looking good but Mum was determined not to give up. She was the receptionist at Gaskett, Metcalfe & Walton, a firm of solicitors, and approached her boss, Michael Harris. Mum volunteered to work lunch hours and longer hours so that she could save the money (she had already surrendered an insurance policy to help but was worried about further payments). Michael could see there was no way she would save enough by the time I had to start and so he came to an arrangement with her: the firm advanced my fees and they stopped £25 a week from Mum’s wages to pay them back. I’m so grateful to him for help when we needed it, and later on he became a trusted friend and handled several legal matters for me.
His firm also helped Mum get more money from my dad, John Murphy, although at the time this wasn’t properly explained to me. I remember, when I was about 12, being taken to a court near Tower Bridge in my school uniform. The whole experience didn’t gel – I think I’d have rather done without the money. I didn’t like the role of poor kid outside court with a begging bowl: they needed to recast the part for another child, I thought, not one who went to stage school, had a posh accent and believed she would one day be a big success. I stood outside the court building with a strange sick feeling in the bottom of my tummy because I believed I must have done something wrong. Courts were for criminals, weren’t they?
One of the clients at the firm where Mum worked was Bruce Forsyth’s first wife, and when she heard about me going to Italia Conti she gave us her daughter Debbie’s old cape. Some of my uniform came from Dickens & Jones, the official school supplier, which to me was a really high-end shop up West and I know it cost an arm and a leg. Mum got a lot of it from a second-hand shop in Battersea, though. The cape was dark blue with a collar like Mary Poppins’s cape, a bit like the ones nurses wear; there were silver buttons each side with chains going across. Underneath we wore a royal-blue blazer and then a blue jumper and grey skirt. Later on, little kilts. In winter, I had a blue velour hat and a straw boater for summer.
But the uniform was only the start: I had to have a bag containing The Complete Works of Shakespeare, which I never used because we’d have the parts printed out on paper. I also needed loads of ballet shoes, tights, a leotard and all the other accessories a dancer has to have. Imagine me walking from Stephenson House to the Elephant and Castle tube station done up like something out of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I was so proud because it was obvious I was going to a fee-paying school.
Grandad thought Mum was mad to be paying out all that cash. ‘You’re wasting your bloody money! Why don’t you send her to Pitmans?’ he used to say. Learning shorthand would be more useful, he thought. Meanwhile, Mum fought her corner.
‘No, it’s what she wants to do,’ she insisted.
‘Are you sure it’s not what you want her to do?’ he said.
And it’s true: I was living out Mum’s dream for her, but it was also my dream, my lifeline, my chance to be someone different. Mum saw that, too: she felt that I wouldn’t end up like some of the other girls round there, marrying a gangster or a petty criminal or even becoming a single mum like her. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, we were making a point to my absent father: trying to prove he’d made a big mistake when he turned his back on us.
In those days the Italia Conti building was so imposing. Years later, when I was doing The Bill, I used to drive past it, and it doesn’t look anything special now – I guess that’s normal when you look back on things from an adult perspective. Back then I was very impressed by the vast entrance hall. On the first day, Mum and the other mothers came with us and there was a real excited buzz about the place.
I don’t ever remember not fitting in: if they’d all been talking with Geordie accents I’d have adopted one, too. As a kid I was a complete chameleon. It was a useful skill in my working life but one that came, I believe, from my upbringing: I always had to put whatever trauma we were going through behind me. Don’t think about it too much, just get on with it, was the family philosophy.
Looking back, going to stage school should have been daunting, but it wasn’t at all, and this is a testament to the self-esteem Mum had given me. As a child, you could throw me in at the deep end in any situation and I’d swim. Besides, what was there to be scared of? Laura, Amanda and Karen were going, too. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t impressed: we first years shared a dressing room with the older girls and I remember being bowled over by Leslie Ash, who was a fifth former. I was mesmerised by her beauty and sophistication; she was the most stunning girl I had ever seen. She wore drainpipe jeans tucked into her boots, had feather-cut hair and always seemed to be carrying a large portfolio, probably full of gorgeous 10” by 8” headshots. We all wanted to be Leslie Ash.
The whole place was magical. In the loos were slim white paper bags with a picture of a crinoline lady on the front. We four thought they were there for our ballet pumps (one shoe fitted perfectly in each bag) and we lined them up in the dressing room. I’m sure the older girls must have been in fits of laughter. We were also convinced there was a ghost in one of the classrooms (we called him ‘Ghost Boy Blue’) and left notes out for him. They always disappeared, which meant he was real. Years later, when Karen and I were revisiting the school, we discovered the teachers had been nipping in to take them – they thought it was very funny.
Italia Conti was run by the Shewards, whose four children had all been taught there and now helped out: I got to know the youngest, Graham, really well. They are a brilliant family, dedicated to the school and the kids who go there. I think I was the smallest in our year, but from the beginning it worked out well for me. Even before I started full time in the summer holidays we got a call from the Conti Agency (when you attended the school you were automatically placed on the books). The BBC were casting a TV show (Ballet Shoes, based on the book by Noel Streatfeild) and they were looking for girls under 4’6” to play extras. We had to be aged 11 or over to be allowed to work, yet most girls that age were too tall. I was nearly 12, but only 4’ 21/2”.
‘Oh, bless her!’ said the girl from the agency when Mum told her how tall I was, and we could hear them laughing in the background. She then had to check with the casting director that I wasn’t too small, and luckily I wasn’t. I was thrilled to be working and being paid about £50 before I’d even started at stage school. But it wasn’t all happy memories, and this was also my first experience of something that would haunt me throughout my time as a child actor.
In order to work, all child actors had to go to the Inner London Education Authority and jump through hoops put in place to ensure we weren’t being exploited. We were weighed and measured, then had to prove our schoolwork was up to date and a third of our earnings was being saved. For me, the worst part was that I had to produce my birth certificate every time, and whenever I pulled it out there it was in big bold letters: ‘Father Unknown’.
Why couldn’t Mum just make up a name? Why does everyone have to know? I would think to myself. We lie about everything else in our family, so couldn’t she have told ‘just a little fib’? The school would ring up to say I had a job, adding casually, ‘Make sure Lisa brings in her birth certificate.’ Of course it was no big deal to them, but my heart would sink. If only one person could have put it in perspective. I wish someone had said, ‘Your mum had a really shit time because everyone judged her but actually they got it wrong, it doesn’t matter – she and your Nan and Grandad should stop worrying about what other people might say and accept the situation.’ But no one did, and it was years before I could tell myself the same thing. As it was, I couldn’t be in the same room when they looked at the birth certificate, I couldn’t bear seeing someone else’s eyes reading ‘Father Unknown’ – it made me feel physically sick. The worst thing was people feeling sorry for me. I can’t stand pity.
For most of the filming of Ballet Shoes I was at the barre doing exercises. I was never the best at ballet and the teacher in the film would come up behind us and whack my backside, which was always sticking out. When the programme
