I never was very good at practical matters, perhaps because like Dad I was a bit of a dreamer. From the earliest age I lived much of my life in a fantasy world surrounded by imaginary friends. This wasn’t because I was a lonely child or didn’t have any other children to play with; it was simply a world of my own that I loved to be in. I used to carry on conversations with people who lived under the floorboards, or in the walls or underneath my bed – I would feel them tugging at my hand or leg, or hear them knocking on the floor. I’d talk to them for hours: there would be tears and laughter and arguments. It sounds strange but it was only the same as the little plays I would write and perform in my grandma’s house. I’d be every character, changing hats and voices as I swapped sides in a conversation.
I don’t think the adults around me were aware of this private world. While many children have highly creative imaginations, sadly as we reach adulthood we leave that innocence behind. And so I kept my secret friends to myself and chatted to them when no one else was around.
We were lucky to have a television at a time when many families were unable to afford one and I loved watching the children’s programmes because they fuelled me with yet more ideas, but books were my real passion: I am a bookaholic. My dream was to one day have my own library – I’m still working on that one. Back then, I would imagine the characters jumping out of the book and me being part of their world before they disappeared back into the pages. I loved all the animated shows and cartoons: I would have liked to work in the world of animation, given the chance. I adored going to the cinema and could well believe I was up there on that screen in whatever film it was: I might be Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Alice living in Wonder-land. At one time I even wanted to be John-Boy in The Waltons although that was more to do with the big-family thing than being a boy. Later still, in my teens, I fancied being Doris Day in all those films with Rock Hudson or Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire, and then of course there was Audrey Hepburn with the wonderful Cary Grant.
Pretending to be someone else was as natural to me as breathing. I couldn’t imagine a place where I just had to be myself, and so for me it was a natural progression from a make-believe world into the exciting world of acting.
Chapter Two
When I was six we moved to a large and beautiful house in the pretty village of Burton Joyce, on the other side of Nottingham. My mother had worked hard doing up our last house: walls were knocked down to create larger rooms and she then decorated and improved before selling on for a healthy profit so we could move up in the world. Our new home was detached, double-fronted and gabled; it had its own grounds, outhouses and driveway as well as an impressive flight of steps leading up to the front door. Inside were six bedrooms and spacious living rooms, perfect for the lavish parties my parents loved to hold.
The house cost £8,000, which was a vast sum in the early fifties, but Mum and Dad worked hard and had also been enterprising, plus they’d had a major stroke of luck. My father bought a clothing firm that had gone into liquidation and he inherited all the stock, which filled ten enormous lorries. He saw an opportunity to make a lot of money selling the stock on. At this point my mother held a very senior position at the French cosmetics firm Orlane but she chose to sacrifice her career to help run the business. And so they rented a three-storey factory with a shop underneath, which they named Joy’s Boutique.
While Mum organised and ran the new shop, Dad (who could never have stayed in one place for a whole week) hired a team of people and set them up with vans full of stock to visit various markets in the country. On Saturdays I used to go with him. I loved standing behind the stall selling the clothes to shoppers, but we didn’t make as many sales as we might have because we would stop for a long breakfast on the way. Mum used to tell me, ‘Make sure your dad gets to the stall by seven – you must get there early.’ We’d both promise to do so and then Dad would drive us to his favourite transport café, where he would enjoy a full English while I had tea and baked beans. We’d tuck in and Dad would say, ‘Don’t tell your Mum.’ Afterwards he’d play the one-armed bandit while I watched and we’d eventually get to the stall around midday.
Inevitably Mum found out, probably because the takings were not what they ought to have been, but in any case Dad was bored by then and so he let other people take over that side of the business. I don’t think he was a lot of help: he would go off in search of new stock or on some other escapade, leaving Mum to do most of the work. She must have felt impatient with him because so much of the responsibility for our lives, our home and our income fell on her shoulders. They did have rows and on one occasion I remember her throwing a boiled egg at him, but it missed and hit a very hot radiator. Fortunately it was painted yellow, as the runny egg stuck like glue and stayed there for a long time.
My parents didn’t actually spend a lot of time together – at home they were often at opposite ends of the house and during the day Dad would disappear on some mission while Mum would be left running the shop. She made it into a really successful business and now not only did we live in a beautiful house with a swimming pool, stables and a mini golf course but we had a gorgeous pink and white Cresta with wings on the back, a Mercedes coupé, a violet MGB (custom-built for my mother) and a Jaguar. Little wonder I had a passion for cars when I grew older.
Mum’s determination was awesome. We always had a house full of dogs, and one day she decided to breed them. We mainly had poodles so she bred a miniature version, which turned out to be another success. I adored the poodles, especially the puppies, which I would tuck into my dolls’ pram and then pet and fuss over for hours. I’m not sure if they enjoyed this quite so much because I was fairly strict and would insist they stayed put, shoving them back into the pram whenever they dared to try and escape.
Dad was a bit of a soft touch around the poodles. When one little white puppy was born with deformed legs, the vet told us that it ought to be put down, but Dad insisted on keeping her as a family pet. We called her Dinkum and although she had to walk on her elbows she managed just fine and lived to the ripe old age of 20.
At the tender age of seven Brett was packed off to a boarding school called The Rodney, a few miles away in a village called Kirklington. I was six when he left home, and after that I only saw him when he came back for the holidays and so for much of the time I felt as if I was an only child. I missed my brother very much when he went away despite the fact that he and his friends often teased and tormented me. They were rough-and-tumble little boys and, although a bit of tomboy myself, I was an easy target. And, to compound the problem, Mum often told Brett to keep an eye on me so I had to tag along with him and his friends. Unfortunately, the ‘games’ they thought hilarious frequently left me petrified.
One day they took me to the local recreation ground, where some distance from the swings and roundabouts was a large tree covered in gruesome-looking fungus. I had been extremely wary of this tree ever since Brett had told me that the fungus was poisonous and whoever touched it would die a horrible death. Clearly desperate to dump me so they could run off and play, the boys decided to tie me to the tree. They knotted some belts and ties together and after a brief Indian war dance with plenty of whooping, they bound me to the tree. But I wasn’t touching the fungus (they had left a small gap and this meant that if I stood up straight I could avoid it) and before they ran off and left me they warned that if I shouted or struggled I would touch the fungus and die instantly.
More scared of the fungus than anything else, I stood straining at my bonds, desperately hoping they hadn’t meant it and would come back, but too scared even to shout out. It was Dad who eventually found me, what seemed like hours later. By that time my knees were sagging and I was in serious danger of collapsing against the fungus so I burst into floods of hysterical tears.
Brett couldn’t sit down for a week after that incident but it didn’t stop him from planning more assault-course tortures whenever he wanted to get rid of me. He used to climb up trees, haul me up after him and then clamber