Steve wanted to go on a London bus and so that’s exactly what we did. People must have been gob-smacked to see Steve McQueen on a bus, but I never noticed because I was far too busy staring at him and thinking, I’m sitting with Steve McQueen, little me from Nottingham in my flowery dress and homemade love beads.
That evening Steve decided to take me to the Poissonnerie, a restaurant in Chelsea. Despite my French nursery education I didn’t remember that ‘poisson’ meant fish. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover this until it was too late as I’m violently allergic to seafood.
The place was exclusive and classy, all heads turned as Steve walked in and I was so proud to be his dinner companion. Sadly, the evening became memorable for all the wrong reasons. We sat at the bar on high stools, looking at the menus, and, being a gentleman, Steve offered to order for me. I was relieved as the menu was in French and I didn’t know what most of the dishes were.
He ordered a stew and it arrived with all sorts of strange-looking things floating in it. As I stared into my bowl Steve handed me a large wooden instrument shaped like a truncheon. I sat there, holding it, but after a minute Steve (realising I didn’t know what to do) gently relieved me of it with one of those wonderful Steve McQueen smiles. It turned out to be a pepper mill but I’d never seen one before and I was truly mortified when I realised my mistake.
I dutifully tried the stew and after a very short time, having eaten a rather strange rubbery ring, my stomach started to rumble like a boiler and my face began to swell and burn. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t, and as Steve turned to me, realising something was wrong, the trajectory of vomit hit him square on the chest. I stared at him in horror; knowing I was having an allergic reaction and that there was more to come, all I could do was make a run for the street to throw up in the gutter.
Next thing I knew, I was being bundled into a taxi by the restaurant manager, who gave the driver some money and told him, ‘Take her home.’ As we took off, my final image of Steve McQueen was of several staff fussing over him and wiping his shirt. Alas, I had almost certainly blown my chances of marrying this particular Hollywood superstar, I realised as I flopped in the back of the taxi.
Chapter Five
After that encounter with Steve McQueen, I felt mortified. I was still smarting when I received some upsetting news from home: my parents were to separate. This was something that would never have occured to me. There had probably been clues leading up to it, but if so I hadn’t cottoned on. I always believed they were happily married and the occasional rows they’d had in front of me during my childhood hadn’t seemed at all important. I guess I might be forgiven for not noticing that a problem had been brewing. In our house, my father had his bedroom and my mother had hers: having grown up with this, I thought it was the norm.
My mother had the most beautiful bedroom: a proper boudoir, it was full of plumped-up satin pillows, silk cushions and Venetian-style mirrors. There was also a reproduction Louis-Quinze bed and dressing table. Huge walk-in wardrobes had doors decorated with hand-painted French pastoral scenes. Father’s bedroom, on the other hand, was a proper man’s room with a plain wooden bed and dark brown, masculine-looking furniture that seemed perfect for him.
I’d always been aware that my father went missing on occasion but I thought he was just off in his gown van, selling Crombie coats. When I was 10 I learned how to drive that van up and down our very long drive. My mother is fond of telling the story of how one day she saw the van take off through the kitchen window and, thinking my father had left the handbrake off, she dashed outside only to glimpse my head just below the steering wheel. My grandson Oliver is the same – he’s only 4 years old but if there was a van to climb into, away he would go.
Looking back, I’m guessing that Dad (who was always a ladies’ man) had a female in every port of call. He was such a good-looking man that no one could resist him: I bet every woman he met fell in love with him. Whenever he came home from one or other of his trips there would be another row and another boiled egg whizzing across the breakfast table to splat on the radiator, but I just thought it was par for the course and never took much notice. And I wasn’t surprised when Mum went on holiday with her friends – I just thought that was what women did.
Since those days, however, my mother has told me that the only reason why she and Dad stayed together for as long as they did was because she was determined they would not split up until Brett and I had left home. They had agreed that once we were gone they would separate and sell the house – and that’s exactly what they did. Dad got a place on his own in Nottingham and Mum went on to live in a beautiful penthouse at the top of a Nottingham hotel, with a stunning view of the river.
What was lovely about all this was that they remained friends until the day my father died. They didn’t even bother to get a divorce until many years later, when Mum met somebody else. Even then she was reluctant to go through the formalities but I encouraged her to do so because I wanted her to marry again, to be happy. I have always thought it was wonderful that she and Dad stayed friendly because I was never able to remain on good terms with my two former husbands.
Like most men, my father hated being on his own, and so although he never lived with anyone else he was seldom alone. Even when he grew older, women loved him. He was an easy man to adore, but at the same time one who should probably never have married or had children. A dreamer, a fantasist, a romantic, he just wanted to live in his own world.
I always thought he was a good father, but he didn’t agree. Years later he told me: ‘I was never a father to you or to Brett. I was never there, never played with you, hardly ever took you on holiday.’ That might have been true but somehow I always knew he loved us: he was never disappointed in me or my brother, his was an unconditional love. By this time Brett had become a successful DJ with his own, extremely busy life working alongside Jimmy Savile and Peter Stringfellow and so we were in separate places. Inevitable, perhaps, but sometimes I felt very sad about it, too.
By then we were nearing the end of our first year at drama school and were all busy with end-of-year productions. As first years we had to go and watch the year above us in their productions, and so one evening I went along to see the second years in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet starring a young actor called Robert Lindsay. I took one look at his passionate portrayal of Romeo and instantly fell in love. Luckily for me, the passion turned out to be mutual. ‘Bob’, as we knew him then, had dark hair and dark eyes – he was one of the RADA boys that all the girls fancied. We met at a party soon after I’d seen his Romeo, where we talked and laughed all night. I thought he was funny and talented, while he made it clear that he liked me. He asked me on a date the following evening.
We went to see the musical Godspell starring David Essex, who was then (and still is) a major heart-throb. It was at the Roundhouse in Camden. As we sat in the audience, Bob turned to me and said, ‘One day, I’m going to be up there on stage, starring in this musical.’ And he was right: he did star in it, only two years later, in 1972.
Within weeks of that first date we were in love and decided to move in together, so I left the flat that I shared with the girls and moved into another one with Bob, this time just off the Tottenham Court Road. Our flat wasn’t really a flat as such – we couldn’t afford anything as grand as that. It was a very old-fashioned room that housed an embarrassingly creaky bed, a couple of