Two steps down from the main room was another small room housing an old sink and a big old-fashioned bath with a tap that only ever produced a trickle of hot water so it was impossible to have more than a shallow bath. The loo was downstairs (freezing on winter nights) and we had a tiny prehistoric cooker that was barely usable. In fact, the whole building (still standing today) ought to have been condemned, but we were in love and nothing else mattered.
The only puzzling thing about the block was that lots of single girls seemed to live there and people would come knocking on their doors at all hours. I had no idea what this was about until one afternoon when there was a knock at our door. I opened it only to realise that the old man reeking of booze and eyeing me up was probably not there to read the meter.
So that was the day when Bob and I worked out that we were not just living in a seedy old block of flats but some kind of brothel and the slimy old sod who had just knocked on the door was a customer. In fact, Bob was standing behind me when I opened the door and he went berserk when he saw the way the guy was leering at me and chased him down the stairs. Afterwards we thought it was really funny and laughed into the night, eating our kebabs in bed while trying to keep warm.
We actually became a popular squat for other students, who used to come and sleep on our floor. This was largely because they got cheap kebabs from the downstairs shop run by Gig, a lovely Greek man: he made sure we all ate well and we loved him for it.
Student days should be romantic, sex-fuelled and fun-filled: for Bob and me, they were. When the summer holidays came, we stayed in London and got jobs as ushers at the Palace Theatre, where the once-seen, never-to-be-forgotten Danny La Rue was performing in a spectacular revue, Danny at the Palace. In his big white wigs and diamante-studded ball-gowns, he made the most beautiful-looking, elegant woman. When he first appeared, he’d walk towards the middle of the stage in all his glory and say to the audience in a low baritone, ‘Wotcha, mates!’ The audience loved him, as did we – although I had many a row with the manager there because I was paid £3 10s while Bob got £4 10s. Talk about inequality! But they refused to back down and in the end I was sacked for being such a troublemaker.
Bob and I had been together in our little love nest for about a year when we decided to get married. There wasn’t a formal proposal, we just agreed one day that it would be a great idea. Together we went to see my mum and then on to Ilkeston, not far from Nottingham, to see his. Around the same time, we also told my father. Both our mothers were lovely to us, but I’m sure that privately they thought we were too young and hoped it would fizzle out. I was still only 20 and Bob, nine months older than me, was 21, but we thought we had found real love and would be together forever.
We chose a date in the summer holidays, and despite her reservations Mum bought me a beautiful wedding dress embroidered all over with white hearts and a huge skirt and long train. She also purchased lovely outfits for my bridesmaids, who were children of friends, and the pageboy from Bob’s side. Mum and I decided on the venue, while Bob and I chose the guests we wanted to invite and I arranged for our banns to be read.
Everything was in place and I was ecstatic at the prospect of marrying Bob because I thought he was everything I wanted. He seemed just as happy but perhaps he was having private doubts because only a few weeks before our wedding day everything changed. The summer term had ended and Bob, being a year ahead of me, had graduated from RADA and was heading out into the world to begin his acting career. He was in a play in Exeter, at the Northcott Theatre, and I went down to visit, taking with me a little mongrel puppy as a gift for him. While there, I started to feel uneasy. A couple of the girls he was working with were giving him looks that I couldn’t mistake and he was very distant towards me, so much so that I became convinced he was playing around.
After I left and went back home to stay with Mum in Nottingham I didn’t hear from him. As the days passed I began to realise he wasn’t going to get in touch, but then neither did I. I let our romance fizzle out. Thankfully, my mother picked up the signals and quietly cancelled our wedding, having paid for everything.
I thought perhaps his mum had persuaded him not to go ahead because I knew she was unhappy about it, but, looking back, there must have been more to it than that. Bob was fiercely ambitious and perhaps that’s what really lay behind our break-up. He used to say to me, ‘I’ll have my name in lights before you do,’ and although it was a joke between us he really meant it. Perhaps he felt we’d always be competing with one another. Of course I felt sad about the end of our romance, but deep down I knew everyone had just got carried away with the idea of the wedding, including Bob and I. He went on to enjoy a career that would see him become a household name, starring in such TV favourites as Citizen Smith and My Family, as well as appearing on stage in dozens of successful plays and musicals.
At the end of that summer I headed back to RADA for my final year and, incredibly, I didn’t see or speak to Bob again until twelve years later when I walked into the BBC to do a radio play. It was the first time that I’d set eyes on him since the day he walked out of our flat, and by then he had married and divorced Cheryl Hall while I was married to my second husband, Ken Boyd. We both said a polite, if slightly awkward, hello, although I couldn’t resist a little dig.
‘By the way,’ I called out over my shoulder as I entered the studio to start the recording, ‘I sold the dress!’
Quite rightly, he lowered his head.
In truth, I had given the dress to my cousin Gary Birtles, a brilliant footballer who was a striker for Nottingham Forest in the amazing Brian Clough era. Sandra, his fiancée, looked absolutely lovely in it on their wedding day. Sadly, the dress didn’t bode well for them either.
So, am I left with any regrets? Well, no. Regrets are futile and a waste of energy. We were young and silly, it was a student crush and like all holiday romances it should have stayed where it belonged, in the confines of RADA, and not taken out of context. We both made mistakes. I have bumped into Bob in recent times, but it was obvious he had no wish to acknowledge the past. So Romeo really did die in the end.
Chapter Six
In my last year at RADA, perhaps on the rebound from my relationship with Bob Lindsay, I became involved with a director whom I met through one of our productions. He was quite a lot older than me and I thought he was glamorous and experienced. We went on several dates and then he invited me to move in with him. He lived in a beautiful flat in a large Victorian converted house. It was far more comfortable and spacious than my student digs so I didn’t hesitate for long.
Everything seemed to be going fine until one morning when he came upstairs and waved a sheet of paper at me.
‘Hey, look what I’ve just found downstairs in the letter-box!’ he said.
It was a handwritten note addressed to me. In capital letters, someone had scrawled, ‘I know where you live and I don’t like the man you are living with.’ There was no signature and no postmark, so it had obviously been hand-delivered. It was weird and a bit creepy but, hoping this was some kind of a joke, I shrugged, screwed it up and swiftly binned it. However, the next day there was another, similar note written in the same hand on exactly the same kind of paper. We were both puzzled and slightly alarmed but we didn’t know what to do and so once again we decided to ignore the message.
After that the notes began to arrive almost every day: they were all in black ink and capital letters. Gradually they became more aggressive and ominous. The sixth note said: ‘I’m warning you. I will kill you if you don’t leave this man.’
By this time we were becoming increasingly rattled. Who on earth would want me to leave him? Was there some secret admirer? None I knew about, certainly. Worried the situation was turning really nasty, my boyfriend suggested that I should leave the flat for a time and go and stay with a friend of mine who lived in Islington. I agreed, and the moment I left the flat the poison-pen notes stopped. Clearly whoever it was knew I’d moved out. After a few days I decided to move back, hoping they had given up.
When I was back in the flat, however, my boyfriend looked out of the window and said that he thought he