Danielle was beautiful, with lovely dark hair: she wore mascara and bright red lipstick, and to me she looked just like Snow White. Her mum had an antique stall on the Bermondsey Market and she gave me a keeper (friendship) ring. She was very into horoscopes, mediums and reading the future. I was once in Danielle’s room when I watched a lamp fly off the windowsill without anyone touching it. Oh God, her mum’s going to think I broke it! How was I going to tell her it just came off on its own? All she said was: ‘Don’t worry, darling – it’s only Danielle’s poltergeist.’
Danielle and me used to spend all our time together talking about boys – we even practised kissing just to know what it felt like. When I was 14 I really fancied this boy called Lee who used to sell newspapers at the Elephant and Castle. He looked cheeky and funny, like a squashed version of Mike Reid, and would call out the newspapers in a singsong voice, which I found very attractive. Danielle passed a note to him saying I fancied him and he arranged to take me out on a date. I remember he turned up in a little beige suede bomber and wore gold chains. We did have a kiss, my second ever, and I seem to remember it lived up to expectations. Funnily enough, I have clearer memories of kissing Danielle – what does that mean? But I didn’t see him again: I remember thinking myself a bit above him, which sounds snobbish, I know. I’d been brought up to believe only Prince Andrew was good enough for me.
Danielle pursued acting for a while, but family life took her in another direction. Her brother Jamie, however, in my opinion became one of the best actors of his generation.
Another of my really good friends was Suzy Fenwick, whose cousin Perry plays Billy Mitchell in EastEnders. When we were kids, Perry was appearing at the Shaftesbury Theatre in a production of Peter Pan as one of the Lost Boys. Suzy and I used to hang around with them. She fancied one of Perry’s mates, a lad called Nick Berry. We were mucking about at my flat one day when we found his phone number. Suzy rang and asked, ‘Is that Nick Berry?’ When he said yes, she replied: ‘I went through the phone book and I only found one berry, so I picked it!’ Suzie had to put the phone down – she couldn’t speak, we were laughing so much: it was really silly teenage girl stuff.
Back home, life wasn’t all rosy, though. When I was a teenager, Mum and I used to fight a lot in the way that I think sisters sometimes fight; Grandad would have to tell us to calm down. Both of us knew (and still know) which buttons to press. Our fights would be about trivial things but underlying them would be pent-up feelings about each other.
Mum never did things by half. I remember she was on tranquillisers and decided to come off them abruptly after hearing on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life that you shouldn’t take them for more than three weeks or so. By then she’d been on them for six years. She just threw the whole lot down the toilet and went cold turkey, but you’re supposed to come off them gradually. I remember having to hold her in the night when she was freaking out – I was about 12 or 13 at the time. She was shivering, sweating and rocking her body backwards and forwards. Even after that first terrible night I’d still hear her whimpering and moaning, but she did it: when Mum decides on something, she is very single-minded.
She gave up cigarettes in the same way. When I was 18 she went to see a doctor about a cough, and when she came back she said: ‘He told me I’ve got very thin airways.’ She used to smoke 40 Consulate menthols a day but gave up there and then at the age of 40. I wish I could have had the same self-discipline: it took me several attempts to quit.
Whatever was happening at home, I still had my escape route: the train that took me to my beloved school every day, where I could sing, dance and be with my friends all day long. For me, schooldays really were among the happiest of my life.
It wasn’t always wonderful, though.
CHAPTER 4
My Secret Shame
I’d been nursing a secret for a whole week after I was summoned once again to the principal’s office. On this occasion Mrs Sheward stressed it was nothing to worry about but the staff had noticed I’d put on a bit of weight and they didn’t want it to get any worse. She told me to be careful with what I ate and said they would keep an eye on me. By then I was 13.
Afterwards I was so upset and embarrassed and I couldn’t understand it. I knew another girl who had been put on a diet but she was really fat – how could I have let myself get that big without noticing? When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see fat, but if they thought I was fat then I must be so. I kept the conversation to myself, but then it got worse, far worse: I was about to be outed as a fattie.
‘Lisa, will you come here, please. I just need to check how you’re doing with your weight.’
Having been called to the front of the class, I had to stand on some scales next to the teacher’s desk. I was mortified, more embarrassed than I’d ever been in my whole life. Now all my friends and classmates knew: I was officially fat. And that terrible feeling, as I walked from my desk to the front of the classroom, has never left me: with one massive blow it seemed to destroy the image I had of myself. No matter how many times my friends told me that I was nothing like the other girl on a diet, the damage was done. I think I was a little bit chubby. My body had started to change and fill out; I remember lying down next to one girl in jazz class doing floor exercises and just coveting her hipbones, thinking how cool it was to have your bones sticking out like that. For dancers, all the moves look better when you have thin arms and legs. In ballet classes the boys had to lift us, and this was another reason why we were more aware of what we weighed: some boys didn’t half make a meal out of it, groaning and carrying on as if they had to lift a ton of coal.
At stage school you’re in front of a mirror every day in a skimpy leotard and tights. How we looked was a big thing: we were performing children and the school made it clear from the word go that casting directors could come round at any time, picking kids for jobs or to appear in advertisements, so you always think they will choose the most beautiful and you buy into the idea that thin is beautiful. I was worried because I thought if I was chubby then when I was doing all that dancing and exercising I’d be massive by the time I left school.
I still didn’t tell Mum I’d been put on a diet. Years later, when I gave interviews about being told to lose weight so young, I described my mother going up the school to object, but this was just one of my fantasies. I never gave her chance to protest – it was my problem to deal with. Also, I never really talked to my friends about it and I didn’t cry: I just took it on the chin, absorbed it and kept any hurt buried inside me in the same way that I always dealt with difficult feelings.
Somehow, I lost the extra pounds. I’d skip school lunch, which wasn’t difficult. Mrs Stooks, who served in the canteen, always had a fag in her mouth so we’d all be focused on whether that tower of ash was about to drop into our Spag Bol. Often it did, which put us off eating there. Instead I’d head straight for the chocolate machine in the hallway. I’d get a Bar Six and a hot chocolate, then dip the Bar Six into the drink and suck the chocolate off until all that was left was the crispy bit; often that was all I had.
I think I must have developed some kind of body dysmorphia: I no longer trusted what I saw in the mirror because in my mind I was fat, end of, but that’s not what the mirror said and so what I was seeing must have been wrong. Body-conscious ever since, I can’t help but feel thin is more beautiful, although as I get older I know it can also be ageing. However, this view is deeply ingrained and although I would not become one of the anorexic ones at school I can easily see how it happened to others because it’s a very fine line.
One of my Italia Conti classmates was the brilliantly talented Lena Zavaroni, who died of anorexia just weeks before her thirty-third birthday, having battled the condition all her adult life. I was deeply sad when I heard the news of her death but, like everyone else who knew her, not surprised. I’d heard she
