those days in order to teach. I instantly embarked on a course one evening a week at a college in Stockport, to study GCE Anatomy and Physiology. This was about as useful to my future as an actress as a lawnmower would have been, but as it was now February, and having missed the first term and almost half of the second term, with the exams coming up in June, I thought it best to choose a subject that I already had some knowledge of. Because of my nursing course, this seemed to be the best choice and, indeed, I managed to pass it with a grade two, my best grade to date.

In the summer of 1970, DT and I decided to hitch-hike down to Arcachon on the south-west coast of France, camping as we went. He had borrowed an old tent belonging to his father. The tent was stowed in an ancient, stained, green-canvas tote bag and had been in there since it was last used, some twenty-odd years before, probably for his father’s National Service. Our first stop, after finding it very difficult to secure lifts in France, was at a campsite in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris. We arrived in the evening, just as people were preparing their evening meals. I looked around at the state-of-the-art tents (the French take camping and caravanning very seriously), and theirs were all, without exception, brightly coloured, modern jobs, blue, green, red and yellow, with bendy poles that screwed together. Some had separate bedrooms and covered extensions to sit out under. People were cooking elaborate meals on full gas ranges, while others were barbecuing or drinking wine at elegantly laid-out tables, complete with vivid tablecloths and proper cutlery. There was that smell of coffee and garlic wafting in the air, which made me excited about setting up camp and cooking our very first meal out in the open. Then DT got the tent out.