the piano by ear, never had a lesson, and would belt out songs like ‘Tommy Tucker’ and ‘Slap a Bit of Treacle on Your Pudding, Mary Ann’. She loved it, and that’s why she insisted Mum should look after me at weekends – nothing, not even me whom she idolised, could get in the way of their time down the pub. Nan loved having an audience in the palm of her hand. Everyone in the pub knew each other, knew all about their kids, there was a great sense of community.
I can still sing all her good old London songs. Nan was singing until she was in her eighties and perfected the same throaty wobble in her voice on a big note that Vera Lynn had. In April 2003, when I was the subject of This Is Your Life, she had Michael Aspel eating out of her hand and insisted on singing, finally getting her break on national television. As she got older and her voice wasn’t so strong, she would hold the mike too close (which gave a fuzzy edge to the sound), but my memories are of her belting the words out.
Nan was of average height (there’s nobody else in our family who is small like me) and the only make-up she ever wore was lipstick, which to be perfectly honest was never expertly applied. Let’s just say her lipstick thought her lips were bigger than they were. At home she wore a pink nylon overall, the sort of thing only Nans had.
So that’s Nan and Grandad, and now it’s Mum’s turn. Obviously I wasn’t around when all this happened, but eventually, years after my childhood, I heard it from her. It was not easy for Mum to tell her story, or to live it either: life on the estate may have been safer and friendlier in those days, but people were also a lot more judgemental and it was tough for a single mother. Her story has been shrouded in shame and half-truths for most of my life. In fact, it’s only in the past few years that I’ve managed to piece it all together.
My mum Val is the second eldest of Nan and Grandad’s four children: Shirley was four years older and after Mum came Jim and Alan. As a small child Shirley had TB, and at 18 months she went into hospital and only left when she was six. When she came home she thought Nan and Grandad were a nurse and a doctor; it was ages before she called them ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ again, and they were overjoyed when she did. This was at a time when families could only visit children in hospital for a couple of hours every day so it must have been very hard on them all. Val always felt Shirley was the favourite, and perhaps she was because of what she’d been through. Anyway, she was the one who could do no wrong and I think in a way both she and Mum fell into their roles: Shirley did everything right, while Val was the rebellious, cheeky one.
All Nan’s children attended the Joseph Lancaster school, which I went to later, which felt nice for me because I liked that feeling of continuity, of being part of the family, one of Nan’s children. Afterwards, they all attended the same grammar school: Walworth Central. Despite being the only member of her family to pass the 11-Plus, Mum left school at 15 and worked in office jobs. She was doing the wages at Arthur Miller & Co just off the Bermondsey Road (a firm which made donkey jackets) when she became pregnant with me at the age of 22. By then Auntie Shirley was married – she married early, her first serious boyfriend – and Uncle Jim was working in the Channel Islands, so only Mum and Alan were living at home.
Mum was very glamorous-looking – 5’8”. I’ve got a picture of her sitting like a model with her big peroxide-white hair back-combed up and wearing her winklepickers and a tight little cardigan. She looks so powerful, so in control of her life. Yet she didn’t handle anything difficult that happened to her in the way you’d imagine the woman in the photo would. It was the early sixties and in some ways women were beginning to take charge of their lives, but the moment they became pregnant it was right back to the fifties, the days when nice girls didn’t part their legs until they were married and any girl who got pregnant was ‘no better than she ought to be’.
Everyone who knew Mum when she was young says she was extremely attractive, great fun, very into how she looked and having boyfriends. Even now, when I say those things, I feel I have to add, ‘but not in a tarty way’. I think I just imbibed the general feeling in the household that my mother was a bad girl who liked boys a bit too much and ended up getting pregnant like girls who sleep around. That was the way of thinking of Nan and Grandad’s generation, the judgemental view I grew up with.
Mum used to go out with a friend, Norma, who worked as a receptionist at the same firm. One evening on the way home from work, Mum (who was 20 at the time) bought ‘Let’s Twist Again’ by Chubby Checker. After playing it back at the flat, she wanted to go out and have fun, so she rang Norma – I’ve a lot to thank Chubby Checker for! They went to a pub in Lambeth Walk and a couple of guys came in, one of them wearing what my mum described as a ‘Frank Sinatra’ hat.
‘He’s gorgeous, he reminds me of Paul Newman,’ Mum told Norma as soon as she clapped eyes on John Murphy. Luckily, Norma fancied the other one. Mum liked the self-assured look of John – she always went for the cocky ones. After the ritual chatting-up, Mum and Norma agreed to go on to a drinking club in the Strand. Being close to Fleet Street, it was a place mostly used by printers (John worked ‘in the print’ for a firm of typesetters in Shoe Lane). As Mum was to learn much later, he was married, but his job gave him great cover for their affair because everyone knew printers worked shifts so on the nights he wasn’t able to see her he had a perfect excuse.
Mum and Norma were bowled over by these two blokes, but Mum admits they were much keener than the men so they took to hanging around in the drinking club in the hope of seeing them. Sometimes John would ring Mum at work and she’d walk around on Cloud Nine for the rest of the day. She’d really fallen for him. She admits she always knew she was more into the relationship than he was, but that’s young love for you. And she’s often told me she was bang in love with him. She used to say, ‘You always kid yourself that they will get keener, don’t you?’ John would sometimes come to the flat and go to the pub, so Nan and Grandad met him too, but he never fully played the role of Mum’s boyfriend – he always had a mate with him.
It was an erratic affair: Mum could go weeks without seeing him, but she was always desperate for him to call, and whenever he did she would drop everything. She was mad keen and that’s why she says she slept with him: desperate to hang on to him, she was trying to take the relationship to another, more committed level. Some nights he would come round to Nan and Grandad’s at about 2 a.m. after he’d finished work and Mum would let him in. He’d stay for a few hours and creep out later. Two years into the relationship, however, Mum found she was pregnant and John Murphy was about to become ‘Father Unknown’.
I think she didn’t believe it could happen to her: she admits she was in denial. When she missed her first period she thought it must be because she had a cold, and the next time it had to be an upset stomach. When she faced up to it she started jumping down whole flights of stairs, drinking neat gin and taking hot baths, but I was determined to make my entrance – Mum says I was a ‘clinger’. You couldn’t have abortions in those days (they were illegal) and besides, she wouldn’t have known where to start.
At first the only person she told was her friend Norma. When she was sure, she told John Murphy, and that’s when he dropped the bombshell in her hour of need: ‘I can’t do anything, I’m married,’ he confessed. Mum says it never occurred to her that he might be married. She admits she should have questioned him more and should have known because he wouldn’t commit, but she never did: she just wanted him.
Mum was devastated, but told no one else, and because she was tall and slim she managed to conceal her bump for a long time. Eventually, when she was about six months pregnant, she broke down in floods of tears at work and confessed to one of the directors. He asked why she was so upset and she said, ‘Because I am not married.’
In that moment of utter despair he gave her the support she so badly needed. ‘A baby is a joyous event,’ he told her. ‘You have to embrace it.’ The owner of the company told Mum that they would do anything they could to help, so it’s unfair to say everyone was judgemental, but in reality
